THE WEEKLY STANDARD ONLINE PRIVACY POLICY

SCOPE OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY

Thank you for visiting WeeklyStandard.com, (the “Site”).  This Site is owned and operated by The Weekly Standard LLC (“TWS”), located at 1150 17th Street, N.W., Suite 505, Washington, D.C. 20036.  Your access to and use of this Site is subject to the following Privacy Policy (“Privacy Policy”) and all applicable laws.  The terms “TWS”, “we”, “us” and “our” when used in this Privacy Policy means TWS, its parent company, Clarity Media Group, Inc. and their respective subsidiaries and affiliates. The terms “you” and “your” when used in this Privacy Policy means any user of this Site.

Your privacy on the Internet is of the utmost importance to us, and we want to make your experience online satisfying and safe. This Privacy Policy describes how we protect your privacy when you use the Site. This Privacy Policy applies only to information, including personally identifiable information, collected through our Site. ”PII” means “personally identifiable information,” which is information that identifies you personally, either alone or in combination with other information available to us (including without limitation you name, address, email address, telephone number, age, or other personal information). “Non-PII” means “non-personally identifiable information” or other information which alone does not identify you (however, in some circumstances Non-PII may be combined with PII in order to identify a specific individual). This Privacy Policy is part of and incorporated into the Terms of Use for our Site.

YOUR CONSENT TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

By using our Site, you are agreeing to the collection, use, and disclosure of your PII and Non-PII as described in this Privacy Policy. If you do not consent to the collection, use, and disclosure of your PII or Non-PII as described in this Privacy Policy, you may not use our Site.  If you have any questions or concerns regarding this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please email us at webmaster@weeklystandard.com.

INFORMATION COLLECTED ON OUR SITE

We or our third party service providers may collect and track the following types of information about users on our Site:

Optional Voluntary Information. In order to access or use certain services and capabilities on our Site, you may be required to voluntarily submit certain PII. The use of these services or capabilities is purely optional, so you are not required to submit any PII to TWS if you do not wish to use them. Some of these capabilities include subscribing to our print magazine; subscribing to our email newsletter; making a purchase in our online store; requesting information from us; submitting feedback to us; using our Site to e-mail an article; participating in surveys, polls, contests, or sweepstakes on our Site; or requesting customer service or technical support through our Site.  Some of the PII you provide for these purposes is sent directly to our third party service providers rather than being collected by TWS. For example, if you make a purchase in our online store, subscribe to our print magazine, request information regarding our cruise, or use our article email function, your data is transferred directly to the third party service providers with whom TWS has contracted to handle these services on our behalf.

Usage tracking. TWS tracks user traffic patterns and content accessed throughout our Site. However, we do not correlate this information with data about personally identifiable individual users. TWS sometimes tracks and catalogs the search terms users of our Site enter in our Search function, but this tracking is not associated with individual users. Collecting usage information allows us to better tailor our content to readers' needs and to help our advertisers and sponsors better understand our audience. In addition, certain third party service providers may track usage and Non-PII of our users. This is described further below.

Cookies, pixels, and other technologies. In order to improve your experience when using our Site, we, our third party service providers, or advertisers may place a text file called a "cookie" in the browser files of your computer, which stores preferences and may be used to help personalize your experience. A cookie can't read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. We, our third party service providers or advertisers may also use web beacons, pixel tags, or other technologies, which are small pieces of code placed on a web page or embedded in emails sent to users. More information about third party advertising and ad targeting is below. TWS uses cookies to track user traffic patterns, to enhance your experience when using our Site, to persist information through your session, and to personalize the Site for you based on your preferences and selections. You can refuse cookies by turning them off in your browser. If you've set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies, you will receive the warning message with each cookie. Disabling cookies may result in errors while using the Site.

Information Sent to Us by Your Web Browser. TWS collects certain Non-PII sent to us automatically by your web browser, such as your IP address, the address of the web page you were visiting when you accessed our Site, information on your operating system and browser, and the date and time of your visit. In addition, we may review our server logs for security purposes, such as detecting intrusions into our network. If we suspect criminal activity, we might share our server logs -- which contain visitors’ IP addresses -- with the appropriate investigative authorities who could use that information to trace and identify individuals.

ADVERTISING AND AD TARGETING

We generally use third party advertising companies to serve ads when users visit the Site. In the course of serving advertisements to this Site, our third-party advertisers may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. These companies may use Non-PII collected regarding user visits to this Site and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to our users. The Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”), a cooperative group of ad serving providers that has developed a set of privacy principles to which its members adhere, provides a website offering more information about this practice and your choices about not having this information used by these companies, as well as information about NAI and third party ad servers in general. You may visit the NAI site at www.networkadvertising.org/optout_nonppii.asp.

We use certain third parties to serve ads on our Site, to provide us with data collection and ad response measurement. These third parties may view or set their own cookies, web beacons, pixel tags or use similar technologies subject to their own privacy guidelines. In addition to the NAI site, which provides general information about third party ad servers, you may visit the websites of the third parties listed below to see the privacy policies of some of our ad serving and data collection partners. For your reference, the privacy policy of one of our third party service providers, Datran Media, LLC, is provided here: http://www.datranmedia.com/privacy.

USE OF INFORMATION COLLECTED ON THE SITE

TWS may use PII collected on our Site: to enhance your experience using our Site (whether to provide interactive or personalized elements on the Site or to better prepare future content based on the interests of our users); to process your order, subscription, or other request for information or products; to maintain your registration on the Site; to improve our Site or for other purposes related to the business of TWS; for any other purpose described in this Privacy Policy or otherwise as we may disclose to you from time to time. We may also use Non-PII sent to us by your web browser or by cookies to perform statistical analyses of our server logs in order to study the use and popularity of various areas of our Site. We also review IP addresses to analyze where we are getting our audience.  TWS creates aggregate reports on user demographics and traffic patterns for advertisers, sponsors and partners. This allows our advertisers to advertise more effectively, and allows our users to receive advertisements that are pertinent to their needs. We will not collect (nor provide to an advertiser or sponsor) information that a specific identifiable user clicked on any particular ad. However, by clicking on, otherwise interacting with or viewing an ad, you are consenting to the possibility that the advertiser will make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the ad, and this may lead to similar ads being targeted to you on our Site and potentially on other Sites.

SHARING OF THE INFORMATION

We may inform advertisers of the results of our analyses of our server logs, including details regarding Site usage and general information about our audience, however, such disclosures will refer only to general, aggregate usage data from these analyses - never specific identifying information. We may share your PII with: (i) our current or future affiliates, subsidiaries, parent company, or other related entities; (ii) companies and organizations that perform services on our behalf, for example, companies that provide support services to us (such as data storage and web hosting services); and (iii) carefully selected third parties for marketing or other purposes not expressly described herein. In addition, in many circumstances, your data is provided directly to our third party service providers rather than being provided to TWS (for example, when you subscribe to our print magazine online, when you make a purchase in our online store, when you email an article through our Site, or when you sign up to receive information about a cruise) as all of these functions are handled by third parties on behalf of TWS, and these entities may in turn share your PII with TWS. We may disclose the PII we collect through our Site when we, in good faith, believe disclosure is appropriate to comply with the law (or a court order or subpoena); to prevent or investigate a possible crime, such as fraud or identity theft; to enforce the terms of use or other agreements that govern your use of our Site; to protect the rights, property or safety of TWS, our users or others; or to protect your vital interests. Information submitted to our Site is an asset of TWS and will become part of our normal business records. Your PII may be transferred to another company that has acquired the stock or assets of TWS, for example, as the result of a sale, merger, reorganization, dissolution or liquidation. If such a transfer occurs, the acquiring company’s use of your PII will still be subject to this Privacy Policy, and the privacy preferences you have expressed to us. 

Please be aware that although we may request your consent for some disclosures described in this section, by using our Site you are deemed to have accepted and agreed to the sharing of your information collected through our Site in the manner described in this Privacy Policy, and we will not be required to obtain your consent for any disclosure described in this Privacy Policy.

THIRD PARTY SITES

Third party sites, including our partners, advertisers, affiliates and other content providers accessible through our Site, may have their own privacy and data collection policies and practices. Through the Site you may be introduced to, or be able to access, information, third party sites, content, advertisements, features, contests or sweepstakes offered by other parties. TWS is not responsible for the actions or policies of such third parties and is not liable to you for any claims that may arise from your interaction with those third parties or their sites. You should exercise caution and check the applicable privacy policies of those third parties when providing PII or another party’s information on a feature or page operated by a third party.

INTERNATIONAL USERS – TRANSFER OF INFORMATION

TWS is headquartered in the United States, and you understand that any PII collected on the Site will be transferred to TWS in the United States and may be shared with entities related to TWS wherever they may be located. You hereby consent to the transfer to and processing of any PII by TWS and any TWS related entities, or any of the other parties described in this Privacy Policy, whether located in the United States or any other countries, for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, or for any other specific purposes to which you consent. If you are located in a country other than the United States, you should note that, at present, the laws of the United States and certain other countries have not been approved by the European Commission or privacy authorities in certain other countries as providing “adequate protection” for personal information within the meaning of the EU Data Protection Directive or applicable laws of other countries. Please know, however, that no matter where your personal information is collected, used, transferred or stored, if it was collected through the TWS Site, it will be protected by the terms o of this Privacy Policy.

CHILDREN'S PRIVACY

Consistent with the Federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), we will never knowingly request PII from anyone under the age of 13 without requesting parental consent. The Site is not directed at nor targeted to children under the age of 13 and we do not use the Site to knowingly solicit PII from or market to children under the age of 13. If you are under the age of 13, do not provide us with any PII. If we learn that someone under 13 has provided Personal Information to the Site, we will use reasonable efforts to remove such information from our databases.

SECURITY

TWS operates secure data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection systems. Our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary. Only authorized individuals have access to the PII provided by our Site’s users.

MODIFYING OR DELETING YOUR INFORMATION

We respect your right to make choices about the ways we collect, use and disclose your PII. You may update or modify your information at any time by logging in to the Site using your user name and password and updating your user profile, or by sending an email to us at webmaster@weeklystandard.com. You may also request that we delete the information you have provided to us by sending an email to webmaster@weeklystandard.com.

HOW TO OPT-OUT

If you wish to opt-out of receiving emails from TWS or any third party service providers or partners of TWS, please click on the “opt out” link at the bottom of the applicable email, or send an email to webmaster@weeklystandard.com to opt out of emails from TWS (our third party partners have their own opt-out procedures which you should be able to find on their emails or websites).

THIS PRIVACY POLICY MAY CHANGE

We reserve the right to update or modify this Privacy Policy, at any time and without prior notice, by posting the revised version of this Privacy Policy on the Site. Your use of the Site following any such change constitutes your agreement that all PII or Non-PII collected from or about you through the Site after the revised Privacy Policy is posted will be subject to the terms of the revised Privacy Policy. You may access the current version of this Privacy Policy at any time by clicking on the link marked "Privacy Policy" at the bottom of each page of our Site.   To the extent rules or guidelines affecting your use of the Site are found on other pages of the Site, those rules and guidelines are hereby incorporated by reference into this Privacy Policy.

EFFECTIVE DATE OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY

This Privacy Policy is effective as of January 25, 2011.