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This Overall Privacy Statement verifies that P18.com is a member of the TRUSTe program and is in compliance with TRUSTe privacy principles. This statement discloses the privacy practices for the entire Web site.
TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit initiative whose mission is to build users' trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the principles of disclosure and informed consent. Because this site wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has agreed to disclose its information practices and have its privacy practices reviewed and audited for compliance by TRUSTe. When you visit a Web site displaying the TRUSTe mark, you can expect to be notified of:
- What information this site gathers/tracks about you
- What this site does with the information it gathers/tracks
- With whom this site shares the information it gathers/tracks
- This site's opt-out policy
- This site's policy on correcting and updating personally identifiable information
- This site's policy on deleting or deactivating your name from our database
Questions regarding this statement should be directed to the P18.com site coordinator at techsupport@P18.com, or TRUSTe www.truste.org for clarification.
Questions
P18.com is a member of TRUSTe and complies with TRUSTe privacy principles.
What is P18.com?
P18.com is your contact management service on the Web. It frees you from the time consuming task of maintaining your address book. When one of your contacts updates their information, your personal address book is updated automatically. When you change your information, all your contacts are automatically notified. P18.com also provides a calendar service, birthday notification, email reminders, and much more.
What information does this site gather/track?
In order for P18.com's contact management services to be valuable to you and to your friends, P18.com asks for basic contact information such as your name, email address, your home and/or business address and telephone numbers, your birthday and your interests.
How private is my contact information?
P18.com ensures the confidentiality of all information you provide about yourself and your contacts. We will not share your information with anyone without your explicit permission. You can individually adjust which portions of information your contacts can see. For example, you can let a close contact of yours see all your information, while restricting a casual colleague to just your professional information. When someone adds you as a contact, they cannot see any of your information until you permit them to do so by linking back to them. When you reciprocate the link (link back to them), you set their permissions by choosing which of the following five types of information they can see:
- Crossing Paths: Contacts with this permission will be notified when your travel plans bring you within 25 miles of where they are. (Every city in the P18.com database is associated with a latitude and longitude.) If one of your contacts lives in Chicago and you give them Crossing Paths permission, every time you tell P18.com about a trip to Chicago you may choose to let that person know. When you enter a trip, you will be asked to confirm that you would like your contacts notified that you will be nearby.
- Birthdays: Contacts with this permission will be notified when your birthday is nearing. They can never see the year of your birth, only the day and month.
- Friends of Friends: If you grant Friends of Friends permission to one of your contacts who has in turn granted Friends of Friends permission to one of his or her contacts, that person (your contact's contact) will find you when he or she does a Friends of Friends search in your city or within one of your groups. If you do a Friends of Friends search, you will be able to see your contact's contact's name. Friends of friends cannot see any of your information, only your name.
- Personal: Contacts with this permission will be able to see your email address, home phone number, home address, URL, and spouse's name. They will also be notified when you change or add a home phone or address.
- Professional: Contacts with this permission will be able to see your email address, office address, office fax, company name, title, department, and administrative assistant's name. They will also be notified when you change or add an office phone or address.
Who controls and updates my information?
You control your information and who sees it. P18.com members can set for each contact in their Contacts List which of the five types of information they wish to share (Crossing Paths, Birthdays, Friends of Friends, Personal, and Professional). This enables users of P18.com's services to build their lists of contacts while maintaining their privacy.
How safe is my contact information?
Our database is secured behind an electronic firewall created by a specialist who designed and implemented a similar system for the Federal Reserve. This firewall prevents the theft or corruption of your information by computer hackers, and our computers physically reside in a secured location monitored around the clock by security personnel. You log on to P18.com using a confidential and unique password, ensuring that you and only you have access to your account.
How does P18.com use cookies?
Cookies are pieces of information that a Web site transfers to an individual's computer for record keeping purposes. They are saved on your hard drive for future reference by the site. Cookies make Web-surfing easier for you by saving your passwords and preferences and by speeding site performance. The use of cookies is an industry standard and most major Web sites, such as those of Microsoft and Netscape, use them to enhance their services. P18.com's limited use of cookies ensures that once you have closed your Web browser, someone else who uses the machine after you will not be able to automatically log on as you. P18.com does not use cookies to verify your identity unless you explicitly choose the automatic login option. Then P18.com writes a cookie to your hard drive that will automatically identify you to the site each time you visit.
Does P18.com sell user information to other firms?
P18.com does not sell or otherwise distribute your information to direct marketers or any other third parties without your specific consent. As a free service that sells selected advertising space, P18.com does reserve the right to collect and distribute aggregate information on its total user base (age distribution, gender, geography, etc.), but specific member information is kept completely confidential.
Is P18.com a source of unsolicited email?
No. We do send you automatic notification of changes your private contacts have made to their information. You can determine how often you would like to receive these email notifications by going to My Profile and clicking on the "Email Updates" selection. If you have received a message from P18.com but don't recall signing up, you have likely signed up through one of our co-branding partners (e.g., Geocities, PlanetDirect, Lycos). If another P18.com member sends you an unsolicited message which violates the P18.com usage agreement (e.g. of a commercial nature, indecent, or harassing), please forward that message to abuse@P18.com. It is also possible that another user may add you to an email list. You can remove yourself from an unwanted email list by simply blocking the person who added your name. That, in turn, breaks the link that put you on the email list.
What is a link?
When you and another person agree to share contact information, you have created a "reciprocated link" in your Contacts List. When a person with whom you share such a link updates his or her own information, the record for that person in your Contacts List is updated. You may also receive email notification of the change, if you wish.
Why are people linking to me?
Occasionally, members you do not know may link to you. You are under no obligation to return the link, and if you do not explicitly add the member as a contact they will be unable to see any of your information. You will be able to see their information, however, and you may receive informative updates in your email, depending on the permissions the other member has granted you. Should this prove annoying, you can block the member by clicking on their name in your address book and then clicking on the "Delete this contact" button. This will break the link entirely.
Who can see information that I export to P18.com?
You, and only you. You are the only person who can see your contact information, including anything that you export from an electronic address book (such as Microsoft Outlook or the Palm Pilot) to P18.com. No one else may access your P18.com Contacts List.
Am I putting my contacts on a mailing list?
No. P18.com will never contact your contacts except at your explicit request. Your contacts' information is completely private and accessible only to you.
Can I export some contacts and not others?
Yes. You always have the option to select contacts that you do not want to export to P18.com from your electronic address book.
How do I remove my name from P18.com?
To change your account status, log in to P18.com, click on "My Profile," and Click on "Account Status". There you can choose to freeze your account or, if necessary, permanently delete it. If you freeze your account, you will no longer receive email notifications from P18.com, but you will still be able to access P18.com via the P18.com Web site. At any time, you may unfreeze your account and you will begin receiving email notifications again. If necessary, you may choose to delete your account entirely. If you choose to delete your account, all your records and links will be destroyed. NOTE: Deleting your account is permanent and irreversible.
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