Footnote.com Privacy Policy

Effective as of January 1, 2007. Last updated on January 8, 2007.

Our Commitment

Footnote.com is committed to maintaining the privacy and security of your personally identifiable information ("Personal Information"). As part of our commitment to you, we have developed this Privacy Policy to describe how we gather and use the information we receive. Please review the information below to familiarize yourself with our policies. By using this Website, you agree to the transfer, collection, processing and use of data by Footnote.com, its parent company, affiliates and agents (collectively, "Footnote.com," the "Website" or "we," "us," or "our") in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy.

This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and is subject to the Footnote.com Terms of Service. Capitalized terms in this Policy if not defined have the meaning given to them in the Terms of Service. Your use of the Footnote.com Website and any Personal Information you provide remains subject to the terms of this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service. You should also be aware that any content you post onto the Footnote.com Website becomes, by your actions, public information and is not considered Personal Information subject to this Privacy Policy.

A Special Note about the Privacy of Children

Protecting the privacy of children is especially important to us. Footnote.com adheres to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. As a parent or guardian, you can help by spending time online with your children and monitoring their online use. Please help us protect your child's privacy by instructing them never to provide personal information on this Website or any other without your permission.

If you are under the age of 18, you should ask for permission before using this Website. You should read this policy with a parent or legal guardian and ask questions about things you do not understand. If you use this Website under your parent or guardian's Membership, that person is strictly liable for your actions. You should always get a parent or legal guardian's permission before giving out your email address or any personal information to Footnote.com or to anyone else on the Internet. Footnote.com does not knowingly collect or maintain personally identifiable information or aggregate information about children under the age of 13. Consistent with our Terms of Service, we reserve the right to delete the profile and terminate the Membership of any person we believe is under the age of 13. If you are a parent and you believe that your child has given us personal information or posted personal information, please contact us and we will delete and destroy the information. You may contact us by support@footnote.com. We also reserve the right to delete the profile and terminate the Membership of any person who permits a child under the age of 13 to publish information or post content under that Member's access.

Information We Collect and How We Use It

We will only collect information that we believe is necessary for our legitimate business interests, such as improving the functionality of our Website, marketing our products, meeting the needs of our customers and ensuring that confidential information remains protected in accordance with applicable industry standards. Additionally, we will maintain reasonable procedures to ensure that we only collect Personal Information with your consent and that we protect it in a manner consistent with this Privacy Policy and all applicable laws.

• Personal Information: Footnote.com and its agents receive and store personally identifiable information you provide to us or that is provided to us on your behalf. You submit Personal Information when you register to become a Member or an All-Access Member. Footnote.com may acquire additional Personal Information and link it with your account when we process financial transactions on your behalf. Although Visitors are not required to submit any Personal Information in order to access the Website, Visitors do submit Personal Information if they email Footnote.com with any comment or question, and at that point Visitors are not anonymous to us. Personal Information collected by Footnote.com may include any of the following: names, email addresses, home addresses, home phone numbers, credit card information, financial information, and other information that relates to an identified or identifiable natural person including age and gender. Subject to the restrictions described in this Privacy Policy and applicable law, we may use Personal Information for any reasonable purpose related to the business, including to communicate with you, to provide you with products and services, to respond to your requests, to update our product offerings, to improve the content and User experience on the Footnote.com Website, and to prepare demographic, benchmarking, advertising, marketing, and promotional studies. You may choose not to provide certain information, but such a choice may limit the features, products, and services available to you. Footnote.com will treat all personally identifiable data as Personal Information and will not sell contact information or other data that can be traced back to specific users without their consent.
• Aggregate Information: Through our contracts with third-party service providers, we use technology that lets us know what type of browser you are using, the website from which you enter the Footnote.com Website, and the pages you view as you visit Footnote.com. This technology helps us compile aggregated statistics about our Users and their use of the Footnote.com Website. We use these statistics to improve the design and content of Footnote.com and to prepare and deliver our marketing programs. We also aggregate Personal Information to provide non-personally identifiable information for sale to other businesses. This "Aggregate Information" does not contain any personally identifiable information and is used for demographic studies, benchmarking, and other advertising and marketing purposes. Aggregate Information cannot be traced back to specific users by third parties other than third parties who are acting as our agents, in which case those agents will have in place privacy policies that comply with the principles and objectives of this Privacy Policy
• Email Addresses & Correspondence: We respect your privacy and your time, so we will only send you emails that we believe will be pertinent and interesting to you, and only if you have expressly agreed to receive such emails. We do not share our email address list with (or sell the list to) other companies for their commercial purposes, provided, however, that we may share the list with our own subsidiaries, affiliates and third-party service providers acting as our agent. (See "When We Disclose Information To Others"). If you do not wish to receive emails or other mail from us, you may change your email preference by accessing your Member account, or you may send us an email to that effect at support@footnote.com. If you choose to correspond with us via email or other electronic means of communication, we may collect this information into a file specific to you.
• "Cookies": Through our contracts with third-party service providers, we use technology such as "cookies" and "web beacons" on the Footnote.com Website to help us analyze the use of our Website. "Cookies" are small files placed on your hard drive that allow us to monitor the web traffic patterns on our Website and to compile data for various reports. Cookies also allow your computer to remember certain information that you have already entered so that you do not have to reenter it. We use both "session" cookies and "persistent" cookies. Session cookies remain in the cookie file of your browser until you leave the Website. Persistent cookies remain in your cookie file for a much longer period of time, depending on the lifetime of the specific cookie. You may be able to configure your browser to accept or reject all or some cookies—you should check the "Help" menu on your browser to learn about setting your cookie preferences. However, some features on the Footnote.com Website are only available through the use of cookies. We use web beacons—a small image that accesses our cookies—to tell us, for example, whether a User opened an email from us or opened an advertisement placed on our site. Please note that Footnote.com allows third-party advertisers that are presenting advertisements on our pages to set and access their cookies on your computer. These advertisers may also use their own web beacons. The advertisers' use of cookies and web beacons is subject to their own privacy policies, not this Privacy Policy.

When We Disclose Information to Others

We may disclose Personal Information and Aggregate Information to subsidiaries, affiliates and agents of Footnote.com for the purpose of processing such information on our behalf. We require that these parties process the information in compliance with our Privacy Policy. We use reasonable efforts to make sure such information is secure and to limit others' use of such information. (See "Data Security".)

We do not disclose Personal Information to other third parties for their commercial or marketing use without your consent. We may share Aggregate Information, including non-personally identifiable tracking data such as User usage patterns, exit pages, URLs and numbers of clicks, with third parties so that they can understand the web traffic patterns for certain content on the Footnote.com Website.

Despite the steps that we take, we cannot guarantee that in all instances Personal Information will not be disclosed. We reserve the right to disclose Personal Information and Aggregate Information under the following circumstances:

• When required to do so by law or court order, or to comply with a discovery request, subpoena or search warrant. For example (and without limitation), we may disclose Personal Information in connection with investigations by law enforcement personnel or tax officials or in connection with inquiries by government administrative officials or regulators.
• When we conclude, in good faith, that disclosure is necessary to enforce our Terms of Service, to take precautions against liability, to investigate and defend ourselves against third-party claims or allegations, to protect the security or integrity of the Footnote.com Website, and to protect the rights, property or safety of Footnote.com and its Users or any other person.
• Under the conditions described elsewhere in this Privacy Policy, including, for example, when a third party acting as an agent helps us analyze web traffic patterns or helps us communicate with you by email (see "Information We Collect and How We Use It"), when a third party acting as an agent assists in storing and managing customer information (see "Ongoing Transfers of Personal Information") or in the event of a merger or bankruptcy (see "Merger, Sale or Bankruptcy").

A Special Notice About Historical Documents

Footnote.com obtains large collections of historical documents from various sources and converts the documents into a digital format so that Users may see a facsimile of the original. Footnote.com and its affiliates and agents take reasonable steps to assure that the documents do not include sensitive, private information about living individuals by, for example, obtaining collections of documents that are old enough that it is unlikely a document will violate the privacy rights of a living person. However, because of the sheer volume of the content acquired (often more than a million pages of documents), Footnote.com cannot and does not review each and every document for privacy concerns. If you believe that a document obtained and digitized by Footnote.com violates your privacy rights, please contact us and we will attempt to resolve the matter quickly. (See "Privacy Policy Compliance and Enforcement").

Footnote.com also permits its Members and All-Access Members to post their own historical documents, to annotate historical documents and to post commentary on Story Pages and on historical documents. Although in our Terms of Service we prohibit Users from posting content that violates the privacy rights of others (see "User Submissions" in the Terms of Service), we do not edit or approve User Submissions. It is possible that a Member or All-Access Member will post your private information. If you think that a User or someone else has posted private information about you that is not a matter of public record, please contact us and we will attempt to resolve the matter quickly. (See "Privacy Policy Compliance and Enforcement").

Third Party Links

The Footnote.com Website may contain links to other sites. When you click on one of those links, you are accessing a website that is not owned, operated, or controlled by Footnote.com or any of its affiliates. The operator of such site may have its own privacy policy (which we encourage you to read carefully), and that policy will govern the collection and use of your data on that site. Footnote.com does not share your Personal Information with these parties and is not responsible for their privacy practices.

Ongoing Transfers of Personal Information

The Personal Information that you provide to us may be transferred across state or national borders for the purposes of data storage, consolidation, retrieval, analysis or the effective management of customer information. Before Footnote.com begins to transfer Personal Information to any third party acting as our agent, we will confirm that they have adopted, are subject to, or are contractually obligated to comply with the principles and objectives of this Privacy Policy.

Your Access to Personal Information

Footnote.com will maintain procedures consistent with applicable law for individuals to gain access to their collected Personal Information and, when appropriate, correct or delete their Personal Information. Members and All-Access Members may update, correct or delete their profiles online. If you have other concerns about your Personal Information, you may email us at support@footnote.com.

Data Security

We will take reasonable precautions in line with industry practice to protect Personal Information from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. We use Secure Sockets Layer software, which encrypts information you submit so that it cannot be read during transmission. However, these measures, standing alone, are not sufficient to ensure the security of your Personal Information. It is also important for you to guard against unauthorized access to your passwords and the unauthorized use of your computer.

Privacy Policy Compliance & Enforcement

We are committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations governing the collection and use of Personal Information. From time to time, Footnote.com will review its Personal Information collection, use, and disclosure practices in order to assure that we are complying with our Privacy Policy and all applicable laws and regulations.

Your use of the Footnote.com Website and any dispute over privacy is subject to this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service. If you have any concerns about the privacy or security of your Personal Information, please contact us at support@footnote.com. We will attempt to resolve your inquiry in a timely manner.

Merger, Sale or Bankruptcy

In the event that Footnote.com is acquired by or merged into a third-party entity, we reserve the right, in any of these circumstances, to transfer and assign the information we have collected from our Users, in whole or in part, as part of such merger, acquisition, sale or other change of control. In the event of bankruptcy, insolvency, reorganization or receivership, assignment for the benefit of creditors or any other equitable or legal action involving creditor's rights, we may not be able to control how your personal information is treated, transferred or used, and you hereby consent to such transfers.

We Retain the Right to Change This Policy

By using the Footnote.com Website, you consent to the collection and use of your information as set forth in this Privacy Policy. From time to time, we may make changes to this Policy. If we make changes, we will post the new Privacy Policy on this page and indicate at the top and bottom of this page the effective date of this Privacy Policy and the date on which this Privacy Policy was last updated. Such notice will include information on how you may remove your Personal Information from our database or opt out of new uses of information, as applicable. If you are concerned about the use of your information, you should consult this page regularly.

Effective Dates

Effective as of January 1, 2007. Last updated on January 8, 2007.