Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy governs Rural Intelligence, the website, and its mobile apps, data collection practices. Rural Intelligence is committed to bringing you information tailored to your individual needs, we recognize the importance of protecting the privacy of your personally identifiable information. In adopting this Privacy Policy, our intent is to balance our legitimate business interests in collecting and using personally identifiable information and your reasonable expectations of privacy.
What personally identifiable information do I provide to Rural Intelligence?
Rural Intelligence may ask you to provide various types of personally identifiable information to enhance your experience on our site. For example, Rural Intelligence may ask for information such as your name or e-mail address. The more information you provide, the better we are able to customize your experience. We may also ask you for other information at other times - such as when you enter a contest or participate in a promotion, when you participate in our Comments, or when you order products from Rural Intelligence. See below about “cookies” and what other information is collected.
How does Rural Intelligence use my personally identifiable information?
Personally identifiable information is collected in three areas of the site: 1) for Commenting, 2) for Contact, 3) for Advertsing and 4) for the Rural Intelligence Mailing List.
Rural Intelligence uses the personally identifiable information you provide to us in several ways. Some examples follow.
A user’s personally identifiable information may be used by Rural Intelligence for editorial purposes such as to contact you as part of an online survey. Additionally, we may also use the information provided by you to: 1) contact you with legal notices, and 2) to advise you of any material changes or additions to our Service or terms and conditions.
We reserve the right to send you offers and information through our opt-in mailing list. Further, we may send you e-mails about Rural Intelligence products, promotions, or services as well as on behalf of other companies. However, if you no longer wish to receive any of the foregoing, you may unsubscribe from the mailing list at any time from the unsubscribe link on any Rural Intelligence mailing list email.
Rural Intelligence also does research on our users’ demographics, interests and behavior based on the information you provide to us including order forms, during a promotion, as well as from our server log files or from surveys. We do this to better understand and serve our users. This research is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis and Rural Intelligence may share this aggregated data with advertisers or other businesses. In addition, under confidentiality agreements, Rural Intelligence may match user information with third party data.
If Rural Intelligence changes its use of your personally identifiable information, it will post such changes in this Privacy Policy.
Do other companies or people have access to personally identifiable information provided to Rural Intelligence?
When you are on an area of Rural Intelligence and are asked for personally identifiable information our policy is that we will not transfer that personally identifiable information unless notice is given prior to transfer. If you do not want your information to be shared, you can choose not to allow the transfer by not using that particular service or by expressing this preference, if requested. Additional information about personally identifiable information follows.
Promotions: Promotions that run on Rural Intelligence may be sponsored by companies other than Rural Intelligence or may be co-sponsored by Rural Intelligence and another company. Some or all personally identifiable information provided by you during a promotion may be shared with the sponsor. If information will be shared, we will disclose such sharing prior to the transfer. You can decide not to participate in the promotion if you don’t want your personally identifiable information to be shared. In certain circumstances, you may not be able to participate in a particular promotion if you chose not to share personally identifiable information.
Advertisers and Links: Rural Intelligence advertisers, or Web sites that have links on our site, may also collect personally identifiable information directly from you. The information practices of companies collecting data on our site or Web sites linked to Rural Intelligence are not covered by this Privacy Policy.
We do not control the privacy policies of our advertisers, sponsors or other sites or businesses to which we provide hyperlinks or access. Please visit the sites of these businesses to review their privacy policies.
Rural Intelligence users should also be aware that, when you voluntarily disclose personal information in Comment areas, that information may be collected by others and may result in unsolicited messages from others. Your email address will be collected during the commenting process for internal moderation purposes only. It will not be available to any external parties or displayed in the comments.
Except as stated in this Privacy Policy or at the time of collection, a user’s personally identifiable information will not be transferred to a party outside Rural Intelligence unless notice is given at the time of collection or prior to transfer. Rural Intelligence may also disclose personally indentifiable information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our User Agreement or may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) Rural Intelligence’s rights or property, other Rural Intelligence users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities.
Data Security: We have in place physical, electronic and managerial procedures to protect the information we collect online. However, as effective as these measures are, no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that the information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the internet.
What information do web servers collect?
Web servers serving Rural Intelligence automatically collect certain non-personally identifiable information, such as which pages each user visits and the domain name (e.g., earthlink.net) of visitors. This information is used for various purposes including internal review, to tailor information to individual visitors, and for traffic audits. We also provide this information about our users on an aggregated, anonymous basis to our advertisers.
What are cookies and how does Rural Intelligence use them?
Rural Intelligence places a “cookie” on the browser of a Rural Intelligence user’s computer to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie can be used to tell when your computer has contacted a Web site; we may also use the information for editorial purposes and for other purposes such as measuring certain traffic patterns. We may also use cookies to track your progress and number of entries in some of our promotions and contests. You may opt-out of the cookies delivered by Rural Intelligence by changing the setting on your browser. Please be aware that this will disable all cookies delivered to your browser, not just the ones delivered by Rural Intelligence.
Our advertisers may contract with a third-party service to host their ads. In this case, an ad serving vendor contacts the advertisers’ hosting service for a particular advertisement. In that case, an independent cookie may be used by the third-party service. We do not have a mechanism to allow visitors to opt-out of cookies from such vendors.
Kids under 13: Do not send any information about yourself to us - including information like your name, address or e-mail address. In general, we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under 13. If, in limited circumstances, we do knowingly collect personally identifiable information from a child under the age of 13, we will do so only with verified parental consent prior to collection. In the event that we learn that we have collected any personal information from a child under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information from our database as quickly as possible.
Technology on the Internet is developing at a rapid pace, and we need to maintain our flexibility in the online arena. If we need to change our policy in the future, we will post these changes as soon as they go into effect.
Is there anything else I should know about my privacy and Rural Intelligence?
All information sharing on Rural Intelligence is optional and done at your own risk. Care should be taken whenever disclosing personal information online. Any information you disclose voluntarily on our comments pages is obviously public. We cannot control the actions of our site users and advise you to use discretion in sharing information about yourself on the internet. The norm on the internet is to sign comments or blogs with a pseudonym. At Rural Intelligence, we strongly encourage users to sign comments with their real names, town and state. We believe it promotes civility, responsibility, and neighborliness. But, as we have no mechanism for enforcing this rule, it is optional. There are rare circumstances when anonymity is appropriate, even a kindness, and in those situations, we encourage it. Should a user invade the privacy of others, spread incendiary misinformation, malicious rumors, or lies, or engage in profanity, we reserve the right to eliminate the offending comments.