The Industry Standard collects personally identifying information and data about individuals, their company, and the company's demographics "personally identifying information and data" including (i) when you provide information to The Industry Standard, such as when you register or sign up for any of our products such as subscriptions, e-mails, contests, newsletters, memberships, RSS Feeds, webcasts, White Papers, online seminars, conferences and other communications with The Industry Standard (ii) when you register or sign up on the The Industry Standard site or when you register for any other IDG Publishing Network products individually or through "auto register", your information will be known to The Industry Standard and (iii) from time to time we may add other information that we collect from third party sources to enhance the information that you provided to The Industry Standard Below is the current policy regarding the usage of personally identifying information and data collected by The Industry Standard. We reevaluate this policy on an ongoing basis based on feedback from users. The Industry Standard reserves the right to change its privacy policy. However, if there are any changes to the use of personally identifying information and data that are different from that stated at the time of collection, we will notify you by posting a notice on our website.

The Industry Standard or one of our IDG affiliated companies, or third party partners may place a "cookie" in the browser files of a user's computer. The cookie itself does not contain any personally identifying information, except when such information has been supplied by a subscriber or registered user.

If you have registered with The Industry Standard, the information in your "cookie" is used to provide a more personalized experience on our Web site.

If you haven't registered with our site, we may place a cookie on your system to help provide a more personalized experience on The Industry Standard.com. This cookie identifies you as a unique user by means of a tracking ID. However, if you have not registered on our site, we cannot link that user ID with personal identifying information and data about you such as your name or e-mail address.

Other cookies without personally identifying information and data are used to enable The Industry Standard to manage the banner advertisements presented or personalized information to the user.

Browsers or third-party software can allow you to block the use of cookies while you surf our site. Or, you can use third-party "anonymizer" services to mask information in your cookies, or even general data such as your IP address. In such cases you would not be able to take advantage of most of the personalization services offered by The Industry Standard.com.

The aggregated information we collect is used for a number of purposes including the following:

To improve the content and design of the The Industry Standard Web site
To enable our audit bureau to verify our claims of traffic to the site
To help advertisers, potential advertisers or marketers assess the suitability of the site for their ad campaigns
As clear GIFs, also known as pixel tags, provided by our ad-serving company to help manage online advertising. These clear GIFs let our ad-serving company recognize a browser's cookie when a user visits our site. The information we collect and share through this technology is not personally identifiable (It does not include your name, address, telephone number or e-mail address). For more information about our ad-serving company or for your choices about not having this anonymous information used, please visit www.doubleclick.net
The Industry Standard has contracted with DoubleClick to serve all advertising on www.The Standard.com, both on the Web site itself and through its e-mail newsletters. When DoubleClick is serving ads, it recognizes certain types of non-personally identifiable information, such as a user's IP address, browser version or type, operating system, service provider and time zone. DoubleClick also uses cookies to note the general content of the sites that users visit over time in order to serve ads on this site and other sites. Any pages a user calls up on www.The Industry Standard.com aren't connected with personally identifiable information collected either at www.The Industry Standard.com or elsewhere. For more details about the non-personally identifiable information DoubleClick collects and the opportunity to opt out of such data collection, please visit www.doubleclick.net/privacy_policy. We use web metric vendors to gather information to help us understand how users utilize our websites and other electronic products.
We may create and use aggregate customer data to understand more about the interests of our customers and may use the data to offer goods and services we believe may be of interest to our customers, on behalf of The Industry Standard, its sister IDG companies, or select organizations. In addition, The Industry Standard and/or its sister IDG companies may combine a users' profile data (in the aggregrate and without identifying a particular user) with a users’ “predictions” (in the aggregate and without identifying a particular user) for the purpose of compiling and creating research that may be sold or licensed by The Industry Standard or its sister IDG companies.

Postal addresses, and other personally identifying information and data that may be collected will be used to promote The Industry Standard and other IDG companies' products and services, and may be rented and/or licensed to selected outside firms for promotional purposes. Offers for which the personally identifying information and data are rented and/or licensed for use and the users are required to target their offers carefully.

Telephone numbers of The Industry Standard registered users are used by The Industry Standard to collect re-qualification data and may be used by The Industry Standard, IDG and other IDG companies, affiliates and it's advertisers for promotional purposes. The Industry Standard may rent and/or license for use phone numbers to selected outside firms for promotional purposes. Offers for which the numbers are rented and/or licensed for use are required to target their offers carefully.

Fax numbers of The Industry Standard registered users may be used for surveys for The Industry Standard and third parties. Except as set forth in this policy no fax numbers are rented and/or licensed to outside firms.

E-mail addresses of The Industry Standard registered users may be used to collect feedback by members of our editorial or research team, to promote The Industry Standard and IDG products and services, and they may be rented to other firms and/or licensed for promotional purposes. When you provide your email address to us, you agree to receive email from The Industry Standard and its sister IDG companies, and the IDG Network. We allow users to "opt-out" of receiving e-mail from outside firms, however, when e-mail information is collected and with each e-mail use of the user's address you can individually "opt-out" of receiving further e-mail from outside firms, The Industry Standard, its sister IDG companies and the IDG Network . If a user does not choose to "opt-out" at the time the e-mail address is collected, or does not respond to the questions concerning how we may use their email address, the address may be rented and/or licensed for use to outside firms. Offers for which the e-mail address is rented and/or licensed for use require the users to target their offers carefully. Users who later decide they want to change their preferences may do on the "Notifications" page at thestandard.com, inside the "Edit Profile" area.

Personal identifying information submitted on portions of our site developed with outside third parties may be shared with those third parties, and the information will be governed by those parties' privacy policies as well as The Industry Standard's. The Industry Standard, nor any of its parent companies or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates do not bear any responsibility for any actions or policies of such third parties.

The Industry Standard users should be aware that when they disclose personal identifying information (e.g., user name, address, company name, telephone number, demographic information, buying information, other data and E-mail address) in discussion forums, chat rooms or other areas that are publicly accessible by others, that information can be collected and used by others and may result in unsolicited messages from other posters or parties. The Industry Standard nor its parent company or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates are not responsible for any information that you provide in the above areas. In the event that the ownership of The Industry Standard or any of its products are sold or transferred all lists and data which contain personally identifying information and data including, for example, user name, address, company name, telephone number, demographic information, buying information, other data and e-mail address, will be transferred to the new owner.