eatNation's Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand how we collect and use the personal information you decide to share, and to help you make informed decisions when using eatNation, located at www.eatNation.com (collectively, "eatNation", "Web Site” or “Site"). If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, please send an email to help@eatNation.com.

The Information We Collect

When you visit eatNation, you provide us with two types of information: personal information, such as your name, email address, gender, age, birthday and any other personal or preference information; and Web Site use information collected by us as you interact with our Web Site. eatNation will not sell, rent, or share personal information with third parties without your prior consent except in the limited circumstances described in this Privacy Policy.

• •     Information Given to Third Parties:

  We might disclose your personal information to third parties to provide you with products and services.

During or immediately following registration, you have the option to view and select offers from various third party companies that may be of interest to you, such as retailers and consumer products manufacturers. These offers are made available to you by our vendors. If you choose to view these offers we will make information you provide during registration available to these vendors. The vendors will forward this information, along with any other information you provide in conjunction with your request, to companies you have selected to fulfill, or facilitate fulfillment of, your request(s). Please note that any information that is passed on by these vendors to third party companies that you select is subject to those third parties’ privacy practices.

We might disclose information you provide to us during registration to third parties in conjunction with (i) your entry into a contest or promotion, (ii) your request of an offer, or (iii) your participation in a survey or similar activity on the Web site. You might be asked for additional information in order to enter the contest or promotion, request an offer, or participate in a survey. The third parties will use the information we provide to them, along with any information you provide during your entry, request, or participation, to (i) notify you if you have won a prize in a contest or sweepstakes, or (ii) to fulfill, or facilitate fulfillment of, requests for products or services you may make in connection with your entry, request, or participation. In addition, we may offer items for sale or provide services jointly with other companies on eatNation, and we may share customer information with that company in connection with your purchase of goods or services.

• •     eatNation’s Own Business Purposes:

  We use and disclose information about you for our own internal statistical, design, or operational purposes, such as to estimate our audience size, measure aggregate traffic patterns, and understand demographic, user interest, purchasing and other trends among our users. We might outsource these tasks and disclose personal information about you to third parties, provided the use and disclosure of your personal information by these third parties is restricted to performance of such tasks. We might also share personal information with third-party vendors to help us bring you the services we offer. Specifically, we may use third parties to facilitate our business, such as to host the service at a co-location facility for servers, to send out email updates about eatNation, to remove repetitive information from our User lists, to process payments for products or services, to offer an online job application process, or to provide search results or links (including sponsored links). In connection with these offerings and business operations, our service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time in connection with these business activities.

• •     Protection of eatNation and Others:

  We disclose personal information when we believe it is appropriate to comply with the law (e.g., a lawful subpoena, warrant or court order); to enforce or apply this Privacy Policy or our other policies or agreements; to initiate, render, bill, and collect for amounts owed to us; to protect our or our Users’ rights, property or safety; or to protect our Users from fraudulent, abusive, or unlawful use of our Web Site; or if we reasonably believe that an emergency involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure of communications or justifies disclosure of personal information without delay.

• •     Business Transfers:

  Information about our Users, including personal information, might be disclosed as part of any merger, acquisition, debt financing, sale of company assets, as well as in the event of an insolvency, bankruptcy or receivership in which personally identifiable information could be transferred to third parties as one of the business assets of the company.

• •     Personal information does not include aggregate information, or data we collect about a group or category of products, services or customers, from which individual customer identities have been removed. Aggregated data helps us understand trends and customer needs so we can better tailor our services to customer interests. We may share aggregated data with third parties for various reasons, including to better understand and improve our services, and for advertising and marketing purposes

When you use eatNation, you may set up your profile, add recipes and photos or videos, form relationships, send messages, blog, message others, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect information about your activities on eatNation so that we can provide you service and offer personalized features. In most cases, we retain it so that, for instance, you can return to view prior messages you have sent or easily see your friend list.

• •     You post User Content (as defined in the eatNation Terms of Use) on the Site at your own risk. Although we have certain security measures in place to protect your privacy, please be aware that no security measures are impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users with whom you may choose to share your pages and information. All such sharing is done at your own risk. Therefore, we cannot guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content. Any improper collection or misuse of information provided on eatNation is a violation of the eatNation Terms of Use and should be reported to help@eatNation.com. By using eatNation, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.

• •     If you, your friends, or members of your network use any third-party applications that work in conjunction with the eatNation Platform ("Platform Applications"), those Platform Applications may access and share certain information about you with others in accordance with your privacy settings. In addition, third party developers who have created and operate Platform Applications ("Platform Developers"), may also have access to your personal information (excluding your contact information) if you permit Platform Applications to access your data. Please note that eatNation does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information that they may obtain in connection with Platform Applications. In addition, Platform Developers may require you to sign up to their own terms of service, privacy policies or other policies, which may give them additional rights or impose additional obligations on you, so please review these terms and policies carefully before using any Platform Application. You can report any suspected misuse of information through the eatNation Platform to eatNation at help@eatnation.com.

Children under Age 13

eatNation does not knowingly collect or solicit personal information from anyone under the age of 13 or knowingly allow such persons to register. If you are under 13, please do not attempt to register for eatNation or send any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, or email address. No one under age 13 may provide any personal information to or on eatNation. In the event that we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us at help@eatnation.com.

Use of Information Obtained by eatNation

When you register with eatNation, you create your own profile. Your User name and profile photograph, as well other User Content on your profile such as recipes, photographs and videos will be available in search results and those limited pieces of information may be made available to third party search engines, and eatNation may post this content from time to time on our home page. This is primarily so your friends can find you and send a friend request. People who see your name in searches, however, will not be able to access your profile information unless they have a relationship to you (friend, friend of friend, member of your networks, etc.) that allows such access. In addition, eatNation may send you service-related announcements from time to time through the general operation of the Site. For instance, if a friend sends you a new message, or comments on a recipe, you may receive a message alerting you to that fact. eatNation may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network like a type of cuisine, for example, providing services or advertisements and promotions, or any other lawful purpose. Any information which is not personally identifiable information but is publicly displayed on the Web Site (such as User name and photos) may appear in search engine results, even after you terminate your membership, depending on the search engine’s indexing methods. As an eatNation User, you will receive our emails (such as email address confirmation, administrative messages, etc.) at your email address, or through the messages you receive on your profile. In addition, you may be enrolled automatically in one of our email programs for newsletters or for product sales. In such case, you will have the opportunity to select whether or not to continue to receive the emails.

Contests, Promotions, Offers, and Surveys

From time to time we collect personal information from Users from contests, promotions, offers and surveys conducted through our Site. Participation in these contests, promotions, offers, and surveys is completely voluntary and you therefore may choose whether to disclose personal information in connection with these activities. Personal Information requested in these activities might include contact information (e.g., your name and shipping address) and demographic information (e.g., your zip code or age level). We use this information to notify you if you’ve won and to award prizes. We may also post an announcement about your having entered the contest on our home page, and in doing so, may use your User name and the content you submitted on our home page, for example, for the announcement. We use information we collect in surveys for internal purposes, such as measuring efficiency in the use of our Site and improve its usefulness. We might also provide third parties with this information, and might combine it with some or all of your registration information. Third parties might use the information we provide them to contact you regarding products or services of interest to you.

Customer Service

We collect personal information when you submit comments, questions or suggestions to our customer service department. We use the information you provide to respond to your submission and use the ideas to make Site improvements.

Third Party WebSite Advertising – General

We use one or more third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Web Site. We do not share personal information about you with any third party advertiser unless you give us permission to do so, separate from any permission you provide during the registration process. These advertisers might also use combined information about your visits to our Web Site and other web sites to provide advertisements about related goods and services of interest to you.

Web Beacons, Cookies, Log Files and Crawlers

Advertisements that appear on eatNation are sometimes delivered (or "served") directly to Users by third party advertisers. They automatically receive your IP address when this happens. These third party advertisers may also download cookies to your computer, or use other technologies such as JavaScript and "web beacons" (also known as "1x1 gifs") to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. Doing this allows the advertising network to recognize your computer each time they send you an advertisement in order to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. In this way, they may compile information about where individuals using your computer or browser saw their advertisements and determine which advertisements are clicked. Also, eatNation does not have access to or control of the cookies that may be placed by the third party advertisers. In addition, we track log files on our Web Site (i.e., we log your computer’s IP address into our log files when you visit a page on our Web Site) and use them to analyze trends, administer the Web site, track your movements on the Web site, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. We might link some or all of this information to personally identifiable information that is stored on a cookie in your computer. We only use information gathered from these activities for our internal marketing and operational purposes. In addition, eatNation provides access to publicly viewed site information by third-party search engine “crawlers” (such as Google). eatNation blocks access by these engines to personal information beyond the publicly viewed information you agreed to upon registering for the site, and as indicated in this privacy policy and terms and conditions. Third party advertisers have no access to your contact information stored on eatNation unless you choose to share it with them. This privacy policy does not cover the use of cookies or other technologies by any of its advertisers.

Third Party Sources

eatNation might also obtain information about you from third parties, such as demographic marketing information, address verification, or third party mailing lists, and add such information to, or combine it with, your personal information. Should we ever obtain this information and link it to you, we will treat it all as personal information under this Privacy Policy.

Security

We use reasonable security measures to store and maintain personally identifying information so as to protect it from loss, misuse, alteration or destruction by unauthorized parties while it is under our control. We use secure socket layer (“SSL”) encryption when transmitting certain kinds of information, such as payment information, over the Internet.

Correcting/Updating Personal Information

We give you the opportunity to opt-out of receiving commercial e-mail from us by following the opt-out instructions provided in the message. Even if you opt-out in this manner, however, you will still receive account-related and non-commercial messages from us. To get placed on our “DO NOT E-MAIL” list, send a request to help@eatnation.com. If your e-mail address is added to the “DO NOT E-MAIL” list, you will not receive any newsletters or other opt-in e-mail messages. Please note, however, that your e-mail address being placed on the “DO NOT E-MAIL” list does not prevent you from receiving “send-to-a-friend” e-mail messages, or email messages from third parties from which you requested information, products, or services from during or immediately after registration. To opt-out from messages from these third parties, or from any other communications that you receive directly from third parties, you must contact them directly in order to opt-out.

California Privacy Rights

California Civil Code Section 1798.83 permits customers who are California residents to request certain information regarding disclosure of personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. We do not provide your personal information to any third party for their direct marketing purposes without your consent. If, having provided your consent, you would like to revoke your consent to future disclosure of your personal information to third parties, send a request to help@eatnation.com with “California Opt-Out” in the subject line. Please note that this opt-out will not prevent the use of information that has already been disclosed to third parties with your consent and you should contact them directly to opt-out from such communications.

Links

eatNation may contain links to other websites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other web sites. We encourage our Users to be aware when they leave our site to read the privacy statements of each web site that collects personally identifiable information. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by eatNation.

Changing or Removing Information

Access and control over most personal information on eatNation is readily available through the profile editing tools. eatNation Users may modify or delete any of their profile information at any time by logging into their account. Information will be updated immediately. Where you make use of the communication features of the service to share information with other individuals on eatNation, however, (e.g., sending a personal message to another eatNation User) you generally cannot remove such communications.

Terms of Use, Notices and Revisions

Your use of eatNation, and any disputes arising from it, is subject to this Privacy Policy as well as our Terms of Use and all of its dispute resolution provisions including arbitration, limitation on damages and choice of law. We reserve the right to change our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use at any time. All changes will take effect as of the date of posting on the Site. If we make changes to this Privacy Policy, we will indicate at the top of this page the date of the change. We encourage you to refer to this policy on an ongoing basis so that you understand our current privacy policy. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account.

Contacting the Web Site

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at help@eatnation.com. You may also contact us by mail at PO Box 620899, Woodside, CA 94062. Copyright © eatNation 2008 All Rights Reserved.