Privacy Policy

Ahead of the Ticker (or “we” or “us”) is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy sets out our privacy policy and explains what we do with your personal information that we collect from you. Please read the following to understand our practices regarding personal information and how they affect you as you our features and services. This statement discloses our current privacy practices; if we make material changes to these practices, we will announce them. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this statement, please e-mail us.

The Privacy Policy answers the following questions:

• What information does Ahead of the Ticker collect about you?
• How does Ahead of the Ticker use your personal information?
• How do we use “IP addresses” and “cookies”?
• Will Ahead of the Ticker disclose any of your personal information?
• What kind of security measures do we take to protect your information from accidental loss or disclosure?
• How can you deactivate your account or correct or revise information that we have about you?
• How do we respect children’s privacy?
• How will you know whether Ahead of the Ticker’s privacy policy has changed?

What information does Ahead of the Ticker collect about you?

Ahead of the Ticker collects information about our readers so that we can provide a more interesting and useful service, as well as more appropriate advertising. We ask for your name, email address, and other personal information when you register to use certain features of our Web site, or if you sign up for special services, such as our email newsletters. We sometimes conduct surveys as well, although you do not have to respond to them.

If you use our recommendation service to email one of our articles to a friend, you will need to provide us with your friend’s email address and your email address as a return address. We will automatically send this person a one-time email, with the recommended article attached, as well as invite your friend to visit and register with our site. We will not use these email addresses for any other purpose.

We collect IP addresses for site security and to help us understand how people use our sites so that we can improve our sites and our users’ respective experiences. For similar quality reasons, we use a feature known as a “cookie.” Cookies contain bits of information that websites transfer to your computer’s hard drive for record-keeping purposes. Cookies can make the Web more convenient by storing information about your preferences on a site. Although we may assign your browser a cookie, the cookie does not tell us who you are. Only you can tell us that. We discuss cookies later in this Privacy Policy.

Besides cookies, we may also use tiny electronic images (called “single-pixel GIFs” or “Web beacons”), which allow us to count users who have visited specific pages or access certain cookies. We may use single-pixel GIFs in the following ways:

• To count and recognize users.

• To conduct research on behalf of some partners on their websites, and for auditing purposes.

• To determine aggregate information about users, including demographic and usage information.

• To determine which email messages were opened and/or acted upon when we send HTML-formatted email messages (messages resembling Web pages that include graphics).

Advertising networks that serve ads on our site may also use single-pixel GIFs in their advertisements. In general, any electronic image viewed as part of a Web page, including an ad banner, can act as a Web beacon.

How does Ahead of the Ticker use your personal information?

Ahead of the Ticker collects personal information to provide you, the user, with the best and most personalized experience possible, and to provide our advertisers with an efficient way to reach the right audience. In short, by knowing a little about you, we can deliver more relevant content and advertisements to you.
We conduct research on our users’ demographics, interests, and behavior based upon the information you provide us when you register or based upon the information on our server log files. This research is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis.

How do we use “IP addresses” and “cookies”?

IP Addresses

Your Web browser or email application automatically provides your Internet Protocol address (“IP address”) to other computers with which you communicate over the Internet, so that they know where to send you information.
We receive an IP address each time you view one of our Web pages, because the browser automatically reports it to us. We also may store the IP address when you register with us.

We may use IP addresses for various purposes, including:

• Diagnosing service or technology problems.

• Assessing and maintaining system security.

• Displaying the most appropriate advertising or content.

• Studying how people use our site and how we can improve it.

• Reporting to advertisers about aggregate, but not individual, information derived from IP addresses.

Cookies

Cookies are used on our sites in the following ways:

• We use cookies to access your stored account information automatically when you log on to our site, in order to deliver a better and more personalized service.

• We use cookies to estimate our audience size and usage patterns. The unique cookie that is given to each browser accessing the website is then used to determine usage patterns and help us target content and ads based upon user interests.

• Our search engines may use cookies to expedite your search for content.

• Some of our advertisers use third-party networks to serve their advertisements on our sites and in our HTML-formatted newsletters. Often, these third-party advertising companies use cookies, Web beacons, and similar technologies to measure advertisement effectiveness. We do not control, nor do we have access to, their cookies or the information they obtain. Use of their tracking technology is subject to their own privacy policies.

Most browsers are set up to accept cookies, but you can configure yours to refuse cookies or notify you when you’ve received one. Browsers differ, so check your “Help” menu to learn how to change your cookie preferences. If you reject cookies on our sites, though, you will not be able to access all areas. When you accept our cookies, we cannot use them to find out who you really are, unless you tell us. And even then, they won’t tell us what you are thinking, your ATM PIN, or to whom you are writing love letters.

Will Ahead of the Ticker disclose any of your personal information?

Ahead of the Ticker will not disclose any personally identifiable information about individual users, except as described in this Privacy Policy. With the few exceptions that we explain here, we do not give, rent, lend, or sell individual information to our advertisers, although we do provide aggregate information. For example, we might tell an advertiser that there are 250,000 registered members at Ahead of the Ticker, but we will not tell them that Jack Jones is one of them, nor will we tell them that his email address is jack@jones.com. We may also use this aggregated information to help the advertisers reach the kind of audience they want. They may give us an ad and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (for example, females in the 90210 ZIP code). Ahead of the Ticker (or people working on our behalf, under contracts and confidentiality agreements) would then take the ad and display it to users who have told us they meet those criteria. We may also disclose aggregate information (for example, information showing that 5 million of our readers clicked on a particular Web advertising banner last month) in order to describe our services to prospective partners, advertisers, and other third parties, and for other lawful purposes.
As for individually identifiable information, we may disclose it only under the following circumstances:

• We may disclose information to others when we have your consent.

• If you use our recommendation service to email one of our articles to a friend, Ahead of the Ticker will automatically send this person a one-time email, with the recommended article attached. The email address you give us will appear on the “From” line of the email, thereby disclosing this information to whoever opens and reads the email. Similarly, if you send email from our site, by using “Reply to Author” or “Email this Post,” your address may appear as the return address of that email.

• We may disclose your personal information as required by applicable law, or in response to legal process, to protect the rights or property of Ahead of the Ticker, or to protect the safety of Ahead of the Ticker, our users, or others.

• We may employ contractors or other third parties to help with our operations. We may give them access to databases of user information, so that they can perform their services for us, including performing system maintenance, performing list analysis or management, or sending mailings for us from our advertisers. These parties are all subject to confidentiality agreements that restrict their use and disclosure of information they obtain through their relationship with Ahead of the Ticker.

What kind of security measures do we take to protect your information from accidental loss or disclosure?

We are committed to protecting your personal information. We store information you provide us on our secure servers. Ahead of the Ticker will never ask you for your password in an unsolicited phone call or email. If you are using a computer to which others have access, such as one in a computer lab, Internet cafe, or public library, always remember to log out and close your browser window when leaving our site.

How do we respect children’s privacy?

Our sites are not directed at children under the age of 13. We operate our sites in compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and will not knowingly collect or use personally identifiable information from anyone under 13.

How will you know whether Ahead of the Ticker's privacy policy has changed?

We may change this Privacy Statement at any time, but we will give notice of any material change (or any notices that we are required to give you) on our websites.

Last Updated: August 25, 2008