This Privacy Statement describes the types of information that we collect through our website and what we do with that information.
Our site is designed to permit you to access our content without registering or providing personally identifying information.
We gather two types of information: (1) information voluntarily supplied by visitors to the site, for example, when they use the “Contact Us” function on the site to communicate with us; and (2) tracking information gathered as visitors navigate through our website, review our email newsletters and other email messages, and “like” or share content through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. This information may be collected directly by us or it may be collected by third-party service providers on our behalf. Third parties featured on or linked to by our website, such as advertisers and others involved in displaying advertisements or promotional messages on our site or offering products and services through our, and social media services may be gathering information as well, through processes we don’t control. We currently use Google Analytics to track overall site traffic and engagement.
Information You Voluntarily Supply
We may collect and store information that you voluntarily supply to us while on our site. This may include personally identifying information if you choose to provide it. In accessing and using the DFWatch.net website, you may have the opportunity to voluntarily submit contact information, such as your name, email address, as well as other information you choose to include in correspondence you send to us through the “Contact Us” function available on our site.
You may interact with content on our site through social media plugins provided by Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn. We do not control the information that these companies collect when you use their social media tools, nor do we control how these companies use any information they collect. We encourage you to review their privacy policies before interacting with our site through these social media tools.
Information That Is Automatically Collected
We also may collect and store, and our services providers may collect and store, information that doesn’t identify you personally that is generated automatically as you navigate through our site. For example, we and our service providers may collect limited information about the device you use to access our site, including the type of device you’re using (computer, mobile phone, tablet, etc.), the operating system running on that device, the type and version of browser software you’re using, the resolution of your computer monitor or other device display, the screen colors available on your device, the website that referred you, and your IP address. (Your IP address is a numerical address that is used by computers and other devices connected to the Internet to identify your device so that data – such as the web pages you want to view – can be transmitted to you.) We use this information to make our site as useful and visually appealing as we can for as many users as possible. We may also use IP address information for systems administration and troubleshooting purposes and to derive a rough estimate of your geographic location – by country, city or town, and perhaps ZIP code.
We may use “cookies,” a standard feature found in browser software, to enhance your experience on the site. Cookies are small files that your web browser places on your hard drive for record-keeping purposes. We also may use web beacons (sometimes referred to as “clear GIFs” or “pixel tags”) to collect non-personally identifying information about how our visitors use our site and how they interact with our email newsletters and with our stories that appear on other websites. By showing how and when visitors use the site and review our news stories, cookies and web beacons help us deliver more relevant content to users, identify how many unique users visit our site, various pages within our site, and our stories that appear on other news sites, and track user interests, trends and patterns. For example, we may use these technologies to collect information about the time visitors spend on each page of our site, the number of visits made to each page or section of our site, whether they open the email newsletters we send them, and whether they click on particular links contained in these emails. Providers of web analytics services such as Google Analytics may use cookies and web beacons to gather this sort of information on our behalf.
Disclosure to Third Parties
To help our financial sponsors better understand our audience and confirm the value of funding our site, we may present them with aggregate information on our audience and how our audience uses our site (for example, information on traffic to various pages within our site). This information does not identify you personally.
We may share the information that is collected through this site with our third party service providers for purposes related to site administration and operation. In some cases, we may permit our third-party service providers to collect such information directly on our behalf. For example, this website uses Google Analytics to help analyze how users use the site. These services use cookies and web beacons to collect non-personally identifying tracking data from our site on our behalf, and then use that data to provide us with statistical reports on website activity.