Your privacy is very important to The Dr. Spock Company, and we are committed to protecting it. You are welcome to explore our web site without providing any information about yourself. To take full advantage of The Dr. Spock Company features such as our newsletter, asking experts questions, and our community activities, we will need certain information from you. For instance, to receive a The Dr. Spock Company newsletter you must give us your email address.
We apologize in advance for this long document, but we want you to know enough about the information we collect, how we use it, and how we protect that information so you can feel comfortable and at ease while enjoying all of our site's features. By registering on our site or otherwise submitting information to our web site, you agree to our use and disclosure of your personally identifiable information as described in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and subject to our Terms of Service.
The general principles of our Privacy Policy are as follows:
- We will only use personally identifiable information you provide for the purposes you provided it.
- We will provide you the opportunity to decline when we ask you for personally identifiable information.
- We keep your personally identifiable information secure by limiting access to the information and keeping our servers secure.
- The Dr. Spock Company is the sole owner of the personally identifiable information you provide. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement.
- We will permit you to review the information you have provided, and let you change it.
- We will prominently post any significant changes we make to our Privacy Policy.
Please read the following to learn more about how we treat the information you provide us.
Children's Privacy
The Dr. Spock Company is committed to protecting the privacy of children. The site is not intended or designed for use by children under the age of 13 years. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from any person under the age of 13 years.
The Information We Collect and How We Use It
The Dr. Spock Company will use personally identifiable information provided by you to improve our content and product offerings, and to personalize our site's content, layout and services to meet your needs.
We may also use information provided by you to deliver content to you that, in some cases, will be targeted to your interests, such as new services, promotions and banner displays. By accepting The Dr. Spock Company's Terms of Service, you expressly agree to receive this information. In order to receive communications from us you will need to provide us with your contact information (for instance, your email address). We may use the contact information to notify you of significant changes in our policies, new product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of our site. If you do not wish to receive these communications, you may notify us of your choice on the "Preferences" page.
Registering for our site will give you access to the following services:
Newsletter
We must have your contact information to send you our The Dr. Spock Company newsletter.
Community and Ask Our Experts
To ask a question of our experts or post information on our site on message boards and other public areas, we will ask you to select a user name and password. We will send you a welcoming email to verify your user name and password. You have a choice as to whether you give us demographic information (such as your age, your child's age and gender, zip code or income level), but we encourage you to enter as much information as you find comfortable so we can provide you with a more personalized experience.
It is important to remember that the questions or messages you submit to The Dr. Spock Company will be available to the public. For that reason, you should consider selecting a nickname for your user name that does not reveal information about you that you might not want others to know.
Control of Your Password
You can create your own password. You should keep your password confidential and not share it with anyone else.
Surveys & Contests
From time-to-time The Dr. Spock Company will offer surveys and contests. We will request information from you if you choose to participate. You do not have to provide any information unless you want to take part. We will use survey information to monitor and improve your experience on our site. We will use your contact information to notify you of information that might be of interest to you based on your survey responses, or if you have won a prize in one of our contests.
Third Party Advertising
We use DoubleClick and other third party advertising companies to offer you ads when you visit our web site. These companies may place cookies on your computer to collect information about you (which does not include personally identifiable information such as your name, address, email address or telephone number), about your visits to this site and other web sites to provide you with advertisements on this and other sites about goods and services of interest to you. To learn more about this practice and to learn what your choices are about not having this information used by these companies, go to http://www.doubleclick.net/us/corporate/privacy/.
Cookies
A cookie is a piece of information that is stored on your computer's hard drive, not on our site. It contains information about you and how you use our web site. It is not linked to any of your personally identifiable information. One of the reasons we use cookies is that they can allow you to move among the different password protected sections of our site without having to reenter your password each time you use a new feature. Cookies help us monitor what people are viewing on our site. We will use cookies to improve our site by understanding how people actually are using it. You are able to decline our cookies if your browser permits, although in that case you may not be able to use certain features on our site and you may be required to reenter your password more frequently during a session.
Advertisers on our site do not have access to nor receive information about you from drSpock.com's cookies. However, advertisers may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser in the course of serving advertisements to you at this site.
Tracking
The Dr. Spock Company uses your Internet Protocol (IP) address to help analyze trends, administer the site, track your "clicks" as you navigate through the site, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. Your IP address is not linked to your personally identifiable information.
Disclosure of Your Information
The Dr. Spock Company is the sole owner of the information collected from you on its site. We will not sell, share, rent or lease this information to independent third parties in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement.
The Dr. Spock Company will not disclose your personally identifiable information to independent third parties other than those who help us operate our site, and those who provide specific services you request from The Dr. Spock Company (such as an independent third party who might help us deliver our newsletters). When you sign up for these member services we will share your name, contact information or other information necessary for the third party to provide the services. These independent third parties will only use your information to provide the designated service, and will handle your information in accordance with this The Dr. Spock Company Privacy Policy.
We also will share aggregated demographic information (that is information that does not allow you to be contacted or identified) with our business partners and advertisers for marketing and promotional purposes. The aggregate information we share with them is not linked to any of your personally identifiable information. For example, The Dr. Spock Company may provide information to third parties about how many people use our site, and what features of the site they use. Another example is that we might tell an advertiser that a certain percentage of our users live in the Eastern United States or have children under the age of two years. We may have contractual arrangements that include financial incentives with independent third parties to provide this aggregated information.
We may disclose any information about you to law enforcement, other government officials, or other third parties, as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate, in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringement, or other activity that is illegal or may expose us to legal liability. We also may disclose such information to third parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate if we sell substantially all of our assets to a third party provided the purchaser agrees to comply with our privacy policy.
How We Keep Your Information Secure
The Dr. Spock Company protects our users' information both online and off-line. All of our users' information, not just the personally identifiable information mentioned above, is restricted in our office. Only employees, suppliers and independent contractors who need the information to perform a specific job are granted access to personally identifiable information. Our employees, suppliers and independent contractors must use password-protected access to the system containing your personally identifiable information. Furthermore, all employees, suppliers and independent contractors are kept up-to-date on our security and privacy practices. Every three months, as well as any time new policies are added, our employees, suppliers and independent contractors are notified and/or reminded about the importance we place on privacy, and what they can do to ensure our customers' information is protected. Finally, the servers we use to store personally identifiable information are maintained in a secure environment.
How You Can Update The Information You Give Us
If you want to change your personally identifiable information (such as your street address), you can do so on the "My Account" page.
How We Signal Significant Changes To Our Privacy Policy
If The Dr. Spock Company makes material changes to our privacy policy, we will post those changes prominently on our site so you are always aware of the information we collect, how we will use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If at any point we decide to use personally identifiable information in a manner substantially different from what we stated at the time it was collected, we will notify you when you sign in so that you will be able to choose whether to proceed under the revised policy.
Links to Other Web Sites
This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that The Dr. Spock Company is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites.
