General Users

The Association of Alternative Newsmedia, and our data service provider, DesertNet, are dedicated to maintaining the privacy of our users.

We will never intentionally disclose any personal identification information about you as an individual user to any third party without having received your permission. We may request personal identification information from you in connection with your use of, or participation in, our contests, sweepstakes, games, surveys, forums, subscription registrations, content submissions, chats, bulletin boards, discussion groups, requests for suggestions, and in connection with other activities, services or resources. In all of these cases, we will collect personal identification information from you only if you voluntarily submit such information to us.

If you do provide us with personal information, we may use it to conduct the activities described above and for internal marketing and promotional purposes. Additionally, by registering for an AAN convention or conference, you consent to share the information you provide during registration with exhibitors and/or event sponsors.

We will release specific information about you or your account to comply with any valid legal process such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute or court order. We will also release specific information in special cases, such as if there is a physical threat to you or others.

Please note that if you give out personal information online -- for example, through a message posting -- that information can be collected and used by third parties. Although we strive to protect our users' privacy, we cannot guarantee the security of information you post in these forums. You disclose such information at your own risk.

This policy does not apply to your use of external sites to which any of the altweeklies.com screens may link.

Tracking of site usage

Our system collects information about your computer so we can collect aggregate data about how our site is used. That information includes your computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address, Web browser and operating system. We also note how visitors were referred to our site, what search terms were most popularly used, how many and which pages were viewed and the length of time spent on the site. This information is studied in summary to enable us to understand the needs and interests of our users. No attempt is made to associate usage patterns with specific individuals. We may share this aggregate data with our affiliates and potential advertisers.

Communications

AltWeeklies.com communicates only with users who have requested information and, in so doing, supplied their e-mail address or other means of contact. We send out the following information:

Service Announcements: On rare occasions, we may send out an announcement to newsletter subscribers regarding a change in our service.

Customer Service: We will respond--usually by e-mail--to users who write to us with questions.

We do not share e-mail addresses of newsletter subscribers with any other company or affiliate.

Cookies

AltWeeklies.com uses cookies, alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser and to provide features such as logging into the site and other personalized settings. AltWeeklies.com does not use cookies to retrieve any information from your computer other than the data originally sent in an AltWeeklies.com cookie.

Links to other sites

AltWeeklies.com links to articles in many of the 122 newspapers that belong to the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. Each of these sites is responsible for its own content and privacy practices. Visitors can read the privacy policies on those Web sites.

Copyright

Except for original material posted at AltWeeklies.com, which is copyrighted by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, all articles linked to from this site are copyrighted by the individual AAN-member newspapers.

Disclaimers

AltWeeklies.com links to articles published in AAN-member alternative newsweeklies. Each member newspaper has full responsibility for the content on its site, including its legality, reliability, appropriateness, originality and copyright.

Changes to privacy policy

Any changes to the privacy policy will be posted on the AltWeeklies.com Web site.

Questions

If you have any questions about our privacy policy, contact us by U.S. mail, e-mail or phone:

Association of Alternative Newsmedia
1156 15th St. NW, Suite 1005
Washington, D.C. 20005
E-mail: web[at]aan.org

Separate Privacy Policy for AAN Members

Association of Alternative Newsmedia members who register to use the Atlweeklies.com Web site are not entitled to the same degree of privacy as users from the general public. AltWeeklies.com keeps track of the identities of all registered users and notes which stories each member posts to the site.

Members agree to post to AltWeeklies.com only material that has appeared in one of AAN's 122 member papers or announcements about articles slated for publication in at least one AAN paper. Those who violate this policy may lose their privilege to post articles.

AltWeeklies.com may terminate or suspend a member's permission to post articles to the site for any reason. AltWeeklies.com also reserves the right to remove content from the site for any reason.

Occasionally, e-mail addresses or address labels of AAN members are provided to associate members of AAN who do business with AAN papers, to freelance reporters gathering information for articles to be posted on the AAN website, or to others in the news-gathering business.

The association reserves the right to sell address lists of its members to other businesses or organizations that have a legitimate work-related purpose for contacting our members.