The World's Largest Online Library |
(Last Updated: January 2001) Introduction Questia Media is committed to safeguarding your personally identifying information while giving you the most benefit from visiting our Web site or using your subscription to the Questiasm service. As part of our normal operations we collect and, in some cases, disclose information about you. Please read the following policy to understand what information we collect, how we will treat this information and what options you have to direct our activities. By registering or using the Questia service, or accessing the Questia Web site, you agree to the terms of our Privacy Policy. For questions of a general nature about our privacy policy, please visit Subscription Information Frequently Asked Questions. Specific questions or comments should be directed to Questia Media by sending email to our Privacy Advocate. Table of Contents As described below, some of your personally identifying information is used by us and may, under some circumstances, be disclosed to third parties. Your use of this Web site or your use of the Questia service represents your consent to our use and disclosure of your personally identifying information in accordance with this policy.
Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to enable us to provide you with an efficient and customized experience while you use the Questia service. To fully use our service, you will need to register using our Online Registration Form where you will be required to provide certain personal information. If you subscribe to our service, we collect information including your name, email address, billing address, and payment information (e.g., credit card number and expiration date). For a complete list of the information we currently request, along with an indication of whether that information is required to register for our service, see our Personal Information Appendix page. We may solicit additional information from you through the use of on-line or email questionnaires from time to time, assuming that you have not previously opted out of such communications. None of this additional information is required for your continued use of our service. In addition to the information we require for registration, we automatically track certain information about you based upon your use of our site. We use this information for internal research on our users' demographics, interests and behavior to better understand and serve our users. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on our site or not), which URL you go to next (whether this URL is on our site or not), what browser you are using, your IP address and what searches you perform in our service. This information is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis. In addition, we may use cookies on certain pages of our site and with certain features of our service. For more information about cookies, see our Cookies at Questia page. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, although in that case you may be required to reenter your password more frequently during a session. If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters, or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities, we may collect such information into a file specific to you. If you use a service provided by a company providing a service co-branded with Questia (a "Co-Brand Service Provider"), the Co-Brand Service Provider may require that you provide personal information about yourself. 2. Use of Your Information We use personally identifying information about you internally to improve our content and product offerings, to customize our site's content, layout and services and to improve our marketing and promotional efforts. We believe these uses allow us to improve our site and services to better meet your needs. We may also use your information to deliver information to you that, in some cases, are targeted to your interests, such as new services, promotions and targeted advertisements. We may use your email address, your mailing address and phone number to send you administrative/renewal or promotional notices. While you may not opt out of the administrative/renewal notices, you may do so for the promotional ones. If you do not wish to receive promotional notices (e.g., notices for new product offerings), you may opt-out through your My Account page by using the Account Maintenance option. While it is not our practice to monitor or review material you store on our site (for example, in your "My Folders" or "Q Drive" areas), we may access this information for system maintenance and troubleshooting activities. Except for legal requests as described in Section 3 below, we will not distribute this material to third parties without your express permission. We may also use information in the file we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on our site, to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreements. At times, we may look across multiple users to identify problems or resolve disputes, and in particular on rare occasions we may evaluate your information to look for users using multiple User IDs or aliases. 3. Disclosure of Collected Data Advertisers. We aggregate personally identifying information and disclose such aggregated information to advertisers and for other marketing and promotional purposes. Of course, the aggregation process strips away any personally identifying information; we do not disclose to third parties any information that could reasonably be used to personally identify you. Co-Brand Service Providers. Questia offers its users and subscribers the opportunity to use a number of third-party services from our site (e.g., moderated chat, on-line writing centers, booksellers). If you choose to use these optional services, we will, by necessity, provide some of your personally identifying information to the Co-Brand Service Provider offering such services. We will disclose only so much of your personally identifying information as is necessary to effect your use of the Co-Brand Service ProviderĖs service. You can, of course, avoid having us make such disclosures by choosing not to use these services. Because we do not control the privacy practices of these third parties, you should evaluate their practices before deciding to use their services. Suppliers and Other Service Providers. We may use third-party Suppliers and Service Providers to facilitate some of our services. For example, we may outsource the operations of one or more aspects of our site to a Supplier or Service Provider who performs services according to our requirements. In some instances, the Service Provider may collect information directly from you (such as the situation where we ask a Service Provider to conduct a survey for us). In these cases, all information disclosures you make will be strictly optional. In all cases, we contractually restrict how these Suppliers and Other Service Providers may access, use and disclose your information. In general, we do not permit these Suppliers and Other Service Providers to sell your information to third parties. Questia Subsidiaries and Joint Ventures. We may share our data, including personally identifying information about you, with our corporate parent and subsidiaries, joint ventures, or other entities that are in common control with Questia Media. To the extent that these entities are given access to your information, they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information they obtain from their other users. Disclosure of Customer Information Through Business Transfers. As our business develops we may purchase another organization and, in so doing, acquire customer information. Also, in the event that Questia Media transfers its assets to our corporate parent or to one or more subsidiaries, joint ventures, or other entities in common control, or sells all or substantially all of our assets to a third party, customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets. Legal Requests. We may decide or be required to disclose information to law enforcement and other government authorities or third parties under certain circumstances. We can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you to law enforcement or other government authorities as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate, in connection with an investigation of fraud, infringement of intellectual property rights, third party lawsuits, or other activity that is illegal or may expose us to legal liability. Unauthorized Access to Your Information. Although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, third parties may intercept or access transmissions or private communications. Therefore, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personally identifying information or private communications will remain private in all cases. 4. Control of Your Password You may not disclose or share your Questia password with any third party. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personally identifying information and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password has been compromised for any reason, you should immediately change your password as described in Section 5 below. A complete description of your rights and duties concerning use of this site is given in our User Agreements. 5. Reviewing and Changing your Personally Identifying Information Following registration, you can use your My Account page to review and change the information you submitted during registration. Specifically, you can review and change your: password; email address; name; address; city; state; zip code; country; phone number; and payment information (if you supplied this information). Upon your request, we will remove your personally identifying information from our operational databases (unless you are a registered subscriber and your account is in dispute, in which case your information will be kept on file until the dispute is resolved). To make these requests, use the Contact Us Web page. Technical constraints and the fact that we back up our systems may prevent the total elimination of your personally identifying information from our systems. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your personally identifying information will be completely removed from all of our databases in response to your requests. You must promptly update your information if it changes. Once posted, you cannot change or remove any public postings made in our chat rooms or other message areas or the feedback area. 6. A Special Note About Children If you are under the age of thirteen (13), you are not eligible to subscribe to the Questia service. 7. A Special Note About Non-U.S. Subscribers If you are a non-U.S. citizen, by subscribing to the Questia service or by providing any personally identifying information as a non-subscriber, you explicitly grant us the right to transfer that information to the United States. 8. Other Information Collectors Except as expressly discussed in this Privacy Policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. Our Web site may contain links to other Web sites for your convenience. To the extent that you disclose information to other parties, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the information you disclose to them. Since Questia does not control the privacy policies of third parties, you are subject to the privacy customs and policies of that third party. We encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others. 9. Security Questia uses industry standard efforts to safeguard your personally identifying information, such as firewalls and Secure Socket Layers (SSL). However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet. 10. Changes to This Privacy Policy Because we reserve the right to make changes to this Privacy Policy, we recommend that you visit it often. If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will notify you by posting them here. We corrected an error in paragraph 5 of our Privacy Policy in which we had stated that you can use your My Account page to change your User ID. Because, once assigned, our system does not allow you to change your User ID, the words "User ID" have been deleted. This change does not affect the privacy of your personally identifying information. |