Privacy Policy



Privacy Philosophy
Information Gathered
Who Collects this Information
Use of the Information
Information Distribution
Opt-Out Features
Security Precautions
Deleting and Deactivating


Introduction
This statement discloses the privacy practices of the The Vitalsearch Company, LLC. Web site. If desired, you can expect to be notified of:
  1. What Personally Identifiable Information of yours is collected
  2. What organization is collecting the information
  3. How the information is used
  4. With whom the information may be shared
  5. What choices are available to you regarding collection, use, and distribution of the information
  6. What kind of security procedures are in place to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of information under the company's control
  7. How you can correct any inaccuracies in the information

Questions regarding this statement should be directed to The Vitalsearch Company, LLC's Support Services department.

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Privacy Philosophy

The Internet is rapidly changing the way all of us communicate and interact with each other. While the Internet allows each of us access to a greater array of information and services than has ever been available, these new online activities do raise new challenges, such as the privacy issues addressed in this policy. The Vitalsearch Company, LLC is committed to working with public policy organizations, industry groups, and government institutions to understand and address these challenges as they arise. But most importantly, having a relationship with our customers that is founded on trust is not only good manners, it is also good business. Any feedback you'd like to provide to help us better meet your expectations in this arena is welcomed.

Our Commitment to You

The Vitalsearch Company, LLC wants to make your online experience satisfying and safe. Our data collection policies allow you to choose how much information to provide to us, and to control how we use that information. Our goal is to provide you with a robust online experience while allowing you to control your privacy.

The Vitalsearch Company, LLC collects information online primarily to make it easier and more rewarding for you to use our services. Depending on the service you are accessing, you could be asked at various times to provide information such as your name, email address, or information about what you like and do not like. On other occasions such as when we provide items for purchase online, we may request your credit card number to conclude the transaction, or your mailing address to ensure proper delivery. We request this information to provide our strongest value to you - a personalized online experience. Customers who personalize our service come back more often - and it's the customers that visit us often who make us successful - so we do everything we can to make The Vitalsearch Company, LLC your service with your name on it and to give you just the content you want.

Information collected online is often defined as being either anonymous or personally identifiable:

  1. Anonymous Information refers to information that cannot be tied back to a specific individual. For instance, we may know that 10,000 people visit this Privacy Policy today, but we do not necessarily know their names, where they live, or their date of birth. What we collect from transactions such as this constitutes anonymous information, much like how your hometown's bus service knows how many people take a given route - but doesn't necessarily know who those people are. Many of the individuals who access our services decline to use the personalization features that are available to them, and therefore those individuals are anonymous to us and the data we collect is similarly anonymous information.

  2. Personally Identifiable Information refers to information that tells us specifically who you are, such as your name, phone number, or postal address. In many cases we need this information to provide the personalized or enhanced service that have requested such as commerce-enabled services which allow us to ship the products you buy to your door. We hope that, like many of our customers, you will find it beneficial to judiciously provide Personally Identifiable Information to us so that we may provide more valuable free content and products to you.

The amount of Personally Identifiable Information that you choose to disclose to us is completely up to you. The only way we know something about you personally is if you register for a personalized service. In other words, we will know Personally Identifiable Information about you only if you choose to share this type of information with us.

Our Commitment to Your Family

Like you, we at the The Vitalsearch Company, LLC. have children of our own and are concerned about their safety when they use the Internet. We want you and your family to be safe while visiting our Internet sites. That is why we have established the following guidelines for the way we interact with children when they access our services.

Consistent with the Federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), we will never knowingly request Personally Identifiable Information from anyone under the age of 13 without requesting verifiable parental consent. We will place a "Children's Seal" on any page directly targeted to children under 13 that requests the disclosure of consumer information, informing those children that parental consent is needed, and we will use a secure and verifiable method for confirmation of such consent.

Additionally, The Vitalsearch Company, LLC offers levels of protection for minors that are beyond what federal law requires. While The Vitalsearch Company, LLC will not target registration to those under 13 without using the safeguards listed above, we recognize that some minors will utilize the registration products associated with our general release products. If a customer registers with us and their birth date indicates that they are not just under 13, but are in fact any age less than 18, we will:

  1. Never knowingly send a copy of a mass emailing to them, even if they gave us permission to email them during registration.

  2. Never voluntarily share their customer information with any third party, even if they gave us permission to share their customer information during registration.

  3. Never list them in any Member Directory in a manner in which their age can be easily identified.

In summary, the management and employees of The Vitalsearch Company, LLC are very proud of our industry-leading steps to safeguard the privacy of all minors online. We're doing what we can to ensure that Personally Identifiable Information regarding registered users under the age of 18 won't leave our company for commercial use; and that someone using our site won't be able to easily look up their age. These protections are a start, but there are some actions we cannot control, and in these areas we need help from the child's parent or guardian as well.

Can The Vitalsearch Company, LLC Do Something About Spam?

In the online world, unsolicited junk email is referred to as "Spam." Nearly all of us at one time or another will find Spam in our email inboxes. Sadly, there is no current solution to completely prevent the delivery of Spam. Your email address can become available to "Spammers" in any number of ways. You may have entered your email address at one of our advertiser's Web site where you signed up for a product or service. Or maybe you posted a message to a discussion board and included your email address - from which it can be automatically plucked by disreputable firms. Or, you might have done nothing at all. Unfortunately, some Spammers send massive amounts of email to various Internet domains, including ours and those run by companies such as Yahoo!® or AOL®. These individuals target large lists of probable email names (like "John") and the resultant email address (like "john@yahoo.com"). While these activities are horribly inefficient, they are a common practice that allow Spammers to get mail out to people who have not provided their names or addresses. Your best bet is simply to delete such email from your inbox if you find any.

Regrettably, all of us are victims of this behavior. The Vitalsearch Company, LLC does not condone these activities and is active in pursuing solutions, including supporting the development of new laws and regulations to stem email Spamming. The Vitalsearch Company, LLC is not responsible for this unfortunate activity, and largely cannot stop it from occurring when it originates from domains off of The Vitalsearch Company, LLC. We can and will, however, take actions against The Vitalsearch Company, LLC users who utilize any of our product offerings as the launching pad for Spam directed towards others, whether those prospective Spam recipients be The Vitalsearch Company, LLC customers or not. Sending Spam from any The Vitalsearch Company, LLC domain is a serious breach of our Terms of Service that can lead to immediate closure of the sender's account.

Finally, The Vitalsearch Company, LLC does occasionally send outbound email communications to our customers - and we hope you never think of it as Spam. To ensure that this is the case, we have strong policies in place that allow our customers to control the delivery of this content, or to prevent it altogether if that is your preference. For information about the controls that we make available to you, please see the information about unsubscribing from The Vitalsearch Company, LLC outbound emailings shown below.

What Personally Identifiable Information of yours is collected

In our effort to provide personalization and opportunities for prizes and services, we may at times ask you to submit information such as your name or email address, or to share your interests and hobbies with us. You never have to answer these questions, and you can decline this exchange of information on any site on the Internet - not just ours - at any time. However, if you should choose to withhold requested information, we may not be able to provide you with some of the services dependent upon the collection of this information, such as the purchase and shipment of products and prizes to people who visit us.

When you surf the Internet, your Internet browser (such as Microsoft Internet Explorer) automatically transmits some information to The Vitalsearch Company, LLC every time you access content on one of our sites. Examples of such information include the URL of the Web page you were just on (known as the "Refer"), the IP (or Internet Protocol) address of the computer you are using, or the browser version you are using to access our site. All of this information can be collected by The Vitalsearch Company, LLC and used to help improve our offerings to you. All of the information that can be automatically submitted to us by your browser is considered Anonymous Information.

To enable many of the features available within the The Vitalsearch Company, LLC, we may assign "cookies" to your Internet browser (such as Microsoft Internet Explorer). A cookie is a small text file that contains a unique identification number stored on your computer. Cookies by themselves cannot be used to find out the identity of any user. This unique identification number automatically identifies your browser - but not you - to our computers whenever you access us. When you visit our site, a cookie in effect says to our server computers "Hello, I'm browser #655. What do you do just for me?" Every Web page that you access that includes advertising or content served from the The Vitalsearch Company, LLC may have the contents of your cookie reported in our server logs. But only when you agree to provide Personally Identifiable Information directly to a The Vitalsearch Company, LLC service, such as through registration, will we be able to know anything about you other than the random number that our server computers originally assign to your browser.

There is a lot of confusion about cookies, how they are used, and what they can do. Cookies only contain information that the server computer "knew" in the first place, and can only be read by the serving domain that placed them. For instance, Yahoo! utilizes cookies, but The Vitalsearch Company, LLC's servers can't read their contents nor can Yahoo!'s servers read ours. Cookies are an essential part of how the Internet works today, and allow server computers to recognize your computer's browser when you return. If you have ever gone to a Web page that automatically provides personalized content without you having to "sign in," such as your own stock portfolio, this is almost certainly being accomplished with a cookie. Since cookies are only text files, they cannot "run" on your computer and have no ability to search your computer for other information, or transmit it to anyone.

Cookies are part of the technology implemented by your Web browser. But don't just take our word for it - read what the companies who wrote the browsers have to say!

For Microsoft, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/insider/internet/articles/security2.htm#cookies

What organization is collecting the information

Any Personally Identifiable Information data you provide to The Vitalsearch Company, LLC, is collected by The Vitalsearch Company, LLC only and is not disseminated, sold or shared with any partly or wholly owned subsidiary of this corporation.

How the information is used

Our services have been designed to enable The Vitalsearch Company, LLC to provide personalized content to those customers who wish to receive it. The majority of the services that are provided for free through The Vitalsearch Company, LLC are the result of advertising revenues. Our ability to provide enhanced services and content to our customers is dependent on our ability to provide venues for our advertising partners that reach specific demographic segments of our customer base. Generally, advertisers have little interest in reaching a specific customer of our services - and as a matter of policy we provide no mechanism for an advertiser to reach you or any other specific customer unless you request that contact. Instead, our advertising partners have the need to reach customers who share common demographic characteristics such as a specific gender or age range. For instance, certain products are more often purchased by men then by women and therefore when advertising those products, in this example the advertiser would prefer to target their messages just to men. The better job The Vitalsearch Company, LLC does in providing a mechanism for advertisers to reach specific sub-segments of our users, the more revenue we can generate from advertising and that ultimately is what allows you the consumer to get to the wealth of free content that is available on The Vitalsearch Company, LLC's various services. Importantly, at no time is your Personally Identifiable Information used to determine what advertising you receive nor do we use it to determine what type of advertising any other customer of The Vitalsearch Company, LLC will receive.

Information Distribution

If you are providing us Personally Identifiable Information, it will only be used within The Vitalsearch Company, LLC unless you choose to allow third party data sharing (by opting in for such distribution during the registration process). Should you choose to provide your information to third parties, The Vitalsearch Company, LLC will share aspects of your information with our valued partners. Some of these transactions will include financial payment to The Vitalsearch Company, LLC for the information provided but are only undertaken with companies whose privacy practices are consistent with the principles established within this policy and with whom The Vitalsearch Company, LLC believes that a product that truly benefits our customers can be promoted. All of our partners help contribute towards many of the free services available on the The Vitalsearch Company, LLC Websites.

Although unlikely, The Vitalsearch Company, LLC may be required by law enforcement or judicial authorities to provide Personally Identifiable Information the appropriate governmental authorities. If requested by law enforcement or judicial authorities, we will provide this information upon receipt of the appropriate documentation.

Other companies that place advertising on our site may collect information about you when you view or click on their advertising or content through the use of cookies (using the same techniques as described above). Due to the way the Internet technically operates, we cannot control this collection of information - but we can control which companies are allowed to place such advertising on our site. As the consumer you should contact these advertisers or content providers that place information on the The Vitalsearch Company, LLC Network directly if you have any questions about their use of the information they potentially collect. It should be noted that anyone placing advertising on our Web sites can only collect Anonymous Information about you unless you actively provide Personally Identifiable Information to them.

Information that you provide while using products such as our Message Boards is available for all to see. Discretion should be used in entering Personally Identifiable Information within such forums, as it may be collected by third parties, and this is, for instance, a leading source of unwanted email Spam. The Vitalsearch Company, LLC does not actively associate the message content entered by our customers in the Message Boards with those customers' registration information. Our server computers will retain this information, however; and it is potentially available for distribution to third parties - most obviously law-enforcement agencies acting under subpoena power, per the terms of this section of our Privacy Policy. We do not use this information to target any advertising to our customers, nor is it ever willingly distributed to any third party, such as an advertiser, except if subpoenaed.

What choices are available to you regarding collection, use, and distribution of the information

The The Vitalsearch Company, LLC does offer you the ability to control the email communications we make to you. It is our intention to give you as much control over our relationship as possible.

First, as mentioned earlier, the consumer always has the final word on whether The Vitalsearch Company, LLC - or any Internet company - knows who you are. It is your choice to share Personally Identifiable Information with The Vitalsearch Company, LLC and we encourage you to consider only sharing information with any site on the Internet if you receive true value in exchange for that information transfer and if you respect the privacy practices of the firm.

If you do choose to share Personally Identifiable Information with The Vitalsearch Company, LLC, you can control whether we contact you or share the information with third parties, either through declarations you make at the time you share information with us. Any time information is requested from you on an our Website, you should see a link to our Privacy Policy and a clear indication of what your information distribution choices are. The Vitalsearch Company, LLC will always give you a chance to unsubscribe to any email communication from us - clear directions for doing so will appear in any email message we send to you.

At times, the The Vitalsearch Company, LLC may enter into cobranding arrangements with other companies, and if so, an opt-in question may be present for contact from these firms as well. Their opt-out features are specific to each organization, but you should never receive email from these organizations unless you have indicated that it is acceptable. All email from the The Vitalsearch Company, LLC or from cobrand partners who gain your permission to send you commercial email, will include an opportunity to opt out of future communications.

The Vitalsearch Company, LLC does reserve the right to send a one-time registration confirmation email, and infrequent Service Alert messages to its customers to inform them of specific changes that may impact their ability to use a service they have previously signed up for, regardless of email contact opt-in status. An example of a Service Alert message would be notification of the impending closing of an account that is believed to be abandoned. Finally, we also reserve the right to contact you if compelled to do so as part of a legal proceeding or if there has been a violation of our Terms of Service. The Vitalsearch Company, LLC is retaining these rights because in limited cases we feel that we may need the right to contact you as a matter of law or regarding matters which will be important to you. These rights do not allow us to contact you to market a new or existing service if you have asked us not to do so, and issuance of these types of communications are rare.

What kind of security procedures are in place to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of information under the company's control

The The Vitalsearch Company, LLC 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, and only authorized individuals have access to the information provided by our customers. Even your registration account password is encrypted before it is sent to our computers - no one in the company could tell you what your password is even if you asked! Any other particularly sensitive information, such as a customer's credit card number collected for a commerce transaction, is also encrypted prior to transmission.

You the consumer are ultimately responsible for the security of your account. As was stated above, we can't even use your password unless it has been encrypted first.

How you can correct any inaccuracies in the information

The Vitalsearch Company, LLC believes strongly in providing you with the ability to access and edit the personal information that you have provided to us. To update the information retained about you, or to deactivate your account, please visit our Member Services area.




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