Privacy Statement

SDOL is committed to protecting your privacy. Please read the SDOL Online Privacy Statement below for information about particular services and sites that you may use. This SDOL Online Privacy Statement applies to data collected by SDOL through its Web sites and services, as well as through its offline product support services.

Collection of Your Personal Information

At some SDOL sites, we ask you to provide personal information, such as your e-mail address, name, home or work address, or telephone number. We may also collect demographic information, such as your postal code, age, gender, preferences, interests and favorites. If you choose to make a purchase or sign up for a paid subscription service, we will ask for additional information, such as your credit card number and billing address, which is used to create a SDOL billing account.

In order to access some SDOL services, you will be asked to sign in with an e-mail address and password. In such cases, SDOL will issue you with credentials which will allow you to access those services. You can use the same credentials to sign in to many different SDOL sites and services. By signing in on one SDOL site or service, you may be automatically signed into other SDOL sites and services.

If you access our services via a mobile phone, you may also use your telephone number and a PIN as an alternative credential to your username and password. As part of creating your credentials, you may also be requested to provide questions and secret answers, which we use to help verify your identity and assist in resetting your password, as well as an alternate e-mail address. Some services may require added security, and in these cases, you may be asked to create an additional security key.

Finally, a unique ID number will be assigned to your credentials which will be used to identify your credentials and associated information. We may collect information about your interaction with SDOL sites and services. For example, we may use website analytics tools on our site to retrieve information from your browser, including the site you came from, the search engine(s) and the keywords you used to find our site, the pages you view within our site, your browser add-ons, and your browser's width and height. We may also use technologies, such as cookies and web beacons (described below), to collect information about the pages you view, the links you click and other actions you take on our sites and services.

Additionally, we collect certain standard information that your browser sends to every website you visit, such as your IP address, browser type and language, access times and referring Web site addresses. We also deliver advertisements (see the Display of Advertising section below) and provide Web site analytics tools on non-SDOL sites and services, and we may collect information about page views on these third party sites as well. When you receive newsletters or promotional e-mail from SDOL, we may use web beacons (described below), customized links or similar technologies to determine whether the e-mail has been opened and which links you click in order to provide you more focused e-mail communications or other information.

In order to offer you a more consistent and personalized experience in your interactions with SDOL, information collected through one SDOL service may be combined with information obtained through other SDOL services. We may also supplement the information we collect with information obtained from other companies. For example, we may use services from other companies that enable us to derive a general geographic area based on your IP address in order to customize certain services to your geographic area.

Use of Your Personal Information

SDOL collects and uses your personal information to operate and improve its sites and services. These uses may include providing you with more effective customer service; making the sites or services easier to use by eliminating the need for you to repeatedly enter the same information; performing research and analysis aimed at improving our products, services and technologies; and displaying content and advertising that are customized to your interests and preferences. For more information about the use of information for advertising, see the Display of Advertising section below.

We also use your personal information to communicate with you. We may send certain mandatory service communications such as welcome letters, billing reminders, information on technical service issues, and security announcements. Some SDOL services may send periodic member letters that are considered part of the service. We may also occasionally send you product surveys or promotional mailings to inform you of other products or services available from SDOL and its affiliates. Personal information collected on SDOL sites and services may be stored and processed in any country in which SDOL or its affiliates, subsidiaries or service providers maintain facilities.

Sharing of Your Personal Information

Except as described in this statement, we will not disclose your personal information outside of SDOL and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates without your consent. Some SDOL sites allow you to choose to share your personal information with select SDOL partners so that they can contact you about their products, services or offers. Some SDOL services may be co-branded and offered in conjunction with another company. If you register for or use such services, both SDOL and the other company may receive information collected in conjunction with the co-branded services.

We occasionally hire other companies to provide limited services on our behalf, such as handling the processing and delivery of mailings, providing customer support, hosting websites, processing transactions, or performing statistical analysis of our services. Those service providers will be permitted to obtain only the personal information they need to deliver the service. They are required to maintain the confidentiality of the information and are prohibited from using it for any other purpose. However, for credit card processing, our fraud detection vendors may use aggregate data to help improve their service. This helps them more accurately detect fraudulent uses of credit cards.

We may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications, in order to: (a) comply with the law or respond to lawful requests or legal process; (b) protect the rights or property of SDOL or our customers, including the enforcement of our agreements or policies governing your use of the services; or (c) act on a good faith belief that such access or disclosure is necessary to protect the personal safety of SDOL employees, customers or the public.

Accessing Your Personal Information

You may have the ability to view or edit your personal information online. In order to help prevent your personal information from being viewed by others, you will be required to sign in with your credentials (e-mail address and password). The appropriate method(s) for accessing your personal information will depend on which sites or services you have used.

Communication Preferences

You can stop the delivery of future promotional e-mail from SDOL sites and services by following the specific instructions in the e-mail you receive. These choices do not apply to the display of online advertising. Nor do they apply to the receipt of mandatory service communications that are considered part of certain SDOL services, which you may receive periodically unless you cancel the service.

Display of Advertising

The Web sites and online services we offer, as well as those of our partners, maybe, in some cases, supported by advertising. We may display ads on our own sites and the sites of our advertising partners. When we display online advertisements to you, we will place a persistent cookie on your computer in order to recognize your computer each time we display an ad to you. Because we may serve advertisements on many different Web sites, we are able to compile information over time about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw and/or clicked on the advertisements we display.

We use this information to make predictions about your characteristics, interests or preferences and to display targeted advertisements that we believe may be of interest to you. We may also associate this information with your subsequent visit, purchase or other activity on participating advertisers’ Web sites in order to determine the effectiveness of the advertisements. While we may use some of the information we collect in order to personalize the ads we show you, we designed our systems to select ads based only on data that does not personally and directly identify you.

For example, we may select the ads we display according to certain general interest categories or segments that we have inferred based on (a) demographic or interest data, including any you may have provided when creating an account (e.g. age, postal code, gender), demographic or interest data acquired from other companies, and a general geographic location derived from your IP address, (b) the pages you view and links you click when using SDOL’s and its advertising partners’ Web sites and services, and (c) the search terms you enter when using SDOL’s Internet search services.

Security of Your Personal Information

SDOL is committed to protecting the security of your personal information. We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. For example, we store the personal information you provide on computer systems with limited access, which are located in controlled facilities. When we transmit highly confidential information (such as a credit card number or password) over the Internet, we protect it through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol. If a password is used to help protect your accounts and personal information, it is your responsibility to keep your password confidential. Do not share this information with anyone. If you are sharing a computer with anyone you should always log out before leaving a site or service to protect access to your information from subsequent users.

Collection and Use of Children's Personal Information

Many SDOL sites and services are intended for general audiences and do not knowingly collect any personal information from children. When a SDOL site does collect age information, and users identify themselves as under 13, the site will either block such users from providing personal information. We encourage you to talk with your children about communicating with strangers and disclosing personal information online. You and your child can visit our online safety resources for additional information about using the Internet safely.

Use of Cookies

SDOL Web sites use "cookies" to enable you to sign in to our services and to help personalize your online experience. A cookie is a small text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Web page server. Cookies contain information that can later be read by a Web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer. One of the primary purposes of cookies is to store your preferences and other information on your computer in order to save you time by eliminating the need to repeatedly enter the same information and to display your personalized content and appropriate advertising on your later visits to these sites.

SDOL Web sites also use cookies as described in the Collection of your Information and Display of Advertising sections of this privacy statement. When you sign in to a site using your credentials, we store your unique ID number, and the time you signed in, in an encrypted cookie on your hard disk. This cookie allows you to move from page to page at the site without having to sign in again on each page. When you sign out, these cookies are deleted from your computer.

We also use cookies to improve the sign in experience. For example, your e-mail address may be stored in a cookie that will remain on your computer after you sign out. This cookie allows your e-mail address to be pre-populated, so that you will only need to type your password the next time you sign in. If you are using a public computer or do not otherwise want this information to be stored, you can select the appropriate radio button on the sign-in page, and this cookie will not be used.

You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Most Web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. If you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to sign in or use other interactive features of SDOL sites and services that depend on cookies, and some advertising preferences that are dependent on cookies may not be able to be respected. If you choose to accept cookies, you also have the ability to later delete cookies that you have accepted. In Internet Explorer 7, you can delete cookies by selecting “Tools”, “Delete browsing history” and clicking the “Delete Cookies” button. If you choose to delete cookies, any settings and preferences controlled by those cookies, including advertising preferences, will be deleted and may need to be recreated.

Use of Web Beacons SDOL

Web pages may contain electronic images known as Web beacons - sometimes called single-pixel gifs - that may be used to assist in delivering cookies on our sites and allow us to count users who have visited those pages and to deliver co-branded services. We may include Web beacons in promotional e-mail messages or our newsletters in order to determine whether messages have been opened and acted upon. SDOL may also employ Web beacons from third parties in order to help us compile aggregated statistics regarding the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns or other operations of our sites.

We prohibit Web beacons on our sites from being used by third parties to collect or access your personal information. Finally, we may work with other companies that advertise on SDOL sites to place Web beacons on their sites in order to allow us to develop statistics on how often clicking on an advertisement on a SDOL site results in a purchase or other action on the advertiser's site.

Controlling Unsolicited E-mail ("Spam")

SDOL is concerned about controlling unsolicited commercial e-mail, or "spam." SDOL has a strict Anti-Spam Policy prohibiting the use its mail servers or other SDOL-provided e-mail account to send spam. SDOL will not sell, lease or rent its e-mail subscriber lists to third parties. While SDOL continues to actively review and implement new technology, such as expanded filtering features, there is no currently available technology that will totally prevent the sending and receiving of unsolicited e-mail. Using junk e-mail tools and being cautious about the sharing of your e-mail address while online will help reduce the amount of unsolicited e-mail you receive.

Enforcement of This Privacy Statement

If you have questions regarding this statement, you should first contact us by using our Web form or by contacting us through our customer service organisation.

Contacting Us

SDOL welcomes your comments regarding this privacy statement.

If you have questions about this statement or believe that we have not adhered to it, please contact us by using our Web form. If you have a technical or general support question, please contact us through the pages on this website.