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Wednesday, November 27, 2024
The independent student publication of The University at Buffalo, since 1950

Privacy Policy

Last Updated: July 27, 2020

The Spectrum Student Periodical, Inc ("The Spectrum," "we" or "our") cares about your privacy and the security of your information

This Privacy Policy describes the privacy practices of The Spectrum in connection with our print and digital products and services, including our website https://www.ubspectrum.com, newsletters and other content we deliver via email, and any other site or service that posts or links to this Privacy Policy (collectively, the "Services"). It describes the kinds of information we may gather in connection with the Services, how we use your information, to whom we disclose your information, and how you can manage your information. 

By using our Services, you are accepting the practices described in our Privacy Policy, including our use of cookies and similar online tools. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, please do not use our Services. We reserve the right to modify or amend the terms of our privacy policy from time to time without notice. Any changes to this Privacy Policy will become effective as of the "last updated" date set forth above. Your continued use of our Services following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes

Our Services are under constant development. This Privacy Policy may therefore be modified and updated on an ongoing basis. Please check back to this page regularly.

1. WHAT INFORMATION IS COLLECTED

We may collect several types of information about you in connection with the Services

Information You Provide to Us. There are a number of circumstances in which you supply us with personal information in connection with the Services, which include:

  • Contact data, such as your name and e-mail address.
  • Registration data, such as information you provide when you subscribe to or register for any of our Services.
  • Marketing data, such as information related to your preferences for receiving communications, subscribing to our publications, newsletters and other content, completing surveys, or participating in market research.
  • Communications, such as information you provide when you send us an email, pitch, submit content, post a comment, request information, or otherwise correspond with us.
  • Demographic information, such as your class year, major, city, state, country of residence, postal code, gender and age.
  • Transaction data, such as your order history, products you have purchased, and information needed to process and fulfill your order, including your order details and delivery address.
  • Financial information, such as your payment card information. (Please note that a third party payment processor is responsible for all collection, processing, and storage of your Financial Information; at no time do we have direct access to or possession of any payment card information.)
  • Content you choose to upload to the Services, such as text, images, audio, and video, along with metadata associated with files you upload.
  • Other information that we may collect which is not specifically listed here, but which we will use in accordance with this Privacy Policy or as otherwise disclosed at the time of collection.

Information We Automatically Collect About Your Use of the Services. We, our service providers, and our business partners may automatically log information about you, your computer or mobile device, and your activity occurring on or through our websites, such as:

  • Device information:  We may collect device identifiers and settings such as your computer or mobile device model, IP address, other unique device identifiers, operating system version, browser type, language, and settings, and device type and settings.
  • Usage information:  We may collect information about the Services you use, the time, date, and duration of your use of the Services, your interaction with content offered through the Services, our referring website, browsing and search history, site and advertisement interactions, and software crash reports. We may also collect information stored using cookies, mobile ad identifiers, and similar technologies set on your device. Our servers may automatically keep an activity log of your use of the Services. We may collect such usage information at the individual or aggregate level.
  • Location information: We may collect and store your device's source IP address, which may disclose the general location of your device at the time you access the Services and precise location derived from GPS-enabled services.  

Information from Third Parties. We may receive information about you from third parties and combine it with information we receive from or about you. For example, when you interact with any The Spectrum account on a social media platform, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, we may collect the personal information available from that platform or that you make available to us on that page or account, including your social media account ID, username, user ID, profile picture, and networks to which you belong, friends and connections and contact information. 

Other Information We Collect. We also may collect other information about you, your device, or your use of the Services in ways that we describe to you at the point of collection. You may choose not to provide us with certain types of information, but doing so may affect your experience in using the Services.

2. HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION

We use your information for the following purposes and as otherwise described in this Privacy Policy or at the time of collection:

Providing the Services. We use your information to enable your use of the Services, send you electronic newsletters, post content you submit, and improve the Services. We may also use your information to establish and maintain the Services, provide support, facilitate social features, enable and support security and fraud prevention features, communicate with you about the Services, and provide information about our Services. To enable us to provide these Services, we may use the information we collect to identify you across sessions, browsers, and/or devices.

Contacting and Communicating with You about our Services. We may contact or communicate with you (by email, phone, or other medium) concerning: information about any transactions; editorial newsletters and content; invitations to events; offers or announcements about our products or features; offers or announcements about our third party partners' products or services; communications about your comments or information submissions; online surveys; and legal notices, policy updates, and other important information about the Services. All editorial and commercial email messages include instructions for unsubscribing from such future communications. 

Content and Advertising Analytics. We may use your information to help us better understand your use of, and our delivery of, the Services, including content selection, delivery, and reporting; and advertising selection, targeting, delivery, and reporting.

Delivering Advertising. We may use your information to facilitate the delivery of targeted advertising, promotions, and offers, on behalf of ourselves and our third party advertisers, both on our websites and elsewhere. Please see the "Third Parties" and "Privacy Choices" sections of this Privacy Policy for further information about our and third parties' use of cookies and other tracking technologies to provide you relevant ads, as well as information about how to disable cookies and make other choices related to targeted advertising.

Auditing and Tracking Our Delivery of Advertising. We may use your information to measure and report on the delivery of advertisements, including without limitation counting ad impressions to unique visitors, verifying positioning and quality of ad impressions, and auditing compliance with this specification and other standards.

Delivering Emails on Behalf of Advertisers or Third Party Partners. We may use your information, including the names and email addresses you provided to us subscribe to our newsletters or download certain content, to deliver marketing communications we believe may interest you on behalf of advertisers or third party partners regarding their products or services. (In such instances, we do not share our readers' information directly with these companies). If you do not want your information used for this purpose, you can opt-out of such use by e-mailing us at support@getsnworks.com.

Facilitating Social Media Engagement. We may use your information to enable you to interact with The Spectrum accounts on social media platforms and to help us determine which content or advertising to deliver to you on those platforms.

Providing Services to our Business Customers. We may use your information to facilitate the provision of services to business customers by 48U Studios, our sponsored content studio.

Learning about Our Users and Services. We conduct research on our users' demographics, interests and behavior, including performing statistical analysis of our users, and their use of the Services. We do this to optimize and improve the Services, our products, and our operations. We may use the information from one aspect of the Services for other aspects of Services. 

Research, Development, and Improving the Quality of our Services. We analyze use of the Services to analyze and improve the Services and to develop new products and services, including by studying user demographics and use of the Services.

Debugging. We may use your information to identify and repair errors that impair existing intended functionality.

To Aggregate Data or Create Anonymous Data. We may create aggregated, de-identified or other anonymous data records from your personal information and other individuals whose personal information we collect. We make personal information into anonymous data by excluding information (such as your name) that makes the data personally identifiable to you.  We may use this anonymous data and share it with third parties for our lawful business purposes, including to analyze and improve the Service and promote our business.

Information Security. We may use your information to detect security incidents, protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, and prosecute those responsible for that activity.

Protecting Our Rights, Protecting Others' Rights and Safety, and Fraud Prevention. We may use your personal information as we believe is necessary to detect, investigate, and prevent activities that may violate our policies or may be fraudulent or illegal; to protect, enforce, or defend the legal rights, privacy, safety, or property of The Spectrum, its employees, its Board, its agents, or its users. We may also use your personal information to ensure compliance with this Privacy Policy, with the Terms and Conditions that govern use of our respective websites, and any other terms of use to which you may agree in the course of using our Services.

Compliance with Law. We may use your personal information as required by law or if we in good faith believe that such action is necessary to comply with the law or legal process.

3. HOW WE SHARE YOUR INFORMATION

As described below, our information-sharing practices vary based on the type of information and the type of recipient.

Third-Party Service Providers. Third party agents and vendors perform functions on our behalf, including, but not limited to, hosting, content management tools, social media integration, marketing, analytics, and billing. These entities may have access to personal information if needed to perform their functions. If such access is required, the third parties will be obligated to maintain the confidentiality and security of that personal information. They are restricted from using, selling, distributing or altering this data in any way other than to provide the requested services to The Spectrum.

Third Party Advertising Partners. When you use our Services, third parties that provide content, advertising, or functionality to the Services may collect or receive information about you and/or your use of the Services, including through the use of cookies, beacons, and similar technologies. These third parties may use your information to provide you with advertising that is based on your interests and to measure and analyze ad performance, on our Services or other websites or platforms, and combine it with information collected across different websites, online services, and other devices. These third parties' use of your information will be based on their own privacy policies.

Third Party Business Partners. In order to access or download certain content sponsored by, we may ask you to provide certain information and for your consent to share that information with our third party business partners. Upon receiving your consent, we may share the information you provide with your business partners so that they can contact you regarding their products, services, or employment opportunities. These third parties' use of your information will be based on their own privacy policies.

Law Enforcement, Legal Process, and Emergency Situations. In some cases, we may use or disclose your personal information to a third party if we are required to do so by law or if we in good faith believe that such action is necessary to comply with the law or legal process; to protect and defend our rights or to prevent misuse of our Services; or to protect the personal safety of our employees, directors, agents, partners, the users of the Services, or the public.

Professional Advisors. We may disclose your personal information to professional advisors, such as lawyers, bankers, auditors, and insurers, where necessary in the course of the professional services that they render to us.

For Compliance, Fraud Prevention and Safety. We may share your personal information for the compliance, fraud prevention and safety purposes.

With Your Consent or At Your Direction. In addition to the sharing described in this Privacy Policy, we may share your information with third parties whenever you consent to or direct such sharing.

4. ONLINE TRACKING

When you use our Services, we and our third party partners (which provide content, advertising, functionality, measurements, or analytics for our Services) may use cookies, web beacons, and other similar technologies to track your use of the Services.

What Are Cookies?  Cookies are small text files that are stored in your device's browser when you visit a website. Cookies make it possible to recognize you as the same user across one or more browsing sessions, and across one or more websites. We and third parties use cookies for a variety of purposes, including remembering your sign-in credentials and preferences so that you do not have to input them each time you use the Services; allowing us and third parties to customize your experience using the Services, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you on our websites and elsewhere online; and allowing us and third parties to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our Services and your experience

What are Beacons?  Web beacons (also called "web tags" or "pixels") are tiny graphics or scripts that communicate information from your device to a server. Beacons can be embedded in online or mobile content, videos, advertisements, or emails. They allow a server to read certain types of information from your device, such as when you viewed the beacon (and thus the content in which it is embedded) and the IP address of the device on which you viewed the beacon. We and third parties use beacons for a variety of purposes, including to analyze the use of our Services and (in conjunction with cookies) to provide content and ads that are more relevant to you.

For more information about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set on your device and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

5. THIRD PARTIES

The Services may contain links to other websites, mobile applications, and other online services operated by third parties, and other websites, mobile applications, and online services operated by third parties may contain links to our Services. These links are not an endorsement of, or representation that we are affiliated with, any third party. In addition, our content may be included on web pages or in mobile applications or online services that are not associated with us. We do not control third party websites, mobile applications or online services, and we are not responsible for their actions of their privacy policies. Other websites and mobile applications follow different rules regarding the collection, use and sharing of your personal information. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of the other websites, mobile applications and online services you use.

We rely on third parties to provide many features of our Services using data about your use of our Services and of other websites. These third parties may use cookies, web beacons, or other technologies to collect and process your personal data for the purposes of information storage and access; personalization of our Services; measurement of and analytics regarding the use of our Services; content selection, delivery, and reporting; and advertising selection, targeting, delivery, and reporting

For instance, third party analytics services use cookies, web beacons, and other tracking technologies to collect information such as your IP address, time of visit, whether you are a return visitor, and any referring website, in order to help us analyze how users interact with and use the Services, compile reports on the Services' activity, and provide other data and insights related to the Services' usage

We may also allow our third party partners, third party ad serving networks, and unaffiliated advertisers (collectively, "Advertisers") to use cookies, web beacons, and other tracking technologies to provide ads about goods and services that may be of interest to you. Advertisers may place a separate cookie on your computer, mobile device, or browser, or utilize other data collection and tracking technologies, to collect information such as your IP address, browser type, server being used, area code and zip code associated with your server, and whether you respond to particular ads. Advertisers may collect information about your online activities over time, across different computers, devices, and browsers, and across different websites and other online services. Advertisers may use this information to provide interest-based advertising or other targeted content. Advertisers may use persistent identifiers to track your internet usage across other websites in their networks beyond our Services and may attempt to combine information they collect about you when you use the Services with information about you obtained from other sources.

In general, the information collected and generated by third parties is processed and stored by the third parties and will be subject to their respective privacy policies (which we do not control and for which we are not responsible). We do not control these third parties' tracking technologies or the information they may collect.

6. PRIVACY CHOICES

There are a number of ways to opt out of having your online activity and device data collected by third parties, which we have summarized below. We hope you find this information to be a helpful reference. Please note that using these tools to opt out of tracking and targeting does not mean that you will not receive advertising while using our Services or on other websites, nor will it prevent the receipt of interest-based advertising from third parties that do not participate in these programs. It will exclude you, however, from interest-based advertising conducted through participating networks and platforms, as provided by their policies and choice mechanisms.

Blocking Cookies in Your Browser. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but also usually allow you to modify your settings to disable or reject cookies, including cookies for interest-based advertising. If you delete your cookies or if you set your web browser to decline cookies, however, some features of the Services may not work or may not work as designed. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser; links to instructions provided by several of the most common browsers are below. You can also learn more at www.allaboutcookies.org.

Blocking advertising ID use in your mobile settings. Your mobile device settings may provide functionality to limit use of the advertising ID associated with your mobile device for interest-based advertising purposes.

Advertising Industry Opt Out Tools. Many of the third party advertisers that use tracking or targeting tools in connection with our Services either directly, or are members of programs that, offer you additional choices regarding the collection and use of your information. You can learn more about the options available to limit these participating third parties' collection and use of your information by visiting their websites:

Platform Opt Out Tools. Google and Facebook offer opt-out features that let you opt-out of use of your information for interest-based advertising.

Using Privacy Plug-ins or Browsers. You can block our websites from setting cookies used for interest-based ads by using a browser with privacy features, like Brave, or installing browser plugins like Privacy Badger, Ghostery or uBlock Origin, and configuring them to block third party cookies/trackers.

Do Not Track Some Internet browsers may be configured to send "Do Not Track" signals to the online services that you visit. We currently do not respond to "Do Not Track" or similar signals. To find out more about "Do Not Track," please visit http://www.allaboutdnt.com.

7. CHILDREN'S PRIVACY

The Services are not intended for children under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect information from children under the age of 16 and we do not target the Services to children under the age of 16. If you are under 16 years of age, do not provide personal information to The Spectrum without providing us with consent from your parents. If we discover that a child under the age of 16 has provided us with personal information and we do not have parental consent, we will delete that child's information as soon as reasonably practicable. If you believe that company has been provided with the personal information of a child under the age of 16 without parental consent, please notify us immediately at support@getsnworks.com.

8. OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION

How Your Information Is Secured. We employ commercially reasonable controls to protect the personal information we collect. However, security risk is inherent in all internet and information technologies and we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information. You need to help protect the privacy of your own information. You must take precautions to protect the security of any personal information that you may transmit over any home networks, wireless routers, wireless (WiFi) networks or similar devices by using encryption and other techniques to prevent unauthorized persons from intercepting or receiving any of your personal information. You are responsible for the security of your information when using unencrypted, open access or otherwise unsecured networks.

How Long Your Information Is Stored. The time period for which we keep information varies according to the purpose for which it is used for, but we may retain your information for as long as we provide you with the Services

Emails and Newsletters. You may always opt-out of receiving future e-mail marketing messages and newsletters from The Spectrum by following the instructions contained within the emails and newsletters, or by e-mailing support@getsnworks.com. 

9. QUESTIONS? Contact us at support@getsnworks.com.

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