The Types of Information We Collect

Information You Give Us

To enable you to enjoy certain features of our Services, we collect certain types of information, including personally identifiable information. For example, we collect information when you:

• Sign up to receive email newsletters. When we send newsletters to subscribers we may allow advertisers or partners to include messages in those newsletters, or we may send dedicated newsletters on behalf of those advertisers or partners. All newsletters will come directly from About, Inc.: when we do this, we do not share your email with the respective advertiser or partner. To unsubscribe from a particular newsletters, click the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of that email newsletter.
• Register. When you register to use forums or other Services, we ask you to provide certain information, which may include your email address, home address, birth year, gender, health conditions, credit card number and zip code, as well as a password for your account. We will not provide advertisers or partners to this personal information without your permission.
• Engage in public activities on the Services. We offer you opportunities to engage in public activities on the Services that are designed to be visible to other users and the public at large, including comments, forums, recommendations, reader reviews, ratings or any other items that you submit. Any information you disclose in your public activities, along with your screen name or ID, or any image or photo, becomes public and may be used by us for online and offline promotional or commercial uses in any and all media. Information you submit is not private or confidential, nor is it protected by attorney-client, doctor-patient, or any other privilege and (regardless of restrictions we impose in our User Agreement or other policies) it might be read, collected and used by others, including through third party search engines which may index the information you post. You therefore should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there might be read, collected, or used by other users of these areas, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages, mine your data, communicate with or market to you in other ways. We are not responsible for safeguarding the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums and About.com has no responsibility to publish, take down, remove or edit any of your public activities or any of your submissions that are a result of your public activities. For more information, see the About.com User Agreement.
• Provide Us Your Credit Card and Billing Information. To enable payment for certain Services, we or a service or payment provider acting on our behalf may collect and store billing and credit card information. This information will only be shared with the third parties who we have hired to perform these tasks.