RealScoop Privacy Notice
Updated as of February 25, 2008
The RealScoop Privacy Policy describes how RealScoop and its affiliates treat personal information when you use RealScoop services, including information provided when you use RealScoop. In addition, the following describes privacy practices specific to RealScoop. To understand how we treat the information you give us as you use RealScoop, you should read this policy and the RealScoop Privacy Policy.
Personal Information
Non-Account Activity. You may have access to only a limited number of Scoops on RealScoop without having a RealScoop Account.
Account-Related Activity. Certain other activities on RealScoop—like uploading files, posting comments, flagging files, or watching restricted files—require you to have a RealScoop Account. We ask for some personal information when you create a RealScoop Account, including your email address and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorized access. A RealScoop Account allows you to access many of our services that require registration.
Usage Information. We may record information about your usage, such as when you use RealScoop, its groups and favorites you subscribe to, the contacts you communicate with, the files you watch, and the frequency and size of data transfers, as well as information you display or click on in RealScoop. If you are logged in, we may associate that information with your account. We may use clear GIFs (a.k.a. "Web Beacons") in HTML-based emails sent to our users to track which emails are opened by recipients.
Content Uploaded to Site. Any personal information or content that you voluntarily disclose online (on discussion boards, in messages and chat areas, within your playback or profile pages, etc.) becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others.
Uses
If you submit personally identifiable information to us through the RealScoop Sites, we use your personal information to operate, maintain, and provide to you the general and personalized features and functionality of the RealScoop Sites, and to process any flagging activity or correspondence you send to us. Your account name (not your email address) is displayed to other Users when you upload files or send messages through the RealScoop Sites and other Users can contact you through messages and comments. Any files that you submit to the RealScoop Sites may be redistributed through the internet and other media channels, and may be viewed by the general public. If you have enabled Active Sharing, other users may see that you, as identified by your account name (not your email address), are watching the same file.
We do not use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages without your consent or except as part of a specific program or feature for which you will have the ability to opt-in or opt-out. We may, however, use your email address without further consent for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of major RealScoop Site changes or for customer service purposes).
We use both your personally identifiable information and certain non-personally-identifiable information (such as anonymous user usage data, cookies, IP addresses, browser type, clickstream data, etc.) to improve the quality and design of the RealScoop Sites and to create new features, promotions, functionality, and services by storing, tracking, analyzing, and processing user preferences and trends, as well as user activity and communications.
We use cookies, clear gifs, and log file information to: (a) store information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit the RealScoop Sites; (b) provide custom, personalized content and information; (c) monitor the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns; (d) monitor aggregate metrics such as total number of visitors, pages viewed, etc.; and (e) track your entries, submissions, and status in promotions, sweepstakes, and contests. This information may be shared within RealScoop and with affiliated companies of RealScoop.
Your Choices
You may, of course, decline to submit personally identifiable information through the RealScoop Sites, in which case you can still view files and explore the RealScoop Sites, but RealScoop may not be able to provide certain services to you. Some advanced RealScoop features may, for authentication purposes, require you to sign up for other RealScoop services as the features are introduced on the site. The privacy notices of those services govern the use of your personal information associated with them.
You may update or correct your personal profile information and email preferences at any time by visiting your account profile page.
Third-party Advertisers, Links to Other Sites
RealScoop may in the future allow other companies, called third-party ad servers or ad networks, to serve advertisements within the RealScoop Sites. These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to send, directly to your browser, the advertisements and links that appear on the RealScoop Sites. They automatically receive your IP address when this happens. They may also use other technologies (such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons) to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and to personalize the advertising content you see.
RealScoop does not provide any personally identifiable information to these third-party ad servers or ad networks without your consent or except as part of a specific program or feature for which you will have the ability to opt-in or opt-out. However, please note that if an advertiser asks RealScoop to show an advertisement to a certain audience (for example, men ages 18-34) or audience segment (for example, men ages 18-24 who have viewed certain channels of content) and you respond to that advertisement, the advertiser or ad-server may conclude that you fit the description of the audience they are trying to reach. The advertiser may also use information regarding your use of the RealScoop Sites, such as the number of times you viewed an ad (but not any personally identifiable information), to determine which ads to deliver to you.
You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers or ad networks for more information on their practices and for instructions on how to opt-out of certain practices. RealScoop's privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.
More Information
RealScoop adheres to the US Safe Harbor privacy principles. For more information about the Safe Harbor framework or our registration, see the Department of Commerce's web site.
For questions concerning the product or your account, please check out the RealScoop Help page.
For more information about our privacy practices, go to RealScoop's full Privacy Policy, or e-mail us at info@realscoop.com.
