This Privacy Policy governs data collection practices of the Kluwer Arbitration Blog (KAB), a publication of Kluwer Law International (“KLI”). KAB recognizes the importance of protecting the privacy of your personally identifiable information. In adopting this Privacy Policy, our intent is to balance our legitimate business interests in collecting and using personally identifiable information and your reasonable expectations of privacy. This policy applies only to information collected by KAB, and does not govern or apply to information collected or used by KLI, or its divisions or affiliates through other means.
What personally identifiable information do I provide to KAB?
KAB may ask you to provide various types of personally identifiable information to enhance your experience on our site. For example, KAB may ask for information such as your name or e-mail address. The more information you provide, the better we are able to customize your experience. We may also ask you for other information at other times – such as when you enter a contest or participate in a promotion, when you participate in our message boards, or when you order products from KAB. Whenever you provide personally identifiable information to us, we will make an effort to link to our Privacy Policy. See below about “cookies” and what other information is collected.
How does KAB use my personally identifiable information?
Our primary goal in collecting personally identifiable information is to provide you, the user, with a customized experience on our network of sites. This includes personalization services, interactive communications, online shopping and many other types of services, most of which are completely free to you.
KAB uses the personally identifiable information you provide to us in several ways. Some examples follow.
A user’s personally identifiable information may be used by KAB for editorial purposes such as to contact you as part of an online survey. Additionally, we may also use the information provided by you to: 1) contact you with legal notices, 2) to advise you of any material changes or additions to our Service or terms and conditions, and 3) account status (including confirmation of registrations).
Finally, you can specify in your account preferences that you would be interested in receiving e-mail from us, in which case we may send you offers and information about KAB, KLI and its affiliates, e-mails about KAB or KLI products, promotions, or services as well as on behalf of other companies. However, if you no longer wish to receive any of the foregoing, you may change your preferences for the future at any time by contacting us at marketing@kluwerlaw.com.
In order to provide services free of charge, we may display advertisements. KAB and/or KLI may deliver targeted advertisements on behalf of advertisers. Advertisers give us an advertisement and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (for example, females over 25 years old). We take the advertisement and display it to users meeting that criteria. In this process, the advertiser never has access to individual account information.
KAB and KLI also may do research on our users’ demographics, interests and behavior based on the information you provide to us including upon registration, on order forms, during a promotion, as well as from our server log files or from surveys. We do this to better understand and serve our users. This research is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis and KAB may share this aggregated data with advertisers or other businesses. In addition, under confidentiality agreements, KAB may match user information with third party data.
If KAB changes its use of your personally identifiable information, it will notify you by the email that you provided at registration and /or prominently post such changes in this Privacy Policy.
Do other companies or people have access to personally identifiable information I provide to KAB?
When you are on an area of KAB and are asked for personally identifiable information, you are providing that information to KAB, KLI, its divisions or affiliates, or vendors providing contractual services for KAB (such as hosting vendors and list managers). If personally identifiable information is being provided to and/or maintained by any company other than these, our policy is that we will not transfer that personally identifiable information unless notice is given prior to transfer. If you do not want your information to be shared, you can choose not to allow the transfer by not using that particular service or by expressing this preference, if requested. Additional information about personally identifiable information follows.
Promotions
Promotions that run on KAB may be sponsored by companies other than KAB or KLI or may be co-sponsored by KAB, and/or KLI and another company. Some or all personally identifiable information provided by you during a promotion may be shared with the sponsor. If information will be shared, we will disclose such sharing prior to the transfer. You can decide not to participate in the promotion if you don’t want your personally identifiable information to be shared. In certain circumstances, you may not be able to participate in a particular promotion if you chose not to share personally identifiable information.
Advertisers and Links
KAB advertisers, or Web sites that have links on our site, may also collect personally identifiable information directly from you. The information practices of companies collecting data on our site or Web sites linked to KAB are not covered by this Privacy Policy.
We do not control the privacy policies of our advertisers, sponsors or other sites or businesses to which we provide hyperlinks or access. Please visit the sites of these businesses to review their privacy policies.
KAB users should also be aware that, when you voluntarily disclose personal information in chat areas or bulletin boards, that information may be collected by others and may result in unsolicited messages from others.
Except as stated in this Privacy Policy or at the time of collection, a user’s personally identifiable information will not be transferred to a party outside KAB, KLI, its divisions or affiliates, or its service vendors unless notice is given at the time of collection or prior to transfer. KAB, KLI or its divisions or affiliates may also disclose account information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our User Agreement or may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) KAB’s or KLI’s rights or property, other KAB users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities.
Data Security
We have in place physical, electronic and managerial procedures to protect the information we collect online. However, as effective as these measures are, no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that the information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the internet.
What information do web servers collect?
Web servers serving KAB may automatically collect certain non-personally identifiable information, such as which pages each user visits and the domain name of visitors. This information is used for various purposes including internal review, to tailor information to individual visitors, and for traffic audits. We also provide this information (as well as information from third-party market researchers) about our users on an aggregated, anonymous basis to our advertisers.
What are cookies and how does KAB use them?
KAB may place a “cookie” on the browser of a KAB user’s computer to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie can be used to tell when your computer has contacted a Web site; we may also use the information for editorial purposes and for other purposes such as measuring certain traffic patterns. For example, cookies are used to ensure that you don’t see the same ad too many times in a single session and that you do not have to reenter your login name or password during your visit. We may also use cookies to track your progress and number of entries in some of our promotions and contests. Advertising service vendors that serve ads into our site may also use their own cookies. You may opt-out of the cookies delivered by KAB by changing the setting on your browser. Please be aware that this will disable all cookies delivered to your browser, not just the ones delivered by KAB.
How Can I Opt-Out of Online Advertising Cookies?
Online advertising for the Service may be delivered by a vendor. Such vendor, like other advertising service vendors, may place cookies on users’ hard drives so that its systems can identify your computer. By placing such cookies on your system, the vendor is able, among other things, to determine automatically whether you have seen a particular advertisement before and avoid sending you duplicate advertisements. It also enables the vendor to serve you advertisements tailored to things you have shown interest in based on other sites you have visited. The vendor allows visitors the option to opt-out of advertising cookies. If you do not want the benefits of advertising cookies, there is a simple procedure that allows you to deny or accept this feature.
Please note that opting out through the above procedure will affect not only KAB and other KLI sites, but other sites served by the vendor as well. However, it will not affect the cookies used by KAB.
Often our advertisers contract with a third-party service to host their ads. In this case, an ad serving vendor contacts the advertisers’ hosting service for a particular advertisement. In that case, an independent cookie may be used by the third-party service. We do not have a mechanism to allow visitors to opt-out of cookies from vendors with whom we do not have a contractual relationship.
Kids under 13
Do not send any information about yourself to us – including information like your name, address or e-mail address. In general, we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under 13. If, in limited circumstances, we do knowingly collect personally identifiable information from a child under the age of 13, we will do so only with verified parental consent prior to collection. In the event that we learn that we have collected any personal information from a child under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information from our database as quickly as possible.
Technology on the Internet is developing at a rapid pace, and we need to maintain our flexibility in the online arena. If we need to change our policy in the future, we will post these changes as soon as they go into effect.