Privacy Policy  

Welco me to the web sites of the River Valley Newspaper Group. We (which includes our parent company, Lee Enterprises, Incorporated) believe in your right to know what information is collected during your visit to our web sites and how that information is used and safeguarded.

Information Automatically Gathered About All Visitors

We collect aggregate and user-specific information on which pages consumers access or visit. This information is used to generate reports that help us assess the value of and interest in the various web sites we provide. We use the information we collect to improve the content of our web pages. We can build a better site if we know which pages our users are visiting, how often they visit and how long they stay on a page.

Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our web pages to you upon request, to tailor our sites to the interests of our users, and to measure traffic within our sites.

To help make our sites more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we may utilize a standard feature of browser software called a "cookie." A cookie is a small piece of computer code that is deposited on your hard drive by our site. Browsers typically recognize when a cookie has been sent to your computer and give you the option to refuse or allow it. A cookie does not actually identify you, just the computer that you are using to access our site. A cookie cannot read data off your hard drive. Our advertisers, content partners and sites that are reached from links on our site may also assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we cannot control.

We use cookies to help us tailor our site to your needs so we can deliver a better and more personalized service. It is a cookie, for example, that allows us to deliver to you any personalized information each time you visit a site.

In addition, we can access cookies later in your current session or in a later session on our site in order to improve your visit to our web site, as in the following examples:

Account Registration If your use of a component of the site requires you to register, a cookie will be used to automatically identify you as a registered user when you are using our site. These cookies are known as persistent cookies and continue on your computer after the initial session in which they are created.

Payment Identification
This cookie allows us to maintain information containing the products (like photo reprints) or services (such as placing a classified advertisement or signing up for home delivery) you are purchasing while you are online. To limit unauthorized access, this cookie, also called a session cookie, expires whenever you exit a browser session.

Like many other commercial sites, our sites may utilize an electronic file called a web beacon to count users who have visited a page or to recognize users by accessing certain cookies. Our site and/or our partner web sites use web beacons for auditing purposes and to collect information from the websites of certain partners. Information recorded through these web beacons is used to report anonymous individual and/or aggregate information about our users from our partners. Aggregate information may include demographic and usage information. No personally identifiable information about you is shared with partners. To opt-out of a third parties’ use of web beacons please click here.

Information Gathered by Voluntary Submission

To make use of certain features on our web sites (such as contests, story comments, letters to the editor, personalized web pages and other interactive forums and blogs) visitors need to register and to provide certain information as part of the registration or participation process. We may ask, for example, for your name, e-mail address, gender, age, and zip code, and we might request information on your interest in sports, personal finance, the performing arts, and the like.

The information you supply will help us offer you more personalized features, to tailor our sites to your interests and make them more useful to you. The more you tell us about yourself, the more value we can offer you. Supplying such information is entirely voluntary. But if you do not supply the information we need, we may be unable to provide you with services and content we make available to other visitors to our sites. Of course, even if you want to remain completely anonymous, you are still free to take advantage of the wealth of content that is otherwise available, without registration, on our sites.

Children under the Age of 13

If you are under the age of 13, do not send us any information about yourself such as your name, address or e-mail address. You may only send us personally identifiable information if your parents have verified to us their consent to the collection of the information.

Because we are a media company, some of our online services and content may be attractive to children. Because we strive to protect the privacy of all users of our site, including children, we endeavor to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Our site:

• Includes our contact information.

• Explains the types of personal information we collect, and how we use it.

• Explains our practices in terms of sharing personal information with third parties.

• Allows parents to consent to the collection and use of their children’s personal information, without consenting to disclosure to third parties.

• Does not condition a child’s participation in an activity on the child’s providing more personal information than is reasonably necessary for the activity.

• Allows parents to review their child’s information, have it deleted, or refuse to permit any further collection, by contacting us.

We make a special effort to encourage children under the age of 13 to consult with their parents before furnishing any personal data. However, we also believe that parents should supervise their children's online activities and consider using parental control tools available from online services and software manufacturers that help provide a child-friendly online environment. These tools can also prevent children from disclosing their name, address, and other personal information online without parental permission. For additional information about parental control tools, please consult http://www.icra.org/_en/parent

E-mails from Us

Upon registering with our website, you may begin receiving communications from us. In addition, if you have signed up for any of our automated account services, we will send you transactional e-mails regarding the status of your account, including confirmations, notices of expiration and renewal and other related electronic correspondence. If you have signed up for any of our e-mail newsletters, you may stop receiving them if you follow the "unsubscribe" instructions located near the bottom of each newsletter. We may send you an e-mail inviting you to participate in subscriber or website user surveys. Such surveys greatly help us improve our services and the value of our web sites. Any information you give us in those surveys will not be shared with any third parties except in aggregate form.

What We Do With the Information We Gather About You

We or one of our affiliated companies may perform statistical, marketing and demographic analyses of our delivery subscribers and their subscription patterns. In addition, we may generally inform our advertisers about our subscriber base. When we present information to our advertisers -- to help them understand our audience and confirm the value of advertising on our websites -- it is usually in the form of aggregated statistics on traffic to various pages within our sites. We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.

In some cases, we contract with third parties to provide services on our behalf, including credit-card and bill processing, shipping, e-mail distribution, list processing and analytics or promotions management. We provide these third parties only with the information necessary for them to perform their specific services. These service providers are restricted from using this information in any way other than to provide services to us, and they may not share this information with any one else nor may they resell this data.

Compliance with Legal Process

We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.

A Final Note:

We are affiliated with other online companies, some of which feature our branding; in addition there are numerous links to third parties contained on our site. Our Privacy Policy does not apply to those companies' web sites, so you should refer to each of those sites to obtain information on their privacy policies. If you cannot find the privacy policy on any of these sites once you have arrived at their site via a link from our site, you should contact that site directly for more information.

The web is an evolving medium. If we need to change our Privacy Policy at some point in the future, we will post the changes before they take effect if we believe that the change in the way we use your personal information is significant or material. Of course, our use of information gathered while the current policy is in effect will always be consistent with the current policy, even if we change that policy later.

Last updated on 09/12/07