Village Voice Media

Parent of SF Weekly and sfweekly.com

Village Voice Media respects your privacy. Our privacy policy for this site follows, but the bottom line is this: Village Voice Media will not sell or share any of your personal information to a third party unless you say it's okay. Village Voice Media will gather personally identifiable information about you only when you provide it voluntarily for specific purposes such as posting an ad or signing up for an e-mail newsletter.

Policy effective as of September 25, 2006

Personally Identifiable Information

We do track how our visitors use this site so that we can see what people like and don't like. We also analyze and aggregate information about use patterns and share the aggregated data with our advertisers (for example, we keep track of how many users see and click on particular advertisements). We may also collect personal information about you via registration for contests, surveys and newsletters, which may include contests, surveys and newsletters for certain third parties. We will not, however, release your name, e-mail address or any other personal information to anyone else outside Village Voice Media unless we have your consent, we are under a legal order to do so, or there is an emergency involving danger to a person or property. This means that we will not provide our advertisers or anyone else outside Village Voice Media with any information specific to you unless we have your consent. If you chose to provide your personally identifiable information for the purposes of a third-party contest, survey, or newsletter, you consent shall be deemed to be given for the release of your personally identifiable information with regard to that third party only, in addition to Village Voice Media. The only Village Voice Media employees or consultants allowed access to personal information about you are those who need to have access. Any employee or consultant who violates our privacy and security policies is subject to disciplinary action, including possible termination or prosecution.

We occasionally have third party agents, subsidiaries, affiliates, and joint ventures that perform functions on our behalf, such as credit card processing, shipping or stocking orders, providing customer service, etc. They have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, and are contractually obligated to maintain the confidentiality and security of the data. They are restricted from using or altering this data in anyway other than to provide the requested services to the Site.

Please remember that any information you share in public area, such as message boards becomes public, and therefore this Privacy Policy does not apply to any information you choose to make public. Please be careful about what you disclose and do not post any personal information that you expect to keep private.

Cookies

"Cookies" are small text files that allow Web sites to store and retrieve information about you from your computer system. Village Voice Media does serve cookies to track individual site usage for later aggregation. But we do not use cookies in order to retrieve any information from your computer other than information originally sent in a Village Voice Media cookie, such as a user code. We have no control over whether and how our advertisers use cookies that originate from their website. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, but you may not be able to take full advantage of our site's features, and we recommend that you leave them turned on.

IP address tracking: All computers and servers on the Internet use IP addresses to recognize and communicate with each other. We collect IP addresses to administer and analyze our site and report aggregate, non-personal information (such as how many visitors we have). When you call up our site on your computer, our servers enter the IP address of that computer into a log. To maintain our users' anonymity, we do not associate IP addresses with records containing personal information.

We do not and cannot use cookies or IP address tracking to retrieve personal information from your computer.

Your Letter to the Editor Contributions

As with our print editions, we insist that you supply your real name, daytime telephone number or e-mail address. That is because we may need to contact you, and because your identity may be important to understand your point of view. If you send us such commentary, we reserve the right to publish it in print or display it on this site in full or in edited form. To protect your privacy, however, we will withhold your name and address upon request, both in print and on-line.

Communication from Village Voice Media

From time to time, we may send you information with announcements and updates about the site and Village Voice Media and our partners. Any ongoing communication you may receive from Village Voice Media via e-mail, such as newsletters, subscriptions, contest results, survey inquiries, etc. may be terminated via a simple "opt out" procedure. You need only reply to the communication with the word "unsubscribe" (without the quotation marks) in the body of your e-mail response and your name will be removed from that mailing list.

Giveaways and Contests

If you sign up to be eligible for a giveaway or contest on our Site, your information will be shared with the advertiser or sponsor of that giveaway or contest for one-time use to notify you if you have won. To the extent the giveaway or contest has its own terms that conflict with the terms of this Privacy Policy, the terms of the giveaway or contest shall govern. Personally identifiable information will be collected only if you voluntarily submit it to our sponsors or us. We will not use your personally identifiable information for any purpose other than the administration of the giveaway or contest without your permission.

Children

Village Voice Media does not orient this site toward children under the age of 13 or target them as an audience, nor does it screen them from using the site. Some of the material on this site is for mature audiences, and parents and guardians should take responsibility for monitoring their children's use. Children under the age of 13 should not use this site. Village Voice Media does not collect or distribute information indicating whether a user is a child.

Links to Other Sites

This site provides links and pointers to Web sites maintained by other organizations. Village Voice Media provides these links as a convenience to users, but it does not operate, control or endorse such sites. Village Voice Media also disclaims any responsibility for the information on those sites and any products or services offered there, and cannot vouch for the privacy policies of such sites. Village Voice Media does not make any warranties or representations that any linked sites (or even this site) will function without error or interruption, that defects will be corrected, or that the sites and their servers are free of viruses and other problems that can harm your computer.

E-Commerce and Our Secure Server

All commerce transactions that take place on this site are processed through our secure server in order to make every reasonable effort to insure that your personal information is protected. Any transactions that take place on other sites that have link from our site are not necessarily handled in this fashion. Village Voice Media disclaims any responsibility for transactions conducted on those sites and cannot vouch for the security of the information submitted in those transactions. (This section posted and effective as of October 25, 2001)

Policy Changes

The privacy policy is effective as of September 25, 2006. We may need to change it from time to time as technology and the nature of the Web keep evolving. We will endeavor to post any changes to this policy as soon as they go into effect. By visiting the Site, you are accepting the practices describe in this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, please do not use the Site and exit immediately. We reserve the right to modify or amend the terms of this Privacy Policy from time to time without notice at any time. Your continued use of the Site following the posting of changes to these terms will mean that you accept those changes.

Governing Law/Sale of Company

Our Site is published in the United States. U.S. law shall govern in any and all disputes, including privacy or defamation issues or otherwise.

In the event of a sale of SF Weekly or a sale of substantially all SF Weekly's assets, the email database and all user information shall accrue to the new owners. Your personally identifiable information will continue to be governed by this Privacy Policy, as it may be amended from time to time.