Others Online Privacy Policy

This policy (updated July 15, 2008) applies to the products and services offered by Others Online, Inc. (collectively, the "services"). If you have any questions about this Policy, please feel free to contact us.

Overview (The Key Takeaways)

Others Online helps online media companies understand what their audience cares about so they can provide better targeted ads or content and just be a better business. So naturally that raises concern about privacy. We take that very seriously, offering end-users unmatched privacy controls and transparency. Here's an overview of our practices and your rights as an end-user:

Our partners deploy our technology on their Web pages using a snippet of JavaScript - nothing is installed on your computer. We do not control what pages they place this JavaScript on.
When you go to these pages, we collect just about any data we can which will help us determine your affinity to various activities, locations, hobbies, music, products, brands, etc. We use cookies so that we can summarize what you care about within an affinity profile.
We disregard any/all personally identifiable information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.
You have 100% control over your affinity profile. On our site you are able to view the keywords/interests we've associated you to, delete keywords, set up block-lists, add keywords/interests, or opt-out entirely.
If you choose, you are also able to use your affinity profile to connect with people who care about the same things. Some people use this feature for discovering others, some use it to drive traffc to their blog.
Other users can't see your affinity profile, unless you explicitly choose to allow them.
Our partners may access your affinity profile through our application programming interface (API) but they mostly view the aggregated audience affinity reports we provide.

The services offered by Others Online do not require you to register or provide any personal information to us. Our consumer services however require you to sign up for an Others Online account and provide limited personal information.

Information we collect on anonymous users

If you've never registered as a member, you're an anonymous user. In order to provide our services, we may collect the following types of information:

Page view data - We want to know what topics you show an affinity towards, based on what you read on the Web. Our JavaScript technology scans each Web page you go to across our network of publishers, and sends to our server a set of keywords/phrases that describes what the page is about. We throw away any/all page view information deemed to be useless or personally identifiable. For instance, we immediately discard common names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and common or inappropriate keywords/phrases.
Search keywords - We look for any keywords you've used in searches across our network of publishers. These may be actual searches you've performed on one of our publisher's sites, or searches you've performed that lead to one of our publisher's sites.
Publishing data - If you're publishing information within our network of publishers, we may also analyze what you've published in order to understand the topics you show an affinity towards. Our publisher partners may help us associate an anonymous user to their public Web site, blog or social network profile, at which point we may spider those pages on a regular basis. This way, if you're writing about "cross-country skiing" we know this is something you care about.
Others Online cookies - Every new anonymous user is assigned a user ID, which we store within a cookie (a small file on your computer containing a string of characters). Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, but you can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. Please note that Others Online allows 3rd party advertisers that are presenting advertisements to set and access their cookies on your computer. Advertisers' use of cookies is subject to their own privacy policies, not the Others Online Privacy Policy.
Log information - When you use Others Online services, our servers automatically record information that your browser sends whenever you visit a website. These server logs may include information such as your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser.
Affiliated sites - We offer our services in connection with other web sites. Personal information that you provide to those sites may be sent to Others Online in order to deliver the service. We process such information in accordance with this Policy. The affiliated sites may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies.

Information we collect on registered users

In addition to the information we collect on anonymous users, if you've registered as an Others Online user, we may collect the following additional types of information:

Information you provide - When you sign up for an Others Online Account, we ask you for personal information (such as your birth date, gender, email address, country, post code and an account password), which we use to authenticate users and to send notifications to those users relating to the Others Online service. The service is anonymous - we do not request your name or your physical address. We do request other information from you on your interests, hobbies and any other keyword you wish to add, plus links to your personal websites, in order to assist you in finding and communicating with other users, as well as assist them in finding you. User profile information including users' pictures, screen names, website links and interests are displayed to users in order to facilitate user interaction. Email addresses are used for the purposes of inviting new friends to join Others Online, adding them to your Favorites and to send notifications related to the service. With the exception of inviting friends, a user's email address is never shared or displayed to other users. Users communicate with each other through the Others Online toolbar service without disclosing their email and IM addresses. To facilitate searching and finding other members on the service, Others Online may allow users to search for others by keyword, age, gender, geographic location or screen name. We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services. For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information.
Information we collect though our toolbar - When you sign in and use the Others Online toolbar service, the application sends information about the websites you visit (including the URL and relevant content keywords) to our servers in order for us to assist you in finding and and communicating with other users relevant to those websites. As a result, your profile may be displayed to those other users as well. We do not send website information from pages that are secured and protected by Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Your web browsing behavior is not made accessible to Others Online without your explicit permission. When signed out, no information about the websites you visit is sent. Over time, we may associate certain keywords to your affinity profile as an interest of yours, in order to provide a more relevant user experience. For instance, we may define "golf" as an interest of yours even when you haven't indicated it as an interest, simply because you keep going to websites about "golf". At any time, you may delete these interest keywords from our servers, or you may elect to turn off this feature. If you turn off this feature, we will still send information about the websites you visit but we will not associate recurring content keywords to your profile. When you install the Others Online toolbar and register, we create a unique installation ID and a unique user ID, which are sent to the Others Online servers after every page view, while signed in. The toolbar also occasionally polls the Others Online service to update user online status. The Others Online toolbar stores application data and components on your computer and automatically checks to see if there are updated components available and if so, will attempt to update them automatically. The unique installation and user IDs are required for the toolbar service to work and cannot be disabled.
User communications - When you send email or instant message communication to Others Online, we may retain those communications in order to process your inquiries, respond to your requests and improve our services. When you send email or instant message communication to other users, Others Online brokers that communication so that each user doesn't know the others direct contact information. However, Others Online does not store nor utilize for any purpose email or instant message communications between users.

Accessing and updating personal information

Anonymous users may at any time go to the Others Online site to view their affinity profile or opt-out. Others Online registered users may modify (add, edit or delete) the keywords/phrases in their profile at any time by logging into the service and accessing features such as Manage Profile and User Options.

Uninstalling the Others Online toolbar

You can uninstall the Others Online toolbar service for Internet Explorer at any time through the "Add or Remove Programs" option in your Control Panel. You may uninstall the toolbar on Firefox within the Tools / Add-Ons menu. When you uninstall the software, the toolbar and its copies of all items are deleted from your computer. Your other files and applications remain unaffected. Should you wish to install and user the toolbar service again, we will retain your account information on our servers for future use.

Information sharing and disclosure

Except as otherwise described in this privacy statement, Others Online will not disclose personal information to any third party unless we believe that disclosure is necessary: (1) to conform to legal requirements or to respond to a subpoena, search warrant or other legal process received by Others Online, whether or not a response is required by applicable law; (2) to enforce the Others Online Terms of Use Agreement or to protect our rights; or (3) to protect the safety of members of the public and users of the service. Others Online reserves the right to transfer personal information to a successor in interest that acquires rights to that information as a result of the sale of Others Online or substantially all of its assets to that successor in interest. For more information see the "Changes in Our Privacy Policy" section below.

We may share with third parties non-personally-identifiable information (information which does NOT reflect nor reference an individual's real name, address, etc.), such as their interests and affinities to topics, companies, products, activities, etc. We do not share, rent or sell email addresses for registered users.

Third Party Advertising

The Services are monetized through advertising. In order to make the advertising as unobtrusive and relevant as possible to our users, we target the advertising based on your affinity profile, which you have full control over. Our advertising or publishing partners may set cookies. These cookies allow their ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement. In this way, ad servers may compile information about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw their advertisements and determine which ads are clicked on. This information allows an ad network or publisher to deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This privacy statement covers the use of cookies by Others Online and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Information security

Others Online member accounts are secured by member-created passwords. Others Online takes precautions to insure that member account information is kept private. We use reasonable measures to protect member information that is stored within our database, and we restrict access to member information to those employees who need access to perform their job functions, such as our customer service personnel and technical staff. Please note that we cannot guarantee the security of member account information. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors may compromise the security of member information at any time For any additional information about the security measures we use, please contact us at privacy AT othersonline DOT com.

Changes to this policy

From time to time we may make changes to our privacy policy. If we make changes, we will post them on our site to make users aware of what the changes are so users will always be aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and when we may disclose it. A user is bound by any minor changes to the policy when she or he uses the Others Online services after those changes have been posted.