PRIVACY AND SECURITY | POLICY
SECTION I
INFORMATION COLLECTED ABOUT YOU
A. Information Collected by dietdetective.com or on Behalf of dietdetective.com
1. In General. dietdetective.com collects two kinds of information: (1) Personally identifiable information ("Personal Information") voluntarily provided by visitors through optional registration or other methods and (2) non-personally identifiable information routinely gathered as visitors navigate through our Website.
2. Personal Information. You are free to visit and use our Website without providing any Personal Information. However, dietdetective.com offers services on our Website that require registration and/or submission of Personal Information. In order to register or otherwise take advantage of the products and personalized services that we offer on our Website, you will have to provide Personal Information. The Personal Information we might request from you may include your name, address, email address, phone number and, if you are making a purchase of goods or services, your billing and credit card information. Providing dietdetective.com with your Personal Information is strictly voluntary.
By way of example only, some situations in which we may request Personal Information include: when you register to become a Member of The Diet Detective Weight Loss Program Website; or when you register to receive our informational Newsletter(s); when you purchase a product or service from our Online Store; when you enter a contest, sweepstakes or promotion on our Website; when you participate in a survey on our Website; or to when you wish to participate in one of our interactive forums, including chat rooms or posting boards. The ways in which we collect Personal Information are described in more details below.
In some cases, we must share your Personal Information in order to fulfill your request(s). For example, we may use third party credit card processing companies and shipping fulfillment companies to fulfill your order. Additionally, from time to time we offer products or services on our Websites that are provided by a third party. Also, sometimes we offer contests and sweepstakes with another party. If you do not wish for us to share your Personal Information in this manner, please do not place orders on our Website or participate in contests or sweepstakes.
Registration & Member Profile.
In order to obtain access to certain products, services, and/or content available on our Website (e.g., meal plans, calorie recommendations specifically for The Diet Detective Weight Loss Program), you must complete a questionnaire / registration form. Our Registration Form and Member Profile pages request that you submit the following information: your name, a selected username and password, email address, mailing address, zip code, gender, height, weight, age, credit card information (if you are making a purchase of goods or services), desired weight, health information (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, etc.), lifestyle preferences (e.g., activity level, favorite foods, etc.), and other diet or lifestyle-related information to help us design and personalize your diet and/or exercise program. We use the Personal Information you provide through registration to recommend and customize diet, meal, and fitness plans; bill you and conduct other billing and account activity; and respond to any questions that you submit. From time to time we might need to update you about your account, contact you regarding a billing question, notify you about changes to our services, or otherwise send you service-related announcements. For example, if a service to which you have subscribed is temporarily suspended for maintenance, we might send you an email to notify you of the service suspension. Or, we may need to contact you with respect to a billing matter. You will not be able to unsubscribe from these transactional emails. You will be permitted to unsubscribe from all other emails that are not transactional in nature.
In those circumstances, we will use your Personal Information to contact to you. By registering for our services, you consent to dietdetective.com contacting you about your account. Based upon the Personal Information you provide us, we will send you a welcoming email to verify your username and password. We will also call you at the telephone number that you provide in your registration to welcome you to dietdetective.com. From time to time we may call you to check in on your diet or exercise progress and offer non-sales related mentoring assistance. If you do you not wish dietdetective.com to contact you regarding your account or your progress, please do not register on our Website. You are of course free to unsubscribe to any other emails that you receive from us.
See the section entitled "Your Privacy Choices" below for more details about opting-out from non-transactional email subscriptions and newsletters.
Emails & Newsletters
You may register to receive email subscriptions and newsletters from dietdetective.com. To receive emails and newsletters from dietdetective.com you must provide your email address. dietdetective.com also offers a "Tell a Friend" (a.k.a. "Refer a Friend") feature that enables you to send articles and other content to your friends. When you use dietdetective.com's "Tell a Friend" feature, we do not store your friend's email address. We use your friend's email address only for the purpose of sending your friend the article or content you requested and for no other purpose, unless otherwise disclosed to you at the time you send the email.
Surveys or Contests
From time to time we may provide you the opportunity to participate in contests, sweepstakes, promotions or surveys on or through our Website. If you participate, we will request certain Personal Information from you. Participation in these contests, sweepstakes, or surveys is completely voluntary and you therefore have a choice whether or not to disclose this information. The requested information typically includes contact information (such as name, email, and/or shipping address), and demographic information (such as zip code).
Sometimes we may offer these contests or sweepstakes together with another party, or we may use a third party service provider to help us conduct the promotion. In order to administer the promotion and/or provide the winner(s) with a prize, we may need to share your Personal Information with a third party who is helping us conduct the promotion or co-sponsoring the promotion with us. We will notify you within the Official Rules of promotions if another party is co-sponsoring the promotion with us. If we are using a third party service provider, the third party service provider will be prohibited from using your Personal Information for any other purpose.
3. Non-personally Identifiable Information
You may use our Website without registering or submitting any Personal Information. In that case, the only information we will collect from you is general, aggregated, demographic, or other non-personal information.
We currently do not use a third-party tracking service, but reserve the right to do so without further notice. In the case that we do use a third-party tracking service, those services use cookies and log files to track non-personal information about visitors to our Website in the aggregate. We may also share non-personal information with third parties such as advertisers and partners. This non-personal, aggregate data is used to analyze trends, to track user movement around the Website, and to gather demographic information about how members, subscribers, and/or visitors use our Website.
In some cases, when you click on a link or an advertisement in an email or newsletter you may receive from us, your browser may be momentarily directed to the site of a third party which, acting on dietdetective.com's behalf (see Section III, below), notes or "counts" your response to the email or newsletter before re-directing your browser to its proper destination. This re-direction process will not be apparent to you. Your Personal Information will not be recorded by this third party.
Cookies
A cookie is a small text file stored on a user's computer for record-keeping purposes. We use cookies on our Website to determine the number of unique visitors, to personalize your online experience, to identify returning visitors, and to provide you with advertisements and messages of interest to you. dietdetective.com does not store any Personal Information in any cookies on your computer. However, we do link the non-personal information we store in cookies to your Personal Information.
Also, companies offering products or services through our Website may use their own cookies. This Privacy Policy covers the use and placement of cookies by dietdetective.com only, and does not cover the use or placement of cookies by any third party.
Your browser may be set to reject all cookies. Most browsers offer instructions on how to reset the browser to reject cookies in the "Help" section of the toolbar. If you reject our cookie(s), you will be restricted to certain free areas of our Website and will be unable to access areas of the Website available to paid members.
We also use a third-party advertising company to serve ads when you visit our Web site. This company may use non-personally identifiable information about your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by this company please review the Google Privacy Policy located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html.
Log Files
As is true of most websites, we gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. We use this information (which does not identify individual users) to analyze trends, to administer the Website, and to identify and solve hardware and software problems as they arise. We may link this automatically-collected data to your Personal Information for the purpose of determining your interests and to offer you goods or services that we believe may be of interest to you.
4. Tracking and Merging Information from Other Sources.
If you register on our Website and provide us with Personal Information, we may link non-personal, aggregated tracking data with your online Personal Information through use of cookies, log files and other non-personal information collection.
We may also supplement the Personal Information we collect from you with non-personal or personal information from other, third party sources (e.g., Experian Information Solutions, Inc.). We will merge this third party information with Personal Information you have provided to us. The composite information about you will be treated in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
We perform this tracking and merging to assist us in evaluating and improving our Website, products, and services; to determine your preferences so that we can tailor our Website, products, and services to your needs; to provide you with targeted marketing offers that we think may be of interest to you; and/or to study nutritional, weight loss, behavioral and fitness questions in general.
B. Information Collected by Third Parties Not Acting on Behalf of dietdetective.com
Sponsors, partners or advertisers on the Website or in emails, special promotions, or newsletters we send you may also use their own cookies or web beacons when you click on their advertisement or link to their website or service, or even if the advertisement simply appears on a page or in an email that you are viewing.
We do not control third parties' use of cookies or web beacons, or how they manage the non-personal information they gather through them. Please review the privacy policy of other sites you visit or link to from our site to understand how these other sites use cookies and how they use the information they collect through the use of cookies or web beacons on their own sites.
C. Children and Adolescents
We are committed to protecting the privacy of children. This Website is not designed for, nor is it intended to attract, children under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect Personal Information directly from any person under the age of 18, and if we do inadvertently collect information from a person under the age of 18, we delete it as soon as we discover it.
D. Public Forums
As mentioned above, this Privacy Policy does not protect you when you use dietdetective.com public forums. As a service to our users, dietdetective.com features chat rooms and bulletin boards where users can share diet, nutrition, and/or fitness information and support one another or post questions for experts to answer. In addition, we may from time to time offer online discussions on a variety of topics moderated by experts. You should be aware that any information shared in a chat room, bulletin board, or online discussion is public information and may be seen, disclosed to, or collected by third parties that do not adhere to our Privacy Policy. You should think carefully before disclosing any personal information in any public forum.
E. Emails to dietdetective.com
This Privacy Policy does not protect you when you send business information, ideas, concepts or inventions to dietdetective.com by email to the contacts listed on the "Contact Us" link on our Website. If you want to keep business information, ideas, concepts or inventions private or proprietary, do not send them in an email to dietdetective.com.
SECTION II
DISCLOSURE OF YOUR INFORMATION
Except as set forth in this Privacy Policy or as specifically agreed to by you, dietdetective.com will not disclose any Personal Information it gathers from you on our Website without your prior permission. Except as set forth herein, you will have the opportunity to opt-in to dietdetective.com sharing your Personal Information with third parties, and you can withdraw your consent to dietdetective.com sharing your information at any time.
In some circumstances, we must disclose your Personal Information to third parties who help us administer our Website or our services. These third parties are required to keep your information confidential and do not use your information for any purpose other than the purpose under which your information was collected. See Section II(C), Disclosure to Outside Contractors for more information.
Additionally, we offer the goods or services of third parties in our Online Store, and in other places on our Website. If you should make a purchase, we will have to disclose your information to these third parties so that your order can be placed and processed. See Section II(D), Disclosure to Third Party Sellers for more information. We also disclose your information to our Affiliates (defined below).
We may also release Personal Information to third parties: (1) to comply with valid legal requirements such as a law, regulation, search warrant, subpoena, court order, or legal process; or (2) in special cases, such as a physical threat to you or others, or to protect the rights and/or property of dietdetective.com. Additionally, in the unlikely event that the entirety of our business is sold, liquidated, merged, or transferred to a third party, we may transfer all personal and non-personal information to the party purchasing or merging with us. See Section II(G), Other Disclosures for more information.
A. Disclosure to dietdetective.com Affiliates
We may disclose information (including Personal Information) about you to our Affiliates. For purposes of this Privacy Policy, "Affiliates" means any person or entity which directly or indirectly controls, is controlled by or is under common control with dietdetective.com, whether by ownership or otherwise. Any information relating to you that we provide to our Affiliates will be treated by those Affiliates in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy.
B. Disclosure to Third Parties Generally
Occasionally we may invite you to be contacted by third parties whose goods or services may be of interest to you. We will only share your Personal Information with these third parties if you grant us permission to do so. If you opt-in to such sharing, we may also share your Personal Information with licensors of certain diet, nutrition, and/or health-related programs offered on or through our Website.
However, as a subscriber to the email newsletter, you are granting permission, in advance, for us to have a third party, health related advertiser to send an email to your account, but no more than 6 times in any calendar year.
We may provide third parties with non-personal information about you that does not allow you to be identified or contacted, including where such information is combined with similar information of other users of our Website. For example, we provide our advertisers and other third parties with aggregate, non-personal information about our Website users, including the number of unique users who visit our Website, the demographic breakdown of the registered users of our Website, or the activities that visitors to our Website engage in while on our Website.
C. Disclosure to Outside Contractors
We may employ independent contractors, vendors and suppliers (collectively, "Outside Contractors") to provide specific services and products related to our Website, including but not limited to maintaining an email suppression list as required by state and/or federal law; hosting and maintaining our chat rooms; providing credit card processing and shipping fulfillment; fraud screening; testing and implementation of special services such as those for contacting members to offer personal, one-on-one, nutritional and member support to help members to reach their goals; and developing applications for our Website and email services. These Outside Contractors may sometimes have limited access to information collected on our Website, including your Personal Information, in the course of providing products or services to us. Access to your Personal Information by these Outside Contractors is limited to the information reasonably necessary in order for the Outside Contractors to perform their limited function for us.
D. Disclosure to Third Party Sellers
Through our Website, you may be given the opportunity to purchase (or to obtain more information) regarding certain content, products or services which are sold through a person or company other than us or our Affiliates (collectively, "Third Party Sellers"). In addition, if you purchase a product or service through one of our co-branded stores (rather than through our Online Store), you will likely be purchasing the product through a Third Party Seller, not from us. We will attempt to notify you when you are dealing with a Third Party Seller by opening a new browser or otherwise notifying you that you are leaving our Website. For example, if you see a phrase such as "powered by" or "brought to you by" followed by the name of a person or company other than dietdetective.com, then you are likely on, or about to enter, a website hosted or operated by a person or company other than us. Third Party Sellers may request that you submit certain Personal Information (e.g., name and address for shipment purposes) to them in order to purchase their products or services or to obtain additional information from them. Alternatively, we may offer the products or services of these Third Party Sellers in our Online Store or elsewhere through our Website. If you should make a purchase of these products or services, we will transmit your purchase data and your Personal Information to the Third Party Seller so that the transaction can be processed.
If you do not wish for a Third Party Seller to have access to your Personal Information, please do not make a purchase in our Online Store (or elsewhere on our Website). By submitting the requested information, you affirmatively consent to have that information shared with the Third Party Seller. This information is used by the Third Party Seller and may be subject to a different privacy policy. We do not otherwise share or disclose your Personal Information to Third Party Sellers unless you give us permission to do so.
E. Disclosure to Linked Sites
In addition to the third party websites that you may access as described above, for your convenience there are links to websites operated by companies other than dietdetective.com ("Third Party Websites") that are not contractors who provide content or services through our Website. These links may be found in advertisements, referenced within content, or placed beside the names or logos of sponsors. dietdetective.com does not disclose your Personal Information to these Third Party Websites without obtaining your consent. In addition, dietdetective.com does not endorse and is not responsible for the privacy practices of these websites. If you choose to link to one of these Third party Websites, you should review the privacy policy posted on the other site to understand how that Third Party Website collects and uses your Personal Information.
G. Other Disclosures
We reserve the right to transfer information to a third party in the event of a sale, liquidation, merger, or other transfer of all or substantially all of the assets of dietdetective.com. We will endeavor, in good faith, to gain the third party's agreement and adherence to the terms of this Privacy Policy. In addition, we will notify users of any such transfer through notice on our Website and through email.
SECTION III
HOW DIETDETECTIVE.COM HANDLES SECURITY
The security of your Personal Information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number) on our registration or order forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). To learn more about SSL, follow this link www.verisign.com.
We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the Personal Information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If you have any questions about security on our Website, please email us at
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SECTION IV
YOUR PRIVACY CHOICES
Except as otherwise described in this Privacy Policy, we will only use Personal Information for the purposes described above or as otherwise disclosed at the time we request such information from you.
Except as otherwise stated herein, users of our Website are notified when Personal Information is being collected by third parties on our Website.
Please know too that you may always choose not to provide information, though it might be needed to take advantage of offers or Website features.
SECTION V
UPDATING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION AND CONTACTING DIETDETECTIVE.COM
You can always contact us in order to (1) update or correct your Personal Information, (2) change your preferences with respect to communications and other information you receive from us or third parties, or (3) delete the Personal Information maintained about you on our systems, by accessing your Member Profile and/or your Subscription Profile or by contacting
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. Such updates, corrections, changes and deletions will not have an effect on other information that we maintain, or information that we have provided to third parties in accordance with this Privacy Policy prior to such update, correction, change, or deletion.
You should be aware that it is not technologically possible to remove each and every record of the information you have provided to dietdetective.com from our servers. The need to back-up our systems to protect information from inadvertent loss means that a copy of your Personal Information may exist in a non-erasable form that will be difficult or impossible for us to locate. Nevertheless, we promise that upon receiving your request, all Personal Information stored in the databases we actively use for research and daily business activities, and other readily searchable media, will be disabled.
SECTION VI
CONTACT US WITH PRIVACY-RELATED QUESTIONS
If you have a complaint or problem, you may email us at
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and we will forward your complaint to the appropriate internal dietdetective.com department for a response or resolution. We try to answer every email in a timely manner but are not always able to do so.
BY USING OUR WEBSITE, YOU SIGNIFY YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY, YOU SHOULD NOT USE OUR WEBSITE. YOUR CONTINUED USE OF OUR WEBSITE FOLLOWING THE POSTING OF CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY WILL MEAN THAT YOU ACCEPT THOSE CHANGES.
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