Privacy Policy

Decibel Magazine’s site privacy policy

We at Decibel value your personal privacy. We respect the personal nature of the information you provide us on our web site and acknowledge the importance of protecting this information. In adopting this privacy policy, our intent is to balance our legitimate business interests in collecting and using your personal information with your reasonable expectations of privacy. The policy may be revised or updated at any time and we encourage you to check back often to ensure that you are familiar with the most recent version and the terms of our policy.

When your info is collected:

You may provide personal information to Decibel in one of three ways: (1) by sharing personal information when you post comments on our posts or stories, (2) by sharing personal information when you provide tips to our news and editorial departments, or (3) by sharing contact information when you choose to opt-in to participate in contests or giveaways. We may also ask for other information at other times, but at no time will you be required to share any personal information to gain complete access to our site.

In addition to personal information — which may include, but is not limited to, your name, street and e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers — we may also collect information that is in no way personally identifiable. This may include your internet protocol (IP) addresses, the operating system you are working on, the internet browser you are using, the domain name of your internet service provider, and the web sites you visit directly before and after your visit to Decibel.

Why Decibel uses your information:

The more we know about you, the better we are able to customize our web site to suit your personal preferences and interests. The e-mail address you provide may be used by Decibel for any reason, such as contacting you for editorial purposes.

To maintain a site that is free of charge and does not require registration, we display advertisements on our web site. We also use the information you give us to help our advertisers target the audience they want to reach. At no time does any party other than Decibel have access to your personally identifiable information, and you will never be contacted by any party other than Decibel. The only exceptions to the foregoing are that we may disclose personally identifiable information (i) in response to legal process, for example, in response to a court order or subpoena, (ii) in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take actions regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of another person, violations of our terms of use, or as otherwise required by law, or (iii) in the event we are acquired by or merged with another company.

Non-personally identifiable information (such as stated above) may be shared in aggregate form with our advertisers or marketing partners but your personally identifiable information will never be disclosed to them.

How Decibel uses your information:

Information about your visit to Decibel, such as number of times you have viewed an ad (but not your name, address, or other personal information), is used to serve ads to you on this site. And, in the course of serving advertisements to this site, third party advertisers may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser.

We have also contracted with a number of advertising network partners to monitor certain pages of our website and RSS feeds for the purpose of reporting website and RSS traffic, statistics, advertisement “click-throughs,” and/or other activities on our website. Where authorized by us, these advertising network partners may use cookies, web beacons, and/or other monitoring technologies to compile anonymous statistics about our website visitors. No personally identifiable information is collected by or transferred to these network partners.

Third parties and web sites that have links on our site may also collect or use information about you. The information practices of other companies or people that Decibel does not employ or manage are not covered by this privacy statement.

We partner with third party ad networks and allow such networks to use cookies to collect non-personally identifiable data for targeting and serving ads. Users can opt-out of this behavioral targeting by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative’s consumer page at http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.

Additional information: 

Any information you disclose voluntarily on our comments pages or in any forums we may develop in the future becomes public information. We cannot control the actions of our site users and advise you to use your discretion in sharing information about yourself on the internet. All information sharing is optional and done so at your own risk. Privacy is a very personal matter and we encourage you to be careful and responsible when disclosing personal information online.