Privacy Policy

Information Collected

We collect personal information when you voluntarily provide it to us or authorize us to collect it on your behalf. The types of personal information collected may include your full name, e-mail address, website URL, personal website URL, “screen name” and any other information that would allow FoodPyramid.com to identify you, or contact you, upon your consent.

We may ask you to provide certain other information through surveys, which will enable us to personalize and improve our services. This may include demographic data such as age, gender, ZIP code, preferences and interests.

We may receive and store any information you enter on our Site or provide to us in any other way. The personal information you provide may be used for attribution to comments you post to the Site, to operate and improve the Site and to better deliver our services.

We collect personal and non-personal information to customize content and advertising, fulfill your requests, improve our services and contact you.

Opinions and Polls

Occasionally, you may be asked to give your opinion when you visit our site. We use information from opinion polls to better understand the needs of our users and to gather information about health care trends and issues.

Contests, Sweepstakes and Surveys

If you enter a contest, sweepstake or fill out a survey sponsored by FoodPyramid.com and/or one of our partners, we may ask you to provide additional information or answer certain questions in order to participate in a promotion. We may contact you in connection with a particular contest or sweepstakes in order to update you regarding your status, administer the promotion, let you know that a promotion has ended, and for other prize fulfillment needs or contest and sweepstakes related messages.

Some or all of the information collected during a contest, sweepstake or survey may in some cases be disclosed publicly. It may also be shared with a co-sponsor or a provider of prizes in order to update you of your status, administer the promotion, inform you that a promotion has ended, or for other prize fulfillment needs as indicated on the entry form. We will include a notice at the time of data collection if your data will be disclosed or shared.

Log Info

When you visit our site, our servers will automatically collect log information. This information may include your Web page request, Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We collect log information so that we can properly administer our system and gather aggregate information about how our site is being used, including the pages visitors are viewing. Our Web advertising partner(s) may use your IP address to determine your approximate geographic location in order to provide you with location-relevant advertising.

Cookies

We, and our advertisers, may collect anonymous information about your use of our site through cookies. The cookie does not tell us who you are. Only you can tell us that.

The information collected by cookies helps us generate customized content and also allows us to statistically monitor how many people are using our site and for what purpose. For contests or sweepstakes, we may use cookies in order to track your progress and the number of entries in some promotions. For polls, we may use cookies to help ensure that an individual can’t vote more than once on a particular question or issue.

Our Web advertising partners may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser in order to control the sequence of advertisements you see and to make sure you don’t see the same ad too often. They do not use information collected by these cookies in its advertising network. Such ads will be targeted to you based only on the non-personal information that is automatically transmitted on the Internet, such as information collected in our Web logs and the approximate geographic location of your computer.

We may also have agreements with companies, sometimes called “Ad Networks,” that serve advertising on behalf of third parties. These Ad Networks may place or recognize a unique cookie, sometimes called a “third party cookie,” on your browser. Ad Networks use cookies to understand Web usage patterns of people who see advertisements, to control the sequence of advertisements you see, to provide you with the most relevant advertising, and to make sure you don’t see the same ad too often. Ad Networks may connect information about pages you visited on our site with information about pages you visit on other sites and show you advertising based on this combined information.

Any advertisements served by Google, Inc., and affiliated companies may be controlled using cookies. These cookies allow Google to display ads based on your visits to this site and other sites that use Google advertising services. DoubleClick DART Cookies is used by Google. Google, as a third party vendor uses cookies to serve ads on your site. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet.

Option for Cookie Management

Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL – http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html

Your browser software can be set to reject all cookies or to accept cookies only from our Site. Most browsers offer instructions on how to reset the browser to reject cookies in the “Help” section of the toolbar.

Web Beacons

We – and our advertisers – also use Web beacons, sometimes called single-pixel GIFs, which momentarily direct your browser to a server other than FoodPyramid.com in a way that may not be apparent to you. Web beacons are used to count users who have visited specific pages and determine which emails have been opened and/or acted upon when we send HTML-formatted email messages. We do not link any identifying information to Web beacons.

Personal Information obtained from Third Parties

When we associate information that we obtain from third parties with personal information that we have collected under this policy, we will treat the acquired information like the information that we collected ourselves. We will not share information that we obtain from third parties in personally identifiable form. However, we may share aggregated, non-personal information, as described in this policy – that may include information we obtained from third parties in a form that does not permit you to be identified.

Agents and Contractors

Contractors may have access to your personal information in the course of assisting the operation of our business and providing products or services to you. These contractors include vendors and suppliers that provide us with technology, services and/or content for the operation and maintenance of our site. Access to your personal information by these contractors is limited to the information reasonably necessary for the contractor to perform his/her limited function. Contractors have an obligation under their contracts with us to keep your information confidential and to comply with our privacy and security policies.

Aggregated, Non-Personal Information

We may share aggregated information about you with third parties. This is information that is combined with the non-personal information of other users and does not allow you to be identified or contacted. Depending on the circumstances, we may or may not charge third parties for this aggregated information. We also may not limit the third parties’ use of the aggregated information.

E-mail Communications

E-mail communication that you send to us via the e-mail links on our site may be shared with a Customer Care representative, employee or the person that is most likely to be able to address your inquiry. If you provide personal health information in your email, it will be used only for the purposes of answering your email.

E-mail Newsletters and Alerts

If you subscribe to our newsletter or have opted to receive an email alert when there are new posts to the Site, and decide that you no longer wish to receive it, you can unsubscribe by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email. If for some reason that function is not available please contact us by email and we will unsubscribe you.

Personal Information Protection

We maintain reasonable standards of security and confidentiality and store personal information collected in a database. However, while we employ reasonable standards of security – no security system is impenetrable. For most Internet sites, it is possible that third parties may unlawfully intercept or access information that you transmit. As such, we cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that information you supply won’t be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet.

You may always decline to provide personal information to us and/or refuse cookies in your browser, although some features or services may not function properly as a result.

A Special Note About Children 

Children are not eligible to use our web site and services and we ask that minors (under the age of 13) do not submit any personal information to us. If you are a minor, you can use this site only in conjunction with permission and guidance from your parents or guardians.

Privacy Policy Changes

We retain the discretion to amend or modify this Privacy Policy from time to time. You agree to review this Privacy Policy periodically to ensure that you are aware of any changes. Your continued access or use of the website and/or the services shall be deemed your conclusive acceptance of any amendments and/or modifications.