Privacy Policy.
Welcome! This Privacy Policy applies to your use of Curiosity Zone Science websites, including ExperimentExchange.com and CuriosityZone.com, and mobile device applications provided by Curiosity Zone Science or our affiliates (collectively, “Curiosity Zone,” “we” or “us”) that include an authorized link or reference to this policy (collectively, the “Services”). Except as specified herein, this policy does not apply to information you may provide to us offline.
By using any of our Services, you agree that this Online Privacy Policy and our Visitor Agreement govern your use of our Services and any dispute concerning the Services. Please take a few minutes to read them before using or registering to access our Services.
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@curiosityzone.com
Children Under 13.
This Service is not for children under the age of 13. Curiosity Zone cares about protecting the privacy of children; we won’t knowingly allow anyone under the age of 13 to provide us any personally identifying information online. Children should always get permission from their parents before sending any personal information about themselves (such as their names, email addresses, and phone numbers) over the Internet, to us or to anyone else. We encourage you to become involved in your children’s online experience, and to share your knowledge and experience with your young ones. If you’re under 13, please do not register for our Service or provide us with any personally identifying information (such as your name, email address or phone number).
Information Collected Through Our Services.
The information we gather through our Services falls into two categories: (1) information you voluntarily supply to us when you register, purchase products, participate in promotions or surveys, submit comments or questions or otherwise communicate with us or others through the Services, and (2) information collected automatically as you use our Services, including without limitation, information that may be collected through our mobile applications while they are in use or running in the background of your device.
Third-party providers and advertisers featured on, or linked to or from, our Services may also gather information through processes that we don’t control and subject to their own separate privacy policies, which may differ from ours. Some of our Services also may participate in third-party advertising networks or similar services that collect information about your computer or device and your activity online and as a mobile user to tailor some of the advertising that you see on our Services and other third-party sites, mobile apps and marketing channels in their networks to your interests.
Specifically,
- Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to our website or other websites.
- Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to our users based on your visit to our site and/or other sites on the Internet.
- Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated.
Registration and Other Personally Identifying Information.
You may register to use certain features of our Services. When you register, we may collect personally identifying information. In addition, when you use various aspects of our Services, we may ask you for personally identifying information, including when you complete a survey, enter a contest, or report a problem with our Services.
Contests and Other Promotions.
From time to time, we may offer contests, sweepstakes or other promotions. Participation in these promotions may require registration for our Services (see “Registration and Other Personally Identifying Information,” above). We may also automatically enter our users in some promotions. If you choose to participate in promotions that require registration, we will collect contact information such as your name, address, and email address and we may share this information with co-sponsors or other third parties involved in the promotion that we identify in the rules or entry materials. We don’t control these third parties’ privacy practices, and our Privacy Policy does not apply to their collection and use of your information. We may also share some of your entry information with third parties or the public in connection with the administration of the promotion, such as winner selection and prize fulfillment, and as permitted by the promotion’s official rules, such as on a winners’ list.
Information Collected Automatically When You Use Our Services.
Curiosity Zone or third-party contractors we engage may collect certain information automatically when you use our Services, including but not limited to:
- Web pages, content and advertisements you view and links you click on while navigating within our Services;
- Information about your interactions with our video or audio content, such as the type of content accessed via our Services;
- Information about your interactions with our email messages, such as the links you click on and whether you open or forward a message, the date and time of these interactions and the device you use to read emails;
- The site you visited before visiting a Curiosity Zone website and the site you visited after visiting a Curiosity Zone website;
- Your Internet Protocol (IP) address (a numerical address assigned to your computer by your Internet service provider so that other computers connected to the Internet can communicate with you online) that can sometimes be used to derive your general geographic area;
- Search terms you enter using our Services or on a referral site;
- Unique identifiers, including mobile device identification numbers, that can identify the physical location of devices in accordance with applicable law;
- Your device type, screen size, browser type, language and other settings, memory capacity, plug-ins, Internet domain, TCP configuration parameters, operating system, carrier code, time zone and the names, versions and package IDs of software installed on your device;
- Standard server log information; and
- Information collected through cookies, web beacons and other tracking technologies (see additional descriptions of these terms below).
Personalization and Tracking Technologies.
Like most website and mobile application operators, we, our service providers or other third parties acting on our behalf or with our permission, use embedded scripts, “cookies,” web beacons, device identifiers and other tracking technologies to operate, analyze and improve our Services and tailor content and advertising to user interests. Third-party companies that provide some of the tools and features accessible through our Services and advertisers and other companies involved in the delivery of advertisements you see on our Services and other websites also may use tracking technologies to collect information about your use of our Services.
Cookies.
Cookies are small amounts of data (often containing a unique identifier) that are stored in separate files within your computer or device’s Internet browser. Cookies are accessed and recorded by the websites you visit, and by the companies that deliver the advertisements you see on our services, so they can recognize the same browser navigating online. You can set your browser to accept or reject most cookies, or to notify you when a cookie is set. (Each browser is different, so check the “Help” menu of your browser to learn how to change your cookie preferences.) It is up to you to decide whether to allow us or third parties to set cookies, but if you block cookies, you may not be able to view or access some of the features of our Services. Please be aware that certain browsers cannot block or delete so-called “Flash” cookies, which use a feature of the Adobe Flash video player to store information on your computer. For information about how to delete Flash cookies, please visit the Adobe website.
Web Beacons and Other Tracking Technologies.
Web beacons (sometimes called “transparent GIFs,” “clear GIFs,” or “pixel tags”) are small strings of code that embed a small graphic image (usually invisible) on a web page or in an email or advertisement. When your browser downloads a web beacon, the server that sends the corresponding image to your browser can recognize and store certain types of information such as cookies previously set, the time and date that you viewed the page embedded with the beacon and a description of that page.
Mobile Device IDs and Location-Based Information.
Certain mobile devices, including smart phones and tablet devices, contain unique device IDs that can be used to identify their physical location. Some mobile device IDs are persistent, while others may be resettable by accessing the device’s privacy settings. Mobile devices also typically transmit caller ID data (which may include a phone number) when used to transmit a telephone call or text message. When you use mobile devices to access our Services, we may collect and transmit unique device IDs and collect caller ID data, as well as other information about your device, including without limitation, your wireless carrier, the make, model, operating system, capacity and settings of your device, the names, package IDs and versions of other software you have downloaded to your device and information about how you interact with and navigate within our Service. With your consent, we or our authorized service providers and partners also may use precise geolocation technology such as GPS or Wi-Fi triangulation or mobile Bluetooth beacon technology to collect information about the exact location of your mobile device. Precise location information may be collected both while you are using one of our mobile applications and continuously over time while our apps are not in use but are running in the background of your device. This information may be used for the purposes described below in “How We Use The Information We Collect,” including to tailor special offers and advertising to your interests, both in our Services, and in third-party marketing channels. You can withdraw your consent to the further collection and use of your precise device location data through any of our mobile apps by accessing your device’s privacy settings as further explained below in “Opt-out Choices: Precise Device Location Tracking.” For information about how to reset your advertising identifier and your other opt-out choices relating to interest-based advertising in mobile applications, see “Opt-out Choices: Mobile App Advertising and Tracking.”
Social Network Posting Tools and “Share” Features.
You can access various social network posting and sharing tools through our Services that are operated by third parties, including a “share” button that allows you to post links to content and features that you believe will be of interest to others on your social network pages. When you visit a page that includes one of these sharing tools, the third-party company that operates the tool may be collecting information about your browser, device and online activity through its own tracking technologies and subject to its own separate privacy policy, which may differ from ours.
Information We May Obtain From Other Sources.
We may combine any information collected through the Services with other information that we obtain about you, your computer, and/or device from other companies and sources, including third-party data suppliers and public databases. The following are examples of information we may collect from other sources:
- Name, postal address, email address and telephone number;
- Demographic data, such as age, gender, and income level;
- Your interests and purchase behavior;
- Publicly-visible data, such as your posts and submissions to blogs, video-sharing services, and other interactive forums; and
- Other navigation data, such as web sites visited and advertisements viewed or clicked on.
How We Use The Information We Collect.
Our primary goal in collecting information is to provide you with a customized experience when using our Services and to make them more valuable to you. Because our Services are supported by advertising, we also use the information we collect to help us and advertisers efficiently reach consumers who are most likely to be interested in particular products and services. We only use payment and identity verification information as necessary to complete a particular transaction, provide a requested service, enforce legal rights or comply with applicable law.
In addition, we and our authorized service providers generally use other information that we or they collect about you to:
- Customize the content you see when you use our Services and other services as you navigate online;
- Analyze, operate and improve our Services, and fulfill your requests for products, services, and information, including any request to send you email and electronic newsletters;
- Help recognize your browser as a previous visitor and save and remember any preferences that may have been set while your browser was visiting one of our Services;
- Enable you to participate in features such as surveys, polls, sweepstakes, and message boards;
- Attribute content that you post to forums we operate on our Services;
- Recognize the same users as they access online or mobile services using multiple browsers or devices and deliver to them appropriate interest-based content and advertising;
- Provide you with special offers, promotions and information from companies within our corporate family, and select third parties in accordance with applicable law;
- Control the display of advertising and develop and deliver advertising tailored to your interests, including advertising that you see on our Services, advertising you see on third-party websites, mobile applications and email programs, and offers and advertising you may receive offline or as push-notifications, from us or others;
- Measure and analyze visitor traffic and usage patterns and improve the quality and effectiveness of our content, features, advertisements, and other communications;
- Conduct market or audience analysis and related reporting;
- Understand whether our users read email messages and click on links contained within those messages;
- Prevent potentially prohibited or illegal activities, comply with applicable law and enforce our Visitor Agreement;
- For any other purposes disclosed to you at the time we collect your information or pursuant to your consent.
How We Disclose Information and Your Related Opt-out Choices.
Except as otherwise expressly noted herein or within the Services, we may share any information collected through our Services, including without limitation, your name, postal address (and any other information we combine with that information) with our provider partners and service providers, and with carefully selected third-party organizations and marketers of products and services potentially of interest to you. The following describes some of the circumstances in which we may share information about our users:
Email.
Except as described in this policy, we will not sell or rent your email address to unaffiliated third parties for their email marketing purposes, without your consent.
We share our users’ email addresses with service providers that send email messages and deliver targeted advertising on our behalf. These service providers may collect data about how you interact with those messages (including information about whether and when you opened a particular message or clicked on a link within a message and the device you used to do so) and analyze it in conjunction with similar information they collect when you respond to emails they send on behalf of their other clients who are not affiliated with us. They use this email response information in combination with your email address to target and optimize the delivery of emails and email advertising they send on our behalf and for their other clients. We may also provide our service providers with lists of our user email addresses in a hashed, encrypted or anonymized form that they use to recognize our users as they navigate online or use third-party email services and enable the delivery of interest-based advertising to those users. We do not authorize our service providers to share your email address with their other clients.
Provider Partners and Service Providers.
To make your experience with our Services more useful and enjoyable, we may offer some features (such as social sharing tools and chat rooms) in conjunction with third-party providers (“Provider Partners”) that specialize in operating such services. We share with each of these Provider Partners such information as is useful or necessary to provide you with the services we offer through that Provider Partner. We also contract with other companies to provide specialized services to us, including but not limited to credit-card and billing processing, shipping, marketing, advertising optimization and interest-based targeting, email and text message distribution, data processing, mobile and website analytics and promotions management. We reserve the right to share with these companies any information we collect about you and/or authorize them to collect information from you directly for purposes consistent with this Privacy Policy.
Aggregated and Anonymous Information.
We and our service providers may combine information about you with information that we or they collect about other users of our Services and share it in a form that does not identify you personally. We and our service providers may also anonymize information by removing any information (such as your name) that makes the information personally identifying to you. We may use aggregated information or other anonymous information and disclose it to third parties as we deem appropriate.
Information You Post to Blogs, Discussion Forums and Community or Social Networking Areas.
Any information that you choose to post to blogs, discussion forums, or other community or social networking services that we offer can be seen, collected and used by anyone who has access to the applicable service. We cannot be responsible for any unauthorized third-party use of such information.
Legal Compliance, Business Transfers and Other Disclosures.
Notwithstanding anything to the contrary stated herein or within our Services, we may occasionally release information about users of our Services when we deem such release appropriate to comply with law, respond to compulsory process or law enforcement requests, enforce our Visitor Agreement, or protect the rights, property or safety of users of our Services, the public, Curiosity Zone, our affiliates, or any third party. Over time, we may reorganize or transfer various assets and lines of business. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary stated herein or on our Services, we reserve the right to disclose or transfer any information we collect to third parties in connection with any proposed or actual purchase, sale, lease, merger, foreclosure, liquidation, amalgamation or any other type of acquisition, disposal, transfer, conveyance or financing of all or any portion of Curiosity Zone or our affiliates.
Your Opt-Out Choices.
Postal Mail.
To remove your name and postal address from lists (if any) that we sell or rent to third parties for their direct marketing purposes, or to opt-out of receiving marketing offers for other Curiosity Zone products, please send your request to us in a letter addressed to Curiosity Zone LLC, Attn: Opt Out, 525-K East Market Street #195, Leesburg, VA 20176..
Email.
You can opt-out from any Curiosity Zone email newsletter or commercial email list and prevent the collection of related email response information by our email service providers by using the unsubscribe link at the bottom of each message and/or by visiting the Email Preferences page on our sites and updating your preferences. If you no longer want to receive third-party email offers that you requested through our Services, simply follow the advertiser’s unsubscribe link or opt-out instructions that should be included in every commercial message you receive. If you wish to disable web beacons in our email messages, turn images “off” in your email client (e.g., Outlook or Outlook Express). Please refer to the settings or options menu in your email client for more information.
Interest-Based Advertising.
Curiosity Zone follows the Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral advertising released by the Digital Advertising Alliance (“DAA”) in July 2009. To opt-out of our use of your website viewing data to serve interest-based advertising on third-party websites and email newsletters, visit the DAA’s Consumer Choice Page. Note that you must opt-out separately from each computer or device and browser that you use to access our Services and if you clear your cookies, you will need to repeat the opt-out process. Also note that the preferences you select on the DAA’s Consumer Choice Page do not apply to the collection of cross-app data from your mobile device. The DAA offers a separate choice tool for the collection of cross-app data on a mobile device for interest-based advertising and other applicable uses. To exercise choice for companies participating in this choice tool, you can install the DAA’s AppChoices app. Please also review the “Mobile App Advertising and Tracking” section below for additional choices.
Most of the third-party advertising and data companies we work with, including DoubleClick and Google, also subscribe to the DAA Principles and/or are members of the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”). To learn more about the information collection practices of NAI members and your related opt-out choices, please visit the NAI’s website here. You can opt out of interest-based advertising from Google by visiting the About Google Ads page or permanently opt out of the DoubleClick cookie by installing the DoubleClick opt out extension. For information about Google Analytics’ information practices and related opt-out choices, please visit their website.
Mobile App Advertising and Tracking.
We, our authorized service providers and/or other third-party partners involved in the delivery of advertising you receive through our mobile applications may collect information about your mobile device, including unique anonymous advertising identifiers and the names and IDs of apps you have installed, as well as information about how you use our mobile applications and other unaffiliated applications. We and our partners use this information to enable interest-based advertising you receive through our Services and within third-party apps and other marketing channels. Depending on your device and operating system, you may be able to reset your mobile device’s advertising identifier to limit this data collection or prevent the collection of usage data across unaffiliated applications for interest-based advertising purposes by accessing the privacy settings on your mobile device. Each operating system, iOS for Apple devices, Android for Android devices and Windows for Microsoft devices, provides its own instructions. Visit the privacy settings for your mobile device or contact your platform operator for more information.
Precise Device Location Tracking.
If you authorized us and/or our service providers to collect and/or share information about the precise location of your device through a mobile application, you can always withdraw your consent and prevent the further collection and sharing of your precise device location information by accessing your device’s location privacy settings. Each operating system, iOS for Apple devices, Android for Android devices and Windows for Microsoft devices, provides its own instructions on how to turn off precise location sharing. Access the privacy settings for your mobile device or contact your platform operator for more information.
Do Not Track.
We do not currently respond to browser do-not-track signals. Instead, we adhere to the standards set out in this privacy policy and offer the opt-out choices described above.
Sites to Which We Link.
We also may provide links to other websites or services, and provide access to products and services offered by third parties, whose privacy policies we don’t control.
How to Correct or Update Your Information.
Curiosity Zone provides you with the ability to access and edit certain personally identifying information that you have provided to us through our Services. To update this information, please visit the “My Account” area or comparable feature of the Service you used to enter your information. If you cannot locate such a feature, send us an email at privacy@curiosityzone.com.
Security, Retention and Storage of Information.
We use commercially reasonable procedures to protect the personally-identifying information that we collect. No security system is impenetrable, however. We cannot guarantee the security of our databases, nor can we guarantee that information you supply won’t be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet. Please see our Visitor Agreement for more information related to posting materials on our Services including our use of such materials.
For the purposes set out in this Online Privacy Policy, personally-identifying information may be transferred to, processed, stored and accessed by us, our affiliates and our unaffiliated service providers in the United States and in other jurisdictions where we or they operate. Courts and other authorities in these jurisdictions may, in certain circumstances, be entitled to access your personally-identifying information. By using the Services, you consent to this transfer, processing, storage and access of your personally-identifying information in and/or outside of the jurisdiction in which you reside.
Your California Privacy Rights.
(As provided by California Civil Code Section 1798.83)
California residents have the right to request and obtain from us, once a year and free of charge, a list of the third parties to whom we have disclosed certain types of personal information (if any) for their direct marketing purposes in the prior calendar year. At our option, we may respond to such requests by providing instructions about how our users can exercise their options to prevent our disclosure of personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. You can read these instructions above in the section of our Online Privacy Policy titled “How We Disclose Information and Your Related Opt-out Choices.” Or, if you are a California resident and prefer that we send you a separate response, please email your request to privacy@curiosityzone.com
Changes to Our Privacy Policy.
Digital technology is rapidly evolving. If we decide to change our Privacy Policy in the future, we’ll post the changes here and indicate at the top of the policy the last date on which it was updated. Unless otherwise noted, all changes will be effective when posted.
