Privacy Policy
This statement discloses the privacy practices of AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. and its WeatherBug properties. These include the weatherbug.com, and aws.com, top level domains, including the websites http://www.weatherbug.com, http://www.aws.com, and the WeatherBug, WeatherBug Plus and WeatherBug Alert desktop applications. When you visit an AWS website, you can expect to be notified of:
What is our Privacy Philosophy?
What Personally Identifiable information is collected?
What is the Privacy Policy for minors?
What organization is collecting the information?
With whom may the information be shared?
What choices are available to you regarding collection, use, and distribution of the information?
AWS is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to build users' trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. This privacy statement covers the site www.weatherbug.com and www.aws.com. Because this website wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has agreed to disclose its information practices and have its privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe.
Questions regarding this statement should be directed, via e-mail, to [email protected] If we have not responded to your inquiry in a timely manner, or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, please contact us at 1-800-544-4429. [ 12410 Milestone Center Drive, Suite 300, Germantown, Maryland 20876.] If you do not receive acknowledgment of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, you should then contact TRUSTe http://www.truste.org/consumers/watchdog_complaint.php. TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with the website to resolve your concerns. To return to the WeatherBug home page, please use the "Back" button on your browser.
What is our Privacy Philosophy?
The Internet is rapidly changing the way all of us communicate and interact with each other. While the Internet allows each of us access to more information and services than ever before, these new online activities raise new challenges, such as the privacy issues addressed in this policy. WeatherBug.com is committed to working with public policy organizations, industry groups, and government institutions to understand and address these challenges as they arise. Most importantly, we believe that having a relationship with our customers that is founded on trust is good business. Any feedback you would like to provide to help us better meet your expectations in this area is welcomed. Read our Bill of Rights.
What Personal Identification information is collected?
WeatherBug.com wants to make your online experience satisfying and safe. Our data collection policies allow you to choose how much personal information to provide to us, and to control how we use that information. Our goal is to provide you with a satisfying online experience while allowing you to control your privacy. WeatherBug.com collects information online primarily to make it easier and more rewarding for you to use our services. When you register, you will be asked at various times to provide information such as your name, email address, and/or information about what you like and do not like. We request this information to provide our strongest value to you - a personalized online experience. Customers who personalize our service come back more often - and it's the customers that visit us often who make us successful - so we do everything we can to make WeatherBug.com your service with your name on it and to give you just the content you want.
Information collected online is often defined as being either anonymous or personally identifiable:
Anonymous Information refers to information that cannot be tied back to a specific individual. For instance, we may know that 10,000 people visit this Privacy Policy today, but we do not necessarily know their names, where they live, or their date of birth. What we collect from transactions such as this constitutes anonymous information. Some of the individuals who access our services decline to use the personalization features that are available to them, and therefore those individuals are anonymous to us and the data we collect is similarly anonymous information.
Personally Identifiable Information refers to information that tells us specifically who you are, such as your name, e-mail address, mailing address. We also ask you for demographic information such as ZIP Code and year of birth. In many cases we need this information to provide the personalized or enhanced service that you have requested. We hope that, like many of our customers, you will find it beneficial to judiciously provide Personally Identifiable Information to WeatherBug.com so that we may provide more valuable free content and products to you.
If you make a purchase via the WeatherBug e-store, the following Personally Identifiable Information, both bill-to and ship-to, will be collected as part of your purchase for the purposes of processing your transaction: name, address, city, state, ZIP, phone, fax, as well as, credit card name, credit card number, credit card expire date.
If you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for your friend’s name and email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site. AWS stores this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email and tracking the success of our referral program.
Your friend may contact us at [email protected] to request that we remove this information from our database.
The amount of Personally Identifiable Information that you choose to disclose to WeatherBug.com is completely up to you. The only way we know something about you personally is if you register for a personalized service or promotion. In other words, we will know Personally Identifiable Information about you only if you choose to share this type of information with us.
When you surf the Internet, your Internet browser (such as Netscape Navigator® or Microsoft Internet Explorer) automatically transmits some information to WeatherBug.com every time you access content on one of our sites. Examples of such information include the URL of the Web page you were just on (known as the "Refer"), the IP (or Internet Protocol) address of the computer you are using, or the browser version you are using to access our site. All of this information is collected by WeatherBug.com and is used to help improve our offerings to you. For instance, we use this information to determine the fastest and most concise method possible for you to download the WeatherBug executable file to your computer - simplifying the entire download process.
When using the WeatherBug online application, the application will make frequent http calls back to our servers to provide you with the most current live weather conditions, weather information and alerts. During these events, no Personally Identifiable Information is being shared or transmitted.
In general, the downloadable WeatherBug desktop application:
- DOES NOT collect Personally Identifiable Information off your computer, the only information collected is during the installation process which allows us to personalize our content for your specific area, or to enable us to comply with certain laws (such as COPPA).;
- DOES NOT initiate downloads or installations without your approval; and
- DOES NOT track surfing habits or present advertising based on your online activities.
To enable many of the features available within the AWS sites, we will assign "cookies" to your Internet browser (such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer). A cookie is a small text file that contains a unique identification number stored on your computer. Cookies by themselves cannot be used to find out the identity of any user. This unique identification number automatically identifies your browser - but not you - to our server computers whenever you interact on one of our Internet domains. When you visit our site, a cookie is read by our server computers. Every Web page that you access that includes advertising or content served from WeatherBug.com will have the contents of your cookie reported in our server logs. But only when you agree to provide Personally Identifiable Information directly to a AWS branded service, such as through registration, will we be able to know anything about you other than the random number that our server computers originally assign to your browser.
There is a lot of confusion about cookies, how they are used, and what they can do. Cookies only contain information that the server computer "knew" in the first place, and can only be read by the serving domain that placed them. For instance, Yahoo! utilizes cookies, but AWS servers can't read their contents nor can Yahoo!'s servers read ours. Cookies are an essential part of how the Internet works today, and allow server computers to recognize your computer's browser when you return. If you have ever gone to a Web page that automatically provides personalized content without you having to "sign in," such as your own stock portfolio, this is almost certainly being accomplished with a cookie. Since cookies are only text files, they cannot "run" on your computer and have no ability to search your computer for other information, or transmit it to anyone.
Cookies are part of the technology implemented by your Web browser. But don't just take our word for it - read what the companies who wrote the browsers have to say!
For Netscape, please visit:
http://about.aol.com/aolnetwork/beacons.html
For Microsoft, please visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/info/cookies.mspx
We employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons or tracking pixels), that help us better manage content on our site by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We do not tie the information gathered by clear gifs to our customers’ personally identifiable information.
We use clear gifs in our HTML-based emails to let us know which emails have been opened by recipients. This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of certain communications and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. If you would like to opt-out of these emails, please contact us at [email protected].
What is the Privacy Policy for minors?
We will never knowingly request Personally Identifiable Information from anyone under the age of 13.
What organization is collecting the information?
The data you provide WeatherBug.com is collected by AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. WeatherBug.com is a wholly owned-subsidiary of this corporation. Click here to find information about AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. http://www.aws.com
Our services have been designed to enable WeatherBug.com to provide hyper-local, personally relevant weather related content to those customers who wish to receive it. The majority of the services that are provided for free through WeatherBug.com are the result of advertising revenues. Our ability to provide enhanced services and content to our customers is dependent on our ability to provide venues for our advertising partners that reach specific demographic segments of our customer base. Generally, advertisers have little interest in reaching a specific customer of our services - and as a matter of policy we provide no mechanism for an advertiser to reach you or any other specific customer. Instead, our advertising partners have the need to reach customers who share common demographic characteristics such as a specific gender or age range. For instance, certain products, such as sporting goods, may be purchased more often by men then by women, and therefore when advertising those types of products, the advertiser would prefer to target their messages just to men. The better job WeatherBug.com does in providing a mechanism for advertisers to reach specific sub-segments of our users, the more revenue we can generate from advertising and that, ultimately, is what allows you to get the free content that is available from WeatherBug.com.
Most importantly, at no time is your Personally Identifiable Information used to determine what advertising you receive nor do we use it to determine what type of advertising any other customer of WeatherBug.com will receive.
Below is a description of the uses of the information that we collect and how our visitors and advertisers benefit from these actions:
We provide personalized content in the form of weather conditions, forecasts, storm warnings, camera images, cool links and more to our users. We pay attention to what our customers do and do not use on our service and modify our content appropriately. We match the patterns of usage that our consumers exhibit on any website where we serve advertising to create anonymous profiles about our customers. The creation of an anonymous profile allows WeatherBug.com to statistically model the demographic characteristics of a customer, without ever knowing that customer's name or any other Personally Identifiable Information about them. These anonymous profiles are used to target advertising - primarily banners - to those customers, both on the WeatherBug.com domain and any of the other Internet domains where we serve advertising. Through the use of anonymous profiles, WeatherBug.com can serve advertising to our customers that is more likely to be for products they would want, and sell that advertising for a higher price. This is essential to our ability to provide high quality content to our customers for free.
WeatherBug.com never matches "Who you are" with "Where you've been" on the Internet because we do not use personal data characteristics such as your name, address or phone number to create these anonymous profiles but rather use primary demographic characteristics such as your age or gender. Finally, anonymous profiles present no privacy risk to our customers because they are worthless to third parties. Since any potential third party would be unable to read the cookies that we set on our domains, only WeatherBug.com can create value from these anonymous profiles.
We develop summary - but not individual - reports for our advertisers. An example of a summary report might be "12,000 people clicked on Advertisement 'X' today, and of those people, 35% had previously indicated they had an interest in sports." Our advertisers, who make it possible for you to use WeatherBug.com for free, need this information to determine how effective their advertising investments are. We never tell our advertisers who it was that saw or clicked on their advertisements, unless you have specifically told us it is acceptable to do so.
With whom may the information be shared?
If you are providing us Personally Identifiable Information, it will only be used within the AWS, Inc Internet domains unless you choose to allow third party data sharing (by opting in for such distribution during the registration process). Should you choose to provide your information to third parties, WeatherBug.com will share aspects of your information with our valued partners. All of our partners help contribute towards many of the free services available on the WeatherBug.com.
We use an outside shipping company to fulfill orders, and a credit card processing company to bill you for goods and services purchased from our estore. These companies do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any other purposes.
Other companies that place advertising on our site may collect information about you when you view or click on their advertising or content through the use of cookies (using the same techniques as described above). Due to the way the Internet technically operates, we cannot control this collection of information - but we can control which companies are allowed to place such advertising on our site. You should contact these advertisers or content providers that place information on WeatherBug.com directly if you have any questions about their use of the information they potentially collect. It should be noted that anyone placing advertising on our websites can only collect Anonymous Information about you unless you actively provide Personally Identifiable Information to them. In some cases, we may allow third party advertising companies to place cookies and Web Beacons on the sites’ Web pages.
Our server computers will retain whatever Personally Identifiable Information you have provided to us, and may be provided to third parties - most obviously -law-enforcement agencies acting under subpoena power, per the terms of this section of our Privacy Policy. Although unlikely, WeatherBug.com may be required by law enforcement or judicial authorities to provide Personally Identifiable Information to appropriate governmental authorities. If requested by law enforcement or judicial authorities, we will provide this information upon receipt of the appropriate documentation. We do not use this information to target any advertising to our customers, nor is it ever willingly distributed to any third party, such as an advertiser, except if subpoenaed.
On occasion, WeatherBug.com may offer affiliates the opportunity to host the WeatherBug application for download, and to receive branding or other consideration in return for helping us increase the number of users for our product(s). In some cases, if you have downloaded the WeatherBug application from an affiliate, the registration information that you provide may be shared with the affiliate. You will be advised prior to registering whether the information will be shared, and if so whether this is a mandatory condition of the download. Please check the affiliate's own Privacy Policy to determine their information distribution policies.
Finally, AWS does not control the information collection and distribution policies on Internet domains other than AWS Internet domains.
If you choose to upload photograph(s), participate in blogs, chat rooms or other forums, on the WeatherBug community section, we will collect the Personally Identifiable Information that you wish to share with us. This may include: name, location where the photo was taken and ZIP Code where the photo was taken. If you have participated in the WeatherBug Community and wish to have a photo removed, please send your request to [email protected].
Information provided within the community section of the site that is Personally Identifiable Information can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the Personally Identifiable Information you choose to submit in these forums.
What choices are available regarding collection, use, and distribution of the information?
WeatherBug.com does offer you the ability to control the email communications we make to you. It is our intention to give you as much control over our relationship as possible. First, as mentioned earlier, the consumer always has the final word on whether WeatherBug.com - or any Internet company - knows who you are. It is your choice to share Personally Identifiable Information with WeatherBug.com, and we encourage you to consider only sharing information with any site on the Internet in which you feel you receive true value in exchange for that information transfer and if you respect the privacy practices of the firm.
If you do choose to share Personally Identifiable Information with WeatherBug.com, you can control whether we contact you or share the information with third parties, either through choices you make at the time you share information with us, or through updates to your information. Any time information is requested from you on an AWS or WeatherBug.com Internet domain, you should see a clear indication of what your information distribution choices are. WeatherBug.com will always give you a chance to unsubscribe to any email communication from us - clear directions for doing so will appear in any email message we send to you. At times, WeatherBug.com may enter into co-branding arrangements with other companies, and if so, an opt-in question may be present for contact from these firms as well. Their opt-out features are specific to each organization, but you should never receive email from these organizations unless you have indicated that it is acceptable. All email from WeatherBug.com, or from co-brand partners who gain your permission to send you commercial email, will include an opportunity to opt out of future communications.
We may post customer testimonials on our web site from time to time, which may contain personally identifiable information such as the customer's name. We do obtain the customer's consent prior to posting the testimonial to post their name along with their testimonial.
At times, WeatherBug.com may enter into co-branding arrangements with other companies, and if so, an opt-in question may be present for contact from these firms as well. Their consent features are specific to each organization, but you should never receive email from these organizations unless you have indicated that it is acceptable. All email from WeatherBug.com, or from co-brand partners who gain your permission to send you commercial email, will include an opportunity to opt out of future communications.
WeatherBug.com does reserve the right to send a one-time registration confirmation email, and infrequent Service Alert messages to its customers to inform them of specific changes that may impact their ability to use a service they have previously signed up for, regardless of email contact opt-in status. We may also periodically contact you regarding new or upgraded services or product offerings. We also reserve the right to contact you if compelled to do so as part of a legal proceeding or if there has been a violation of our Terms of Service. WeatherBug.com is retaining these rights because in limited cases we feel that we may need the right to contact you as a matter of law or regarding matters that will be important to you.
If your personally identifiable information changes you may contact us at [email protected] with the necessary changes.
If you no longer desire our service, or wish to delete/deactivate our service please do the following: (1) uninstall the application and (2) send an email to [email protected] requesting full removal from all AWS databases.
What kind of security procedures are in place to protect against the loss, misuse, or alteration of information under the company's control?
WeatherBug.com operates secure data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection systems. Our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary, and only authorized individuals have access to the information provided by our customers. Secure Socket Layer or SSL encryption is used to transmit sensitive data such as credit card information.
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page.
WeatherBug.com
Customer Information Privacy Policy, last updated March 13, 2007
AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc., All rights reserved.
