As you know, NetCreations
was acquired on June 24,
2004 by the most trusted
and recognized name in
email performance: Return
Path, Inc. As part of the
Return Path family, we
will continue to provide
you with the email tools
you expect, and more.
As
part of this change, we
are asking you review our
new privacy policy, which
is below. We will continue to treat your personal information with the utmost
respect and privacy, using it for the purposes you authorize. If you have any
questions, please email support@returnpath.net.
RETURN PATH PRIVACY
STATEMENT
We know that your privacy is important to you. At Return Path, we're committed
to helping you manage and protect it. We take privacy very seriously, and have
taken many steps to help safeguard the personal information we collect from
you at this Web site.
To demonstrate our commitment, we have agreed to disclose our information practices,
and have them reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe. TRUSTe is an independent,
non-profit organization whose mission is to build user’s trust and confidence
in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. Because
this Web site wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has agreed
to disclose its information practices and have its privacy practices reviewed
for compliance by TRUSTe.
If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first
contact Return Path at privacy@postmasterdirect.com or privacy@surveydirect.com.
If you do not receive acknowledgement of your inquiry or your inquiry has not
been satisfactorily addressed, you should contact TRUSTe at http://www.truste.org/consumers/watchdog_complaint.php.
TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with us to resolve your concerns. To that
end, our privacy statement will tell you about:
- The organization collecting
information at this Web
site.
- The information we
collect.
- With whom it may be
shared.
- The security procedures
in place to protect it.
Thank you for using Return
Path.
Sincerely,
Matt Blumberg, CEO
RETURN PATH PRIVACY STATEMENT
Effective: May 19, 2005
Protecting your privacy is very important to Return Path. We know that you're
concerned with privacy on the Internet, and we've taken many steps to help
safeguard your information.
This privacy statement is provided to inform you of our privacy policy and
practices and of the choices you can make about the way your personal information
is collected online and how that information is used. By personal information
we mean information about you collected through this Web site, including your
email address, or any other information.
The organization collecting information at this Web site:
Return
Path ("Company" or "we"),
owns and operates the websites located
at www.postmasterdirect.com (including
its specific product related sites itprosdirect.com
and smallbizownersdirect.com) and www.surveydirect.com (collectively,
the "Site"). Through the Site,
Company operates the service PostMasterDirect
(the "Service"), by which it
delivers advertisements, surveys and
offers by email to its "list members," that
is, people who sign up for the Service
through our opt-in process via our Site
or through one of our many partners'
sites.
The Company operates SurveyDirect® on
the Site, where we offer
people opportunities to
participate in marketing
research surveys (the “Surveys”)
conducted by various research
companies. Often, these
marketing research companies
offer incentives to participants
in the Survey. Members
who opt-in through SurveyDirect® are
signing up to receive survey
invitations, not email
advertisements. The mailings
may come from either SurveyDirect® or
the market research company
List members can unsubscribe
from our Service or Survey
at any time, no questions
asked. We know that just
because you joined a list
a month ago doesn’t
mean that you necessarily
want to stay on it forever.
Every message we send on
behalf of a marketer is
coded with a special footer
that allows you to remove
your name from our lists
and services automatically
by clicking a link provided
in the message. In addition,
you can discontinue the
PostMasterDirect Service,
cancel your SurveyDirect® membership
or remove yourself from
the lists you signed up
for by following the instructions
at our subscription
review site. To update
your email address, you
will need to unsubscribe
the old email address and
sign up your new email
address through PostMasterDirect or SurveyDirect® sign-up
forms.
We want our list members
to feel comfortable using
the Site and participating
in the Service and Surveys,
so we have created this
Privacy Policy to let you
know what information we
may collect from you on
the Site, through the Service
and through the Surveys
and how we may use that
information. Please take
a moment to review the
terms of our Privacy Policy.
By using the Site and participating
in the Service or Surveys,
you agree to accept the
terms of our Privacy Policy.
If you do not agree to
the terms of this Privacy
Policy, please do not use
the Site or participate
in the Service or Surveys.
The information we collect:
Collection and Use
To simply view the Site without registering for the Service or for the Surveys,
you will not be required to provide any personal information. However, to register
for the Service or to participate in the Surveys, whether at our Site or at
one of our partners’ sites, you are required to provide your email address.
To serve you better and send you the most relevant offers, we may also seek
other personally and non-personally identifiable information about you from
you, our marketing partners where you have given them your consent, or where
such information is otherwise publicly available. Such information may include
postal, demographic or profile data.
If you provide us with your email address or other personal information, or
if we obtain such information about you from you or from one of our marketing
partners, we will retain and use that information solely for the purpose of
sending you advertisements, offers and Surveys from selected marketers in categories
of interest to you. When necessary, we may also use your personal information
to ensure compliance with Company policies and applicable law.
In addition, if you participate in SurveyDirect®, you will be asked to
provide certain demographic data (like your age, gender, zip code, income)
and profile data (like occupation, shopping habits and other areas of interest)
as certain Surveys may be directed to those participants who meet a particular
demographic profile. You will be asked to answer certain “pre-qualification” questions
on a pre-qualification page hosted by us. The information we collect on this
page will be used to determine whether you are eligible to participate in the
Survey and will also be maintained by us to enable us to provide you with more
relevant Surveys in the future. The information provided may be used by the
Service to provide you with better targeted messages if you are also a member
of the Service. Your answers to these pre-qualification questions will not
be provided to the marketing research company conducting the Survey or to advertisers.
If you qualify for a particular Survey after answering questions on our pre-qualification
page, you will be directed to the Survey itself, on pages hosted by the research
company. Note that any information you provide on the pages hosted by the research
company and during the course of the Survey will be subject to the research
company’s privacy policy, not ours.
We also collect information on the "contact us" page and other areas
of the site to allow you to contact us directly with any questions or comments
you may have. This information is used to respond directly to your questions
or comments. We may also file your comments to improve our site or services,
or review and discard the information.
With whom it may be shared:
Except for the limited situations discussed in this Privacy Policy, we will
not share your personal information with third parties. We may sometimes use
other businesses to perform certain specialized services such as merge/purge
(to prevent you from receiving duplicate offers), offer hosting technology
providers, and other data processing services to bring you more targeted offers.
In such instances, we may provide your personal information to those businesses
but they are not permitted to retain or use your information for any other
purpose.
As the Company develops,
we may buy other businesses
or their assets or sell
our business assets. Customer
information is generally
one of the business assets
involved in such transactions.
Thus, in the event that
Company or all of its assets
are acquired, customer
information, including
any visitor information
collected through the Site
or the Service, would be
one of the transferred
assets. In the event of
corporate change, users
will be notified in accordance
with the “Changes
to these terms” section
of the policy if their
personal information is
provided to the new corporate
entity as a result of corporate
ownership change.
Finally, Company reserves
the right to disclose list
member 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 causing
injury to or interference
with (either intentionally
or unintentionally) Company’s
rights or property, other
visitors, list members,
or anyone else that could
be harmed by such activities.
Company also reserves the
right to disclose visitor
or list member information
when we believe in good
faith that the law requires
it.
Aggregate information:
From time to time, we may collect general, non-personal, statistical information
about the use of the Site and the Service, such as how many visitors visit
a specific page on the Site, how long they stay on that page, and which hyperlinks,
if any, they “click” on. The Company also collects and reports
aggregate statistical information on the open rates and response rates generated
by the email campaigns we send. We collect this information through the use
of technologies such as “cookies” and “IP addresses”,
which are discussed in greater detail below. We collect this information
in order to determine what types of advertisements are of interest to list
members and to therefore enhance the Service. We may also group this information
into aggregate visitor data in order to describe the use of the Site and
Service to our existing or potential business partners or other third parties,
or in response to a government request. However, please be assured that this
aggregate data will in no way personally identify you, other list members
or any other visitors to the Site.
IP Addresses
An IP address is a number that’s automatically assigned to your computer
whenever you’re surfing the web. Web servers, the computers that “serve” web
pages, automatically identify your computer by its IP address. Company collects
IP addresses for purposes of system administration, to report aggregate information
to third parties and to track the use of the Site. When visitors request pages
from the Site or click on a link in a mailing sent through the Service or through
SurveyDirect®, our servers log the visitors’ IP addresses. We reserve
the right to use IP addresses to identify a visitor or list member when it
will enhance the users experience or if we feel it is necessary to enforce
compliance with the Site’s policies or to protect Company, the Site,
its visitors, the Service, SurveyDirect®, the list members or others.
Cookies
Cookies are pieces of information that a websites transfers to an individual’s
hard drive for record-keeping purposes. Cookies make web-surfing easier for
you by saving your preferences while you’re at the Site. The use of cookies
is an industry standard -- you’ll find them at most websites. We use
cookies on the subscription review site to verify the subscriber’s login
status. They are not used to store personal information, nor to retain historical
or transactional subscriber data. By showing how and when visitors use the
Site, cookies help us see which areas are popular and which are not. Information
such as the total number of visitors and pages viewed is most easily tracked
with cookies. We may use the information from cookies to make improvements
and updates to the Site and to tailor our services to our visitors’,
list members’ and survey participants’ needs.
You always have the option
of disabling cookies using
your browser preferences.
Most browsers are initially
set up to accept cookies.
You can reset your browser
to refuse all cookies or
indicate when a cookie
is being sent. However,
please be aware that some
features of the Site will
not function properly or
may be slower if you refuse
cookies.
Links to other
sites:
Please be aware that when you are on the Site, or when you receive an email
message from us on behalf of a marketer through the Service, you could be directed
to other sites that are beyond our control, such as the marketer’s site.
And, as discussed above, if you qualify for a Survey on our pre-qualification
page, you will be directed to the marketing research company’s site.
There may be links to other sites from the Site’s pages or from the email
message we send to you that take you outside our Site. These other sites may
send their own cookies to visitors, collect data or solicit personal information.
The privacy policies of these other sites may be significantly different from
this Privacy Policy. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these
other sites and cannot guarantee the security of any of your personal information
collected there. Note that when you link to a third party site from the Site,
you may see pre-populated data fields with your personal information; however,
that information is not available to the third party unless you take certain
actions on the third party’s site, such as submitting a form
Firewalls:
Protecting the security of your personal information is very important to us.
When we store information that you have provided to us when registering for
the Service, that information is protected by security measures that include “firewalls” (a
combination of computer hardware and software that helps keep unauthorized
visitors from accessing information within our computer network), “intrusion
detection systems” (a combination of computer hardware and software
that helps detect any unauthorized visitors) and other tools such as data
encryption and physical security, where appropriate. Unfortunately, no data
transmission over the Internet or data repository can be guaranteed to be
100% secure. As a result, while Company strives to protect your personal
information and privacy, we cannot guarantee or warrant the security of any
information you disclose or transmit to us online and cannot be responsible
for the theft, destruction, or inadvertent disclosure of your personal information.
Privacy policy
for children:
We do not knowingly collect information from children under the age of 13 on
the Site, through the Service, or through SurveyDirect®. On partner sites
where we collect age, or year of birth, we do not opt-in subscribers who indicate
a year that states their age to be less than 13. If you are under the age of
13, please do not provide any personal information to us. If we become aware
that we have collected personal information from a child under the age of 13,
we will make commercially reasonable efforts to delete such information from
our database.
Changes to these
terms:
The terms of this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will notify
you of any material changes to this Privacy Policy by posting a notice on the
homepage of the Site for a reasonable period of time after such changes are
made, that this Privacy Policy has been updated, and by changing the “Effective” date
at the top of this Privacy Policy. We encourage you to check this page periodically
for any changes. Your continued use of the Site and participation in the Service
or in any Surveys offered through SurveyDirect® following the posting of
changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.
Contacting Us:
We value your opinions. If you have comments or questions about our privacy
policy, please send them to Return Path Privacy at privacy@postmasterdirect.com or privacy@surveydirect.com,
or contact:
Return Path
379 W. Broadway, Suite 202
New York, New York 10012
Phone: 212-625-1370 x218
