Privacy Policy

At the same time that Universalinet.Com, LLC and UniversalInet.Com are committed to bringing you information tailored to your individual needs, we recognize the importance of protecting the privacy of personally identifiable information collected about you, our customers and prospects. In adopting this customer privacy policy, our intent is to balance our legitimate business interests in collecting and using information and your reasonable expectations of privacy.

What personally identifiable information does UniversalInet.Com collect from me?

UniversalInet.Com collects information in several ways. Some personal information is gathered when you register. During registration, UniversalInet.Com asks for information such as your name, e-mail address, birth date, gender, zip code, and country, and optional information regarding household income. The more information you volunteer, the better we are able to customize your experience. We may also ask you for other information at other times – such as when you enter a contest or promotion, or when you post an online ad. Whenever we collect information about you, we will make an effort to link to our privacy policy. See the paragraph below about "cookies" and what information is collected by means of the use of cookies.

How does UniversalInet.Com use my information?

Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you, the user, with a customized experience on our network of sites. This includes personalization services, interactive communications, online shopping and many other types of services, most of which are completely free to you. For sponsorship and advertising revenues, we also display advertisements. By knowing a little about you, UniversalInet.Com and its partners are able to deliver more relevant advertisements and content, and hence better service to you.

UniversalInet.Com delivers targeted advertisements on behalf of advertisers. Advertisers give us an opportunity to target visitors with our sponsors products and services as well. We take the advertisement and display it to users meeting that criteria. In this process, the advertiser never has access to individual account information. Only UniversalInet.Com has access to individuals' accounts. This kind of advertisement targeting can include banner ads as well as promotional e-mail. You will be allowed opt-out privileges on any special offers we may e-mail. And, you can change your account preferences at any time.

UniversalInet.Com does research on our users' demographics, interests, and behavior based on the information provided to us upon registration, during a promotion, from our server log files or from surveys. We do this to better understand and serve our users. This research is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis. UniversalInet.Com may share this aggregated data with advertisers or business partners.

Who is collecting information?

When you are on an area of UniversalInet.Com and are asked for personal information, you are sharing that information with Universalinet.Com, LLC, its divisions, vendors providing hosting services for UniversalInet.Com and/or its third party list managers unless it is specifically stated otherwise. If data is being collected and/or maintained by any other company, you will be notified prior to the time of the data collection or transfer. If you do not want your data to be shared, you can choose not to allow the transfer by not using that particular service.

Promotions that run on UniversalInet.Com may be sponsored by companies other than UniversalInet.Com or may be co-sponsored by UniversalInet.Com and another company. Some or all data collected during a promotion may be shared with the sponsor.

Please be aware that UniversalInet.Com advertisers or Web sites that have links on our site may collect personally identifiable information about you. The information practices of those Web sites linked to UniversalInet.Com are not covered by this privacy statement.

With whom does UniversalInet.Com share my information?

As a general rule, UniversalInet.Com will not disclose any of your personally identifiable information except when we have your permission or under special circumstances, such as when we believe in good faith that the law requires it or under the circumstances described below. The following describes the ways that your information may be disclosed.

Web servers serving UniversalInet.Com automatically collect information about which pages each user visits and the domain name (e.g., earthlink.com) of visitors. This information is used for internal review, to tailor information to individual visitors and for traffic audits. We also provide this information (as well as information from third-party market researchers) about our users on an aggregated, anonymous basis to our advertisers. Any personally identifiable information provided by subscribers online as part of an advertiser promotion online (i.e. online coupons) may be provided directly to advertisers.

Business Partners & Sponsors: UniversalInet.Com will only disclose your personal information to business partners or sponsors after you have been informed of this disclosure. We will inform you of the disclosures we plan to make of your personal data either before we collect the data or before we transfer it. You will have an opportunity to tell us that you do not want your data disclosed to these other entities. If you tell us this, we may need to exclude you from the particular promotion or other opportunity we are providing to you. The following sections of this policy spell out these principles in greater detail.

Many promotions offer opportunities to request additional information from sponsors. When you request more information about a particular promotion, your e-mail address may be shared with the sponsor of that promotion. If information other than (or in addition to) your e-mail address will be shared with the sponsor, you will be notified at the time such additional information is collected from you.

Marketplace: If you make a purchase from a store or a merchant on our site, the information obtained during your visit to those stores (including tracking information and cookies as described below as well as the information you give such as your credit card number and contact information) is provided to the merchants. This is to enable transactions to take place.

Merchants listed on UniversalInet.Com have separate privacy and data collection practices. UniversalInet.Com has no responsibility or liability for these independent policies. For more information regarding the merchant, their store, and their privacy policies, return to that store's home page and click on the appropriate link.

Third Party Data & Data in the Aggregate: Under confidentiality agreements, UniversalInet.Com may match aggregated user information with third party data. Also, UniversalInet.Com discloses aggregated user statistics in order to describe our services to prospective partners, advertisers, and other third parties, and for other lawful purposes.

Editorial: A user's personally identifiable information (e.g., name, e-mail address) may be used by UniversalInet.Com for editorial purposes. For example, we may use information provided by you to us as part of an online survey conducted by our editors.

Other: If we run competitions or contests on the site, you may be required to provide information such as your telephone number and address in order to participate. The exact rules may vary in each case but the specific rules for any contest will state how that information may be used. Unless you have told us that you would prefer not to receive e-mail from us, we may send you e-mails about any UniversalInet.Com service, product or promotion as well as on behalf of other companies.

Except as stated in this privacy policy or at the time of collection, a user's personally identifiable information will not be transferred to a party outside Universalinet.Com, LLC, its divisions, its vendors providing internet hosting services or advertising services or third party list managers unless stated at the time of collection. If you do not wish to receive any e-mail or to have us share such information with another party, you may "opt out" at any time as instructed by the e-mail message, or via an e-mail request.

UniversalInet.Com may also disclose account information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our Membership Agreement or may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) UniversalInet.Com's rights or property, other UniversalInet.Com users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities.

What are cookies and how does UniversalInet.Com use them?

UniversalInet.Com places a "cookie" on the browser of a UniversalInet.Com user's computer to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie can be used to tell when your computer has contacted a Web site; we use the information for editorial purposes and for other purposes such as measuring certain traffic patterns. For example, cookies are used to ensure that you don't see the same ad too many times in a single session. We may also use cookies to track your progress and number of entries in some of our promotions and contests. Advertising networks that serve ads into our site may also use their own cookies.

Opting-Out of Online Advertising Cookies

Online advertising for Universalinet.Com Interactive is delivered by the vendors DoubleClick and 24/7 Media. These vendors, like other online advertising vendors, place cookies on users' hard drives so that their systems can identify your computer. By placing such cookies on your system, DoubleClick and 24/7 are able, among other things, to determine automatically whether you have seen a particular advertisement before and avoid sending you duplicate advertisements. It also enables DoubleClick and 24/7 to serve you advertisements tailored to things you have shown interest in based on other sites you have visited. Some people are uncomfortable with this kind of information gathering. DoubleClick and 24/7 allow visitors the option to opt-out of advertising cookies. If you do not want the benefits of cookies, there is a simple unsubscribe link that allows you to deny or accept this feature. For more information about the effect of the DoubleClick cookies on online advertising, please contact us at advertise@universalinet.com.  For more information about the use of cookies or to "opt-out" of cookies, contact us at webmaster@universalinet.com.

Please note that opting out through the above procedure will affect not only Universalinet.Com Interactive sites, but other related sites as well.

Often our advertisers contract with a third-party service to host their ads. In other words, our ad serving vendor contacts their service for a particular advertisement. In that case, an independent cookie may be used by the third-party service. We do not have a mechanism to allow visitors to opt-out of vendors with whom we do not have a contractual relationship.

We do not control the privacy policies of our business partners, advertisers, sponsors or other sites to which we provide hyperlinks. UniversalInet.Com users should also be aware that, when you voluntarily disclose personal information in chat areas or bulletin boards, that information may be collected by others and may result in unsolicited messages from others.

Kids under 13: Do not send any information about yourself to us – including information like your name, address, or e-mail address. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under 13. In the event that we learn that we have collected any personal information from a child under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information from our database as quickly as possible.

Technology on the Internet is developing at a rapid pace, and we need to maintain our flexibility in the online arena. If we need to change our policy in the future, we will post these changes as soon as they go into effect.