Privacy Policy for Ask.comEffective date: April 30, 2009 Ask.com's privacy policy has changed To enable us to personalize the advertisements that we present to you on Ask.com and affiliated sites, we have updated our privacy policy to state that we may use information you submit to us to display personalized advertisements to you. If you do not wish to receive personalized ads, you may opt out by using Ask Eraser. Please see below for details and here for more information on Ask Eraser. Ask.com is part of the IAC family of businesses, which includes several dozen brands in addition to Ask.com, such as Chemistry.com, Citysearch, CollegeHumor, Dictionary.com, Evite, GarageGames, Gifts.com, Match.com, Pronto, ServiceMagic, Shoebuy, The Daily Beast, VeryShortList, and Vimeo, as well as two advertising services, IAC Advertising Solutions and Ask Sponsored Listings. For a list of all of IAC's businesses, please visit www.iac.com.
What types of information do we collect?Each time you visit one of the Sites, we collect the limited information that your browser makes available whenever you visit any website. This information includes: (a) your Internet Protocol (IP) address; (b) the address of the last URL you visited before clicking through to the Site; (c) your browser and platform type (e.g., a Netscape browser on a Macintosh platform); (d) your browser language; and (e) the data in any undeleted "cookies" that your browser previously accepted from us (see "How are cookies used on the Sites?" below). Additionally, when you enter a search query using the Sites or Services, we will receive the query text and process it, together with the above data, to return a search results page to you. If you have modified your browser settings so that address-bar search queries and erroneous domain name system (DNS) requests are submitted to us, we may also receive any search query or misspelled URL that you enter into your browser's address bar. Beginning with search queries received on or before December 10, 2007, we disassociate your query text data from your IP address and your unique cookie ID (see "How are cookies used on the Sites?" below) after a period of 18 months, except in limited circumstances, such as requests to retain the information by law enforcement. When AskEraser is activated, all information described above is removed from Ask.com servers within hours (except in rare circumstances described in the AskEraser FAQ). The Sites and Services usually do not require registration or submission of an account name or email address in order to use them. However, in order to register for and/or fully utilize some of our Services (for example, to create an account to manage personalized home-page "skins" or to create a MyStuff account), you do need to provide an account name and email address. You would also provide to us your contact information if you participated in a promotion or sweepstakes, or your email address if you submitted a help request to us via email or responded to employment opportunities posted on the Sites. If you have activated AskEraser and attempt to submit such information, you will be prompted as to whether you would like to deactivate AskEraser in order to do so. The amount of information that you choose to disclose to us is completely up to you, although access to or use of some Services may be affected if information is not provided. Please note that AskEraser does not delete account or registration information you may submit to us, and such information will be retained even if AskEraser is activated or reactivated. How may we use the information we collect?We use the information that we collect to improve the overall quality of your experience with the Sites and Services, and to facilitate evaluation, improvement, and development of the Services. We aggregate query information for internal reporting purposes and optimization of advertising revenue. We count, track, and aggregate our visitors' activities in our analysis of general traffic flows at the Sites (e.g., tracking where users come from, what pages they select within the Sites, how they interact with search results, etc.). When AskEraser is activated, the search queries you enter will continue to count towards the total number of queries received by the Site, but the particular search queries you have submitted to us will not be associated with you in any manner (for more information, see the AskEraser FAQ). Information about the search queries you submit to the Sites and how you interact with search results may also be used to personalize the content and advertisements that we present to you. We may, based on the search queries you submit and the search results you select (including paid search results), draw inferences about your interests and display advertisements matched to such interests. You may receive such customized ads on the Sites, on websites in the Ask Sponsored Listings network, on websites of other IAC businesses, and on third-party sites with advertising managed by IAC Advertising Solutions (see also "What information do we share with third parties?" below). If you do not wish to receive customized advertising based on your activities on the Sites, you can activate AskEraser and your search queries and selection of search results will be removed from Ask.com's servers within hours (except in rare circumstances described in the AskEraser FAQ). If you also would like to terminate Ask.com's access to your search history for the period before activation of AskEraser, you may remove our cookies from your computer (see "How are cookies used on the Sites?" below and consult your browser's "help" menu to learn how to delete cookies). Please note that if you activate AskEraser and/or remove Ask.com's cookies, you will still be presented with paid search results that are responsive to your search queries. If you choose to submit your name, email address, or other account or registration information, we generally use this information to provide you personalized service. We may use such information to contact you to respond to a request from you, or in connection with legal proceedings, or if there has been a violation of our Terms of Service or this Privacy Policy. We do not associate your search queries or selected search results in any manner with your name, email address, or account or registration information, unless required to do so by legal process or unless specifically instructed to do so by you (for example, if you ask us to save your search queries in your MyStuff account, then your search query data will be linked to your MyStuff account registration data). To review, revise, or delete the account information that we have collected about you online and have maintained, please log in to your Profile Page and edit accordingly. However, please understand that although information, once deleted, is not available on the Sites, it may remain stored indefinitely in our back-up and archival records. How are cookies used on the Sites?Our use of cookies on the Sites. We use cookies and other technology such as pixel tags to track traffic flow and patterns of travel within and among the Sites as well as websites in the Ask Sponsored Listings network and websites of other IAC businesses. Cookies are a standard Internet technology that allows us to store and retrieve information on a user's system. Our web server automatically asks a new user's browser whether it will accept our cookie file. If the user's browser accepts our cookie, our web server will record the cookie's unique ID for our use in internal reporting and for customized advertising (see "How do we use the information that we collect?" above). All of your search queries and interactions with search results on the Sites are associated with your unique cookie ID. When you use the Sites, or a website in the Ask Sponsored Listings network or of another IAC business, we, or IAC Advertising Solutions, may use your cookie data to customize the Services and advertisements delivered to you (see "What information do we share with third parties?" below). Our cookies expire after two years, and all information from expired cookies is automatically deleted from our servers. However, the AskEraser cookie described below is set to expire after 30 years. If you would like to remove our cookies from your computer, you can delete them using your browser (consult your browser's "help" menu to learn how to delete cookies). If you choose to decline or remove cookies, please note that you may not be able to use some of the interactive features offered on the Sites. We do not use cookies to track your use of the Internet in any other way, or associate your name, email address, or personal account information with your cookie data unless you specifically ask us to do so (for example, if you wish us to store your search queries in your MyStuff account). We do not disclose cookie information to third parties, except as otherwise described in this Privacy Policy (see "What information do we share with third parties?" below). Use of cookies on our Sites by third parties. We use third-party companies to serve advertisements when you visit the Sites. These companies may use information about your visits to the Sites in order to present advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest to you. In the course of serving advertisements on the Sites, these companies may place or recognize a unique cookie on your computer or use other technologies such as pixel tags in connection with the Sites. Our Privacy Policy does not cover any use of information that a third-party ad-serving company might collect from you. These companies have their own recordkeeping and data-retention policies. If you would like to consider your options for limiting use of such information by advertising companies, or would like to learn more about this practice, please click here: http://www.networkadvertising.org/ AskEraser cookie. To use AskEraser, you must have cookies enabled in your browser settings. We must place one cookie to serve as a constant indicator that you have activated AskEraser. This cookie simply indicates whether the feature has been activated; it does not store any information about your searches or other use of the Sites or Services. In addition to indicating that you would like AskEraser to delete your search queries, this cookie, when enabled, also suppresses the ability of cookies placed by third-party advertising companies to collect information about you. However, third parties may still receive your search-query information as described below. To learn more about the use of cookies when you activate the AskEraser feature, please click here. What information may we share with third parties?We do not share your name, account name, or email address with third parties for the purpose of enabling them to send you information about their products or services (or for any other purpose, except to respond to legal process as described below). IAC businesses: We use search-query data to identify subject-matter search categories for use in classifying queries and targeting advertising that is delivered in response to queries. We may share the targeting categories as well as the search queries that you submit to us with Ask Sponsored Listings and/or IAC Advertising Solutions to enable them to personalize advertisements they present to you. Third-party service providers. Some elements or features of the Sites, such as news content, our Smart Answers, or the sponsored results advertising on our search-results pages, are supplied to us by third parties under contract. We may supply some of the information we collect from you to those third parties so that they can provide those elements or features for display on the Sites. We may share the following information with third parties: (a) your Internet Protocol (IP) address; (b) the address of the last URL you visited before clicking through to the Site; (c) your browser and platform type (e.g., a Netscape browser on a Macintosh platform); (d) your browser language; (e) the data in any undeleted cookies that your browser previously accepted from us; and (f) the search queries you submit. For example, when you submit a query, we transmit it (and some of the related information described above) to our paid-listing providers in order to generate relevant advertising to display in response to your query and to optimize the number and quality of sponsored results that will be provided to you on the Sites. We may merge information about you into group data, which may then be shared on an aggregated basis with our advertisers. If you provide us with answers to voluntary survey questions, we may furnish this information to our advertisers and partners in the form of group statistics compiled from our users' answers to such questions. These third-party companies have their own recordkeeping and data-retention policies. Use of AskEraser does not apply to these companies, and they will delete the data we share with them only in accordance with their own policies. Law enforcement/legal requirements. We may disclose any information you voluntarily submit to us, as well as any other information we have about you (such as your IP address, the search queries you have submitted, and the search results you have selected) in order to comply with court orders, subpoenas, or regulatory obligations, or when otherwise required to do so by law. We also may disclose such information in compliance with a law-enforcement or other governmental request, or where we believe disclosure is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, or violations of our Terms of Service. AskEraser. In some cases we may be required by law enforcement to retain your search data even when you have activated AskEraser, without alerting you. To learn more, please click here. Corporate restructuring. We also may transfer your information to a third party if we or any of our affiliates are involved in a corporate restructuring (e.g., a sale, merger, or other transfer of assets). What happens when you leave the Sites to go to other Internet sites?We do not control the information collection and dissemination policies of third-party companies. When you are on the Sites, you may be directed to other sites that are beyond our control. For example, if you click on a search result, the click may take you to a third-party website. These other sites may independently collect data from or about you, solicit information from you, or place their own cookies on your computer. We are not responsible for any use of the information such third-party sites may collect. If the Ask Answer Bar is enabled on your Internet browser, then we will be able to collect information pertaining to your use of the Answer Bar even after you have clicked through to a third-party site from our results page. Such information, however, relates only to your use of the Ask Answer Bar and not to your activity on the search-results destination page. We also offer you access to "co-branded" services that are jointly provided by us and selected companies. In many cases, these co-branded services will contain the Sites' branding, but might not be hosted by us. You may notice that you are on a co-branded site if the pages say "provided by Ask" and/or if our standard branding is not displayed at the top of the page. In such cases, you should click on the privacy link on the page to determine which company's privacy policy applies to the information you enter on the page. Even if the page is governed by a separate privacy policy, we might be entitled to receive information about you when using that service. If you elect to provide registration information when using a co-branded service, the information you provide may be shared and/or retained by the provider of that service in accordance with its own privacy policy and terms of service. We encourage you to consult the privacy policies of such other companies and to contact them directly if you have any questions about their use of your information. When we enter into co-branding service relationships, we generally require the service provider to include a link to its applicable privacy policy and terms of service on the co-branded pages. What is our policy regarding personally identifiable information from children under 13?In accordance with the Federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 ("COPPA"), we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13. Registration on the Sites and for the Services is not available to anyone under the age of 13. Do we take security precautions to protect your information?We have security measures in place that are designed to safeguard and help prevent unauthorized access to information we collect online. Ask.com utilizes both industry and proprietary standards to preserve the confidentiality of information. We seek to limit access to our users’ information to employees who we believe reasonably need access to that information to provide products or services to you or in order to perform their jobs. These employees have been informed of the need to maintain the security and confidentiality of such information. Unfortunately, no security system can be 100% secure; accordingly, we cannot guarantee the security of the information that we collect online. Are there special considerations if you are visiting the Sites from outside of the United States?If you are visiting the Sites from outside of the United States, your information will be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States, where our servers are located and our central database is operated. The data-protection and other laws in the United States and other countries might not be as comprehensive as those in your own country. Please be assured, however, that we seek to take reasonable steps to protect your privacy. By using our services, you consent to the transfer of your information to our facilities and those third parties with whom we may share it as described in this Privacy Policy. Whom can you ask if you have privacy-related questions?Questions regarding this Privacy Policy should be directed here. |