Last Modified: __ 7/22/11_______
Welcome to the petMD website (the “Site”). Your privacy is important to us and this policy describes what information we collect, how we use it and how it is secured.
You have the choice of: (i) just browsing the Site, or (ii) buying products or submitting questions to Ask petMD (the “Services”). If you ask us to perform any of the Services you will be transmitting information to us that will identify you personally (“Personal Information”). Accordingly, we are committed to the following:
Collection and Security
When you transmit information from your personal computer to our servers, your information is protected by both a “firewall” (a combination of computer hardware and software that helps keep unauthorized visitors from accessing information within our computer network) and industry standard SSL (secure socket layer) encryption. Once we receive your transmission, we will take reasonable precautions to ensure its security on our systems. Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your Personal Information and privacy, we cannot guarantee or warrant the security of any information you disclose or transmit to us online and cannot be responsible for the theft, destruction, or inadvertent disclosure of your Personal Information. Additionally, your Personal Information may be stored on servers within or without the United States of America and in a jurisdiction that has data protection laws that are not as strict as those in your country.
We also log in your IP address. An IP address is a number that’s automatically assigned to your computer whenever you’re surfing the web. We collect IP addresses for purposes of system administration and to track the use of the Site. When visitors request pages from the Site, our servers log the visitors’ IP addresses. It is not our practice to link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable, which means that a visitor’s session will be logged, but the visitor remains anonymous to us. However, we reserve the right to use IP addresses to identify a visitor only when we feel it is necessary to enforce compliance with the Site’s policies or to protect our service or customers, the Site, or others.
To create a better experience for you we may also use cookies. Cookies are pieces of information that a website transfers to an individual’s hard drive for record-keeping purposes. Cookies make web-surfing easier for you by saving your preferences while you’re at the Site. We never save credit card information in cookies. The use of cookies is an industry standard -- you’ll find them at most websites. By showing how and when visitors use the Site, cookies help us see which areas are popular and which are not. Information such as the total number of visitors and pages viewed is most easily tracked with cookies. We may use the information from cookies to make improvements and updates to the Site and to tailor our services to our visitors’ needs. You always have the option of disabling cookies using your browser preferences. You can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, please be aware that some features of the Site may not function properly or may be slower if you refuse cookies.
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit petMD. The third-party advertising technology that we use on petMD uses information derived from your visits to petMD to target advertising within petMD. In addition, our advertisers may use other third-party advertising technology to target advertising on petMD or other websites. In the course of advertisements being served to you, a unique third-party cookie or cookies may be placed in your browser. In addition, petMD may use Web beacons, provided by third-party advertising companies, to help manage and optimize our online advertising. Web beacons enable petMD to recognize a browser's cookie when a browser visits this site, and to learn which banner ads bring users to our Web site. To "opt-out," please click here.
The Ask petMD Service
The Ask petMD service provides an online question and answer forum and anything submitted in posts may be read, collected, and used by others, and petMD is not responsible for it. For example, search engines may index your questions, answers, and other posts to allow them to appear in search engine results (e.g. if someone does a search on google.com, your questions, answers, and other posts on Ask petMD that relate to the search may appear in the google.com search results list). Protect your anonymity by not including your real name or any personally identifying information in your questions, answers, and other posts on Ask petMD.
Children
petMD does not knowingly collect or solicit Personal Information from anyone under the age of 13 or knowingly allow such persons to use any of the Services. If you are under 13, please do not attempt to use the Services or send any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, or email address. No one under age 13 may provide any Personal Information to petMD. In the event that we learn that we have collected Personal Information from a child under age 13 we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us here.
Use of Information
petMD uses your information to fulfill your specific requests, purchase orders and to send you purchase confirmation and other account-related information. In addition, the Personal Information you provide will allow us to tailor our advertisements to you, send you electronic messages about things including new products, features, enhancements, special offers, upgrade opportunities, contests and events of interest. You may also later choose not to receive these electronic messages.
petMD also uses personal and non-personal information, both individually and combined together, to better understand the behavior and preferences of our customers, to troubleshoot technical problems, to serve static and dynamic advertising, to enforce our Terms of Service, to ensure proper functioning of our products and services as well as to help improve them. In addition, we combine non-personal information with personal information, such as an email address, to tailor our offerings, web pages or game play experience to your preferences or interests.
We may maintain copies of your Personal Information indefinitely, or delete certain information in whole or in part if we determine, in our sole discretion, that such information violates our Terms of Use, or for any or no reason.
We may also disclose personal information to enforce legal rights and comply with the law, or to comply with an order from a government entity or other competent authority, or when we have reason to believe that a disclosure is necessary to address potential or actual injury or interference with our rights, property, operations, users or others who may be harmed or may suffer loss or damage, or when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, combat fraud and/or comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on petMD.
Changes in Ownership
We reserve the right to transfer your Personal Information in the event of a transfer of ownership of petMD or the acquisition of substantially all the assets of petMD related to the business which collected such information, such as acquisition by or merger with another company. In such an event, petMD will notify users who have provided email addresses when information about those users is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
The terms of this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will notify you of any material changes to this Privacy Policy by posting a notice on the homepage of the Site for a reasonable period of time after such changes are made that this Privacy Policy has been updated, and by changing the “Last Modified” date at the top of this Privacy Policy. We encourage you to check this page periodically for any changes. Your continued use of the Site following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.
Any questions that you may have regarding this Privacy Policy should be directed to the contact form here.