This Privacy Policy covers all of the sites on the Kinja platform (“Kinja”), which is created and owned by Gizmodo Media Group, LLC (“GMG”, “us” or “we”). The Privacy Policy governs your access to and use of the services, websites, and applications offered through Kinja (the “Services”). Please read this statement carefully before using or proceeding to access Kinja. Your use of Kinja indicates that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy and indicates your agreement to abide by the Terms of Use in effect and to be subject to this policy.
1. Information Collection
GMG or third parties may collect information from our users at several different points on Kinja.
- Mailing Lists & Service Emails - GMG may launch a mailing list in order to provide subscribers with relevant information or content - breaking news, or weekly or daily round-ups, for example. In order to sign up to receive regular emails from a site’s mailing list, users must submit information including a valid Kinja username and/or email address and may submit demographic information such as location and interests. This information may be used in aggregate form by GMG or its third party service providers in order to assess general user interest in various internal and third party products and services. Your personal and contact information may be passed to GMG’s third party service providers. GMG and its third party service providers may from time to time track how users interact with the emails we send in a continued effort to improve our services. Users who choose to sign up for a mailing list may receive regular emails from the site, consisting of content from the site in question and/or content from third party sponsors. Since editorial independence is critical to us, you can be sure that we will always mark sponsored content as such, including in emails. If you do not wish to receive emails from third party advertisers, please do not sign up for the mailing list.
- Comment Service and Account Information – In order to further enhance the user experience, GMG allows users to comment on some or all of Kinja sites, enabling users to discuss and contribute to topics posted to those sites. Users have the option of signing up for this service, and to do so must either submit some valid information or set up an anonymous account. GMG uses this information to screen out users who leave comments prohibited by our Terms of Use, to make notifications to users when necessary, to pick out topics of interest to commenters, and in certain circumstances to create a Kinja “page” for each such user where such user’s contributions are collected. You may link your account to certain third party services and to do so, may be required to provide your login information for those services. If you login via a third party service, we will receive an identifying token from that service, which will allow us to access some information from your account on that service, so that we can, for example, send you a message through that service. GMG does not receive or store passwords from your third party service and will not pass information provided when you register via a third party service to any other organization except to GMG’s third party service providers or in aggregate form.
- Cookies – GMG or third parties may use cookies, web beacons, HTML5 local storage, JavaScript, and other similar technologies to help us understand how you use the Services and help us provide the Services and advertising to you.
- A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user’s computer tied to information about the user. We may use both session ID cookies and persistent cookies. For the session ID cookie, once the user closes the browser, the cookie simply terminates. A persistent cookie is a small text file stored on the user’s hard drive for an extended period of time. Persistent cookies can be removed by following the user’s internet browser help file directions. We store a cookie on each user’s machine that contains user specific information. You can configure your browser to accept all cookies, reject all cookies, or notify you when a cookie is set. If you reject all cookies, you will not be able to use Services that require you to “sign in,” and you may not be able to take full advantage of all offerings. However, not all Services require that you accept cookies. Use of the Services and emails we send may execute code known as a “web beacon.” This code allows us to understand the time and date of when a user has opened an email. Our web beacons do not collect personally identifiable information. Users wishing to disable our web beacons should do so by turning images “off” in their email client (e.g. Outlook, Outlook Express). Please see your email client for more information.
- Links – Kinja contains links to other sites. Some of these links may be affiliate marketing links encoded by third parties. Such third parties do not collect any personally identifiable information unless you visit the referenced site. Please be aware that GMG is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personally identifiable information. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by GMG through Kinja.
- Embedded Content — You should also be aware that some content delivered through Kinja originates with another content provider. Such other content providers may place “cookies” on your computer, or otherwise gather information about you, including by asking you to provide information through the content player itself. Again, it is up to you to review the terms of use and privacy policy of the originators of such content.
- Data that we collect may be shared with our prospective and actual business partners, advertisers, and other third parties for business purposes. Other than names and email addresses provided at your discretion, we don’t generally collect any “Personally Identifying Information” about our users (such as social security number, telephone number, street address, drivers license number, etc.). However, we may offer you the opportunity to submit other information about yourself (such as gender, age, occupation, hobbies, interests, zip code, etc.), which would then also be covered by this Privacy Policy.
- Log Files – Like most standard website servers we use log files to log certain information about how you use Kinja. This information may be stored on third party servers, and may be used by GMG or its third party service providers in order to provide site personalization and assess general user interest in various internal and third party products and services. We do not, however, collect IP addresses or log IP address information.
- We do not respond to web browser “do not track” or other related mechanisms at this time.
2. Advertising
- Ad Serving – The ads appearing on these websites are delivered to you by a web advertising vendor and/or by GMG’s own proprietary advertising delivery software. In order to serve ads to you, we may use information collected during your searches or visits to our websites and information that we specifically acquire from third parties.
- Advertising and Cookies – Some of our third party advertising partners may distribute cookies to users in advertisements that are provided to us. GMG has no access to or control over these cookies once we have received the advertisements. Some of these advertisers and services we use to deliver advertising may be engaging in online behavioral advertising as defined by the Digital Advertising Alliance and FTC.
- Affiliate Advertising – We participate in affiliate advertising and allow affiliate links to be encoded on some of our pages. This means that we may earn a commission when you click on or make purchases via affiliate links and affiliate partners may use cookies to understand your use of the Services.
- GMG does not provide any Personally Identifiable Information to third-party advertising companies. Note, however, that if an advertiser asks GMG to show an advertisement to users with certain characteristics (for example, women ages 18-24) or a segment of that group (for example, women ages 18-24 who have viewed certain categories of content) and you respond to that advertisement, the third-party advertising company may conclude that you have the characteristics of the audience that they are trying to reach.
- Opt-out – As part of our commitment to transparency and your privacy, we provide the following links to opt-out of cookies provided by both our first party ad server and many third party advertising partners who may be engaging in online behavioral advertising:
- First Party Opt-out – Please visit this link to opt-out of cookies from our first party ad serving vendor, Google: http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/; Third Party and Online Behavioral Advertising Opt-out – Please visit this link to opt-out of cookies from over 50+ major third party behavioral advertising providers: http://www.aboutads.info/choices/.
3. Business Transitions
In the event GMG goes through a business transition, such as a merger, acquisition by another company, or sale of a portion of its assets, users’ personal information will, in most instances, be part of the assets transferred.
4. Contests, Sweepstakes, and Promotions
From time to time you may be able to participate in contests, giveaways, sweepstakes or other similar promotions that we or third parties may sponsor. Participation may require sharing your personal information with us or third parties sponsoring the contest, giveaway, sweepstakes or promotion, and you should check the rules to determine how your information will be used and shared with others. GMG may announce specific rules in connection with any such opportunity, but regardless of whether specific rules are announced, all such opportunities will be controlled by GMG’s “Contest Policies” set forth at Contest Guidelines. Any rules announced at the time of a contest will be in addition to the Contest Policies. In addition, as a condition to receiving any awards or prizes, you may be required to provide additional information, to sign a release, or to authorize the use of certain information about you in marketing materials. If a third party administers the contest, your participation may be subject to additional terms and conditions and that third party’s privacy policy. We are not responsible for such third parties. You should carefully review the Contest Policies and these third parties’ terms and conditions before deciding whether to participate in a contest publicized through the Service.
5. Legal Disclaimer
Though we make every effort to preserve user privacy, GMG may need to disclose personal information when required by law wherein we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on GMG or affiliates. If we’re going to turn over information related to you, we will use commercially reasonable efforts to provide you with advance notice, unless we are prohibited from doing so by law or court order.
6. Information Security
GMG has technical, administrative and physical safeguards in place to help protect against unauthorized access to, use or disclosure of user information we maintain. Under our security practices and policies, access to personally identifiable information is authorized only for those who have a business need for such access, and sensitive records are to be retained only as long as necessary for business or legal needs and destroyed before disposal. Although we work hard to protect personal information that we collect and store, no program is one hundred percent secure and we cannot guarantee that our safeguards will prevent every unauthorized attempt to access, use or disclose personal information.
If you become aware of a security issue, please email us at legal [at] gawker [dot] com. We will work with you to address any problems.
7. Notification of Changes
Whenever GMG changes its privacy policy, we will post those changes to this Privacy Policy page, and other places we deem appropriate so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. The prior version of our Privacy Policy is found here (the version before that is found here) and more on why we’ve made the most recent changes here. You are responsible for reviewing and becoming familiar with any changes to this agreement.
8. Contact Information
If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our privacy policy, please contact legal [at] gawker [dot] com, or by mail to Legal Department, 114 Fifth Avenue, 2nd Floor, New York, NY, 10011.
9. Last Update
This Privacy Policy was most recently updated January 4, 2016, effective February 3, 2016. It was edited on September 14, 2016 and September 16, 2016 to reflect changes to our ownership.
