Privacy Policy Statement

According to Belgian Law of December 8, 1992 regarding protection of privacy you have access to the personal data you provide us through our website.

 

You also have the right to change these data at any time.

 

WDM Belgium does not commercialize your data, however reserves the right to send you messages from commercial partners.

 

This statement describes our practices and your rights with respect to our website customization and behavioral advertising services and the net-affairs website. The effective date of this statement is December 22, 2009.

 

 

Our Website Customization Services.

Our customers are third party websites that you may interact with. We provide our customers with a service that helps them customize your experience when you visit their website. This service works as follows:

 

Step 1: We provide some special HTML code to our customers, and our customers install that code into their web pages.

 

Step 2: When you visit a web page on our customer’s website, our special code causes your computer to contact our servers using technologies sometimes referred to as a web bug.

 

Step 3: If you don’t already have one of our “cookies” (a small unique identifier stored on your hard drive), we place a cookie on your computer. If you already have one of our cookies, we recognize the cookie.

 

Step 4: As you navigate our customer’s website, we keep track of your activity on that site.

 

Step 5: Our database of past user-website interactions make some predictions about your interests. As you navigate our customer’s website, we communicate our predictions to our customer, and the customer may choose to use those predictions to modify the web pages it presents to you accordingly.

 

In general, unless our customers ask us to do so (which normally they would disclose in their privacy policies), we do not share your website interactions with one customer to help a different customer customize your experiences at the different customer’s website. However, we may use information we learn about you through our website customization services to improve our behavioral advertising services (discussed below) for ads delivered to you and to improve our predictions across all of our customers.

 

How You Can Opt Out. You can opt out of our website customization services through any of the following:

 

 

a customer may enable you to opt-out of website customization via a page on its website

you can turn off your cookies permanently

you can turn off your cookies temporarily when you visit our customers’ websites. Note: turning off cookies, permanently or temporarily, may impair your ability to fully experience a website’s offerings

you can visit http://optout.netmng.com/optout.php. If you select the “opt out” button there, we will delete your existing netmining.com cookie(s) and try to place a new cookie that instructs us not to track your future activities when we detect that cookie. If your browsers are configured to reject cookies when you visit our opt-out page, we cannot set our no-track cookie. Also, if you subsequently erase your cookies, use a different computer or change web browsers, you will need to opt-out again.

 

In some cases, our customers ask us to create a page with a form you can use to voluntarily request additional marketing information from the customer (the “Request Form”). The Request Form may ask you for personally identifiable information, such as your name and contact information. You are always free to decline to fill out Request Forms. If you choose to complete a Request Form, then (1) we will transmit the information from the Request Form to the customer who requested the information, and we may simultaneously communicate our predictive assessments about your interests, and (2) we may retain a copy of the information in your Request Form. We retain any Request Form information in a separate database from our other information about you, so we do not use Request Form information to predict your interests. We delete entries in the Request Form database no more than 6 months after the entries are created.

 

Behavioral Advertising Services. We operate an interest-based advertising service (sometimes called “behavioral advertising”). This service allows our advertisers to show you advertisements that are selected for you based on your past behavior throughout the websites participating in our ad network. This service works as follows:

 

Step 1: We provide some special HTML code to websites participating in our ad network, and those websites install our code into their web pages.

 

Step 2: When you visit a web page on one of our participating websites, our special code causes your computer to contact our servers.

 

Step 3: If you don’t already have one of our “cookies” (a small unique identifier stored on your hard drive), we place a cookie on your computer. If you already have one of our cookies, we recognize the cookie.

 

Step 4: We add some information about your web activities to our database every time you visit one of our participating websites, such as the URLs you visit, your browser type, your operating system, the date and time of your request and the duration of your visit to each page. As discussed above, when we help our customers provide website customization services to you, we also add information about your activities at our customers’ websites to our database.

 

Step 5: When you visit a website that has agreed to serve advertising for us (directly or through their participation in an ad network), we check our database to see if we can provide a targeted ad to you based on the information in our database. If so, we deliver the ad to you, either directly or through a third party ad serving business.

 

How You Can Opt Out. You can opt out of our behavioral advertising services through any of the following:

 

 

turn off your cookies. Note: turning off your cookies may impair your ability to fully experience a website’s offerings

you can delete the cookie we set for you. This will eliminate our ability to link your past behavior with future behavior, but we will be able to track your future behavior based on a new cookie we supply

you can visit http://optout.netmng.com/optout.php. If you select the “opt out” button there, we will delete your existing netmining.com cookie(s) and try to place a new cookie that instructs us not to track your future activities when we detect that cookie. If your browsers are configured to reject cookies when you visit our opt-out page, we cannot set our no-track cookie. Also, if you subsequently erase your cookies, use a different computer or change web browsers, you will need to opt-out again.

 

Personally Identifiable Information. Except in the limited circumstances where you submit a Request Form or as described in the “Our Corporate Website” section, in general, our databases do not obtain or store information traditionally considered to be “personally identifiable information,” such as your name, street address, phone number, credit card information, or other unique identifiers. We use your IP address to make a guess of your geographic location, but we don’t retain your IP address in our databases (the IP addresses will remain in our server logs so long as we retain those).

 

For the most part, our database only records your interactions with customer websites and websites in our ad network and various “metadata” about those interactions, such as the times of those interactions. In the course of obtaining this information, we do record the URLs you visit, and personally identifiable information can occasionally appear in those URLs and thus be stored in our database. Our predictive systems do not consider personally identifiable information that may have gotten into a URL as part of its operation, however.

 

Customer Reporting. We provide our customers (including customization customers and advertisers) with various reports about user activity. Except with respect to our delivery of Request Form information to our customers, in general, these reports are summaries of multiple users’ activities and do not include any information that you might traditionally consider personally identifiable information, so it would be unlikely for a customer to learn anything specific about you or your activities through the reports.

 

Data Retention. Any cookies we place on your computer expire 6 months after you last visit a site that participates in our website customization or behavioral advertising programs. Customers participating in our website customization program can each individually determine how long we retain server logs associated with their websites, so please check their privacy policies for more information. If a customer does not specify a retention time, we keep that customer’s customization-related server logs for no more than 6 months. We retain our other server logs related to our behavioral advertising services and our corporate website for no more than 6 months. With respect to Request Forms, we retain a copy of that information for no more than 6 months.

 

Amendment. We constantly improve our services, and some future changes may affect the privacy of your data. We will reflect such service changes in amendments to this privacy policy, and you can always revisit this page to see our most current practices. All amendments will govern your interactions following the date we post the changes to this site. If you do not like our privacy policy amendment, you can always choose to opt out of future services by following the instructions above.

 

Security. We have physical, electronic and managerial procedures designed to protect the information we collect online.

 

 

Corporate Family Members. Members of our corporate family (such as our parent, subsidiaries, joint ventures, other entities under a common control or third party acquirers) may have direct access to our databases. We expect these other entities will honor this statement. Also, we may allow a potential acquirer or merger partner to review our databases, although we would restrict their use and disclosure of this data during the diligence phase.

 

Customers/Network Participants. In general, we take significant efforts to restrict the ability of third parties to access our databases. For example, our website customization customers do not have direct access to our databases; they only get (1) the predictive recommendations we communicate to them, (2) reports about user activity, and (3) Request Form information (when applicable). Similarly, our behavioral advertising network participants do not get direct access to our databases; we select the ads that are delivered in conjunction with their website without telling the participants anything more about you.

 

Service Providers. We retain third party service providers to help us operate our business, and some of these service providers may have direct access to our databases. We usually impose confidentiality restrictions on these service providers.

 

Government/Litigants. Government agencies, law enforcement representatives or litigants may request information in our databases. We respond to those requests as required by law. We may also disclose information in our databases in ways that help us minimize our legal exposure or enforce our legal rights.

 

Hackers. We have adopted numerous security measures to prevent unauthorized accesses of our databases. However, our systems (like all others) cannot eliminate the risk of hacking or other unauthorized accesses by internal or external people.

 

Our Corporate Website. Our website (www.net-affairs.be) as well as our corporate website (www.wdmbelgium.be) uses cookies to track user activity on our site. You can opt-out of these cookies using the same options discussed in the Behavioral Advertising Services section above.

Our corporate website allows you to voluntarily submit a form requesting more information from us, such as to participate in one of our webinars or to inquire about becoming a partner or customer. The request form may request your name, contact information and other information. We incorporate information from submitted forms into our marketing databases, and we use the information to contact users as requested. Other uses may be specified on the page where the data is requested.

WDM Belgium Researchdreef 65 – 1070 Brussels, Belgium is responsible for handling the personally identifiable information collected via our website.