Information Collected Through Technology

Information Provided by You:

You may provide us with certain personally identifiable information when you:

• register for an account;
• order products or gift certificates;
• request customer support or send us any other communication;
• sign up for newsletters, email alerts, and special offers;
• set up a Contributor or Associates account;
• enter sweepstakes or contests;
• sign up for, or redeem, special offers;
• respond to surveys;
• use our Email or referral features; and
• approve your child's request to open an account in accordance with The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA).

We collect information through technology to make our sites more interesting and useful to you and for various purposes related to our business. For instance, when you come to one of our sites, we collect your IP address. An IP address is associated with the access point through which you enter the Internet, and is typically controlled by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), your company, or your university. Standing alone, your IP address is not personally identifiable. We may use IP addresses to collect information regarding the frequency with which our guests visit various parts of our sites, and we may combine IP addresses with personally identifiable information.

Our Web sites collect information through a variety of technical methods, including cookies and Web beacons. Cookies are pieces of information that a Web site sends to your computer while you are viewing the Web site. Web beacons are small pieces of data that are embedded in images on the pages of Web sites. Cookies, web beacons and other technical methods may involve the transmission of information either directly to us or to another party authorized by us to collect information on our behalf.

We may use the information collected through these technical methods for many purposes, including delivering content, tracking and enhancing our guests' experience on our Web sites. For example, when you return to one of our Web sites after logging in, cookies provide information to the site so that the site will remember who you are. We also may use technical methods to analyze the traffic patterns on our Web sites, such as the frequency with which our users visit various parts of our Web sites, and third party Web sites, such as the frequency with which our users visit other Web sites. In HTML e-mails that we send our guests, we may use technical methods for a number of purposes, including: to determine whether our guests have opened or forwarded those e-mails and/or clicked on links in those e-mails, to customize the display of banner advertisements and other messages after a guest has closed the e-mail, and to determine whether a guest has made an inquiry or purchase in response to a particular e-mail. These technical methods may enable us to collect and use information in a form that is personally identifiable.

Many advertisements are managed and placed on our Web sites by third parties. These companies are called "network advertisers." Network advertisers who place advertisements on our Web sites may use cookies and Web beacons to collect non-personally identifiable information about your visits to our Web sites and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like to obtain more information about the practices of some of these network advertisers and to make choices about their use of your information, please click here. Finally, please keep in mind that if you click on an advertisement on one of our Web sites and link to a third party's Web site, then our Privacy Policy will not apply to your personally identifiable information collected on that third party's Web site and you must read the privacy policy posted on that site to see how your personally identifiable information will be handled.

Information That We Collect from Others

We may update and supplement personally identifiable information that we have collected directly from our guests with other information that we obtain from third parties. In addition, we may obtain personally identifiable information about individuals who are not yet users of our Web sites.