Privacy Policy

Your privacy is very important to us. At Hifitrends we have a few fundamental principles that we follow:

  • We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We can’t stand services that ask you for things like your gender or income level for no apparent reason.)
  • We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
  • We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of our site.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Hifitrends collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Hifitrends purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Hifitrends visitors use its website.

Hifitrends also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on our blogs. Hifitrends only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Hifitrends choose to interact with Hifitrends in ways that require Hifitrends to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Hifitrends gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who comment on our blog to provide a username and email address. Those who wish to receive Hifitrends updates via email, we collect their emails. In each case, Hifitrends collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Hifitrends. Hifitrends does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Aggregated Statistics

Hifitrends may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, Hifitrends may monitor the most popular pages on the site or use spam screened by the Akismet service to help identify spam.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Hifitrends discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Hifitrends behalf or to provide services available at Hifitrends, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using hifitrends, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Hifitrends will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, hifitrends discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when hifitrends believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of hifitrends, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an hifitrends website and have supplied your email address, hifitrends may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with hifitrends and our products. We primarily use our blog to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Hifitrends takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Hifitrends uses cookies to help hifitrends identify and track visitors, their usage of hifitrends website, and their website access preferences. Hifitrends visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using hifitrends, with the drawback that certain features may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Business Transfers

If hifitrends, or substantially all of its assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that hifitrends goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of hifitrends may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Ads

Ads appearing on any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by hifitrends and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Mediavine Programmatic Advertising (Ver 1.1)

The Website works with Mediavine to manage third-party interest-based advertising appearing on the Website. Mediavine serves content and advertisements when you visit the Website, which may use first and third-party cookies. A cookie is a small text file which is sent to your computer or mobile device (referred to in this policy as a “device”) by the web server so that a website can remember some information about your browsing activity on the Website.

First party cookies are created by the website that you are visiting. A third-party cookie is frequently used in behavioral advertising and analytics and is created by a domain other than the website you are visiting. Third-party cookies, tags, pixels, beacons and other similar technologies (collectively, “Tags”) may be placed on the Website to monitor interaction with advertising content and to target and optimize advertising. Each internet browser has functionality so that you can block both first and third-party cookies and clear your browser’s cache. The “help” feature of the menu bar on most browsers will tell you how to stop accepting new cookies, how to receive notification of new cookies, how to disable existing cookies and how to clear your browser’s cache. For more information about cookies and how to disable them, you can consult the information at All About Cookies.

Without cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of the Website content and features. Please note that rejecting cookies does not mean that you will no longer see ads when you visit our Site. In the event you opt-out, you will still see non-personalized advertisements on the Website.

The Website collects the following data using a cookie when serving personalized ads:

  • IP Address
  • Operating System type
  • Operating System version
  • Device Type
  • Language of the website
  • Web browser type
  • Email (in hashed form)

Mediavine Partners (companies listed below with whom Mediavine shares data) may also use this data to link to other end user information the partner has independently collected to deliver targeted advertisements. Mediavine Partners may also separately collect data about end users from other sources, such as advertising IDs or pixels, and link that data to data collected from Mediavine publishers in order to provide interest-based advertising across your online experience, including devices, browsers and apps. This data includes usage data, cookie information, device information, information about interactions between users and advertisements and websites, geolocation data, traffic data, and information about a visitor’s referral source to a particular website. Mediavine Partners may also create unique IDs to create audience segments, which are used to provide targeted advertising.

If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices to opt-in or opt-out of this data collection, please visit National Advertising Initiative opt out page. You may also visit Digital Advertising Alliance website and Network Advertising Initiative website to learn more information about interest-based advertising. You may download the AppChoices app at Digital Advertising Alliance’s AppChoices app to opt out in connection with mobile apps, or use the platform controls on your mobile device to opt out.

For specific information about Mediavine Partners, the data each collects and their data collection and privacy policies, please visit Mediavine Partners.