Privacy Policy
Effective Date September 28, 2008
At NPR, we recognize the importance of privacy to visitors of our Web sites and services (the "NPR Web Sites" or "Service"). This Privacy Policy explains what type of information is collected from you when you visit the NPR Web sites and how that information may be used. Please note that this Privacy Policy is separate and distinct from the privacy policies governing NPR's www.getmyvote.org web site, the web sites of NPR's member stations, and the web sites that may link to or from the NPR Web Sites.
Gathering of Information
NPR collects personally-identifying information (such as your name, e-mail address, address, telephone number, credit card information) from the NPR Web Sites for a variety of purposes.
NPR asks visitors to provide certain personal information when they register for certain features or services of the NPR Web Sites (for example, the NPR Community, Application Programming Interface (API) Content access and NPR e-mail newsletters), when they create a profile in the NPR Community, when they request a transcript of NPR programs, when they e-mail or share a page of the NPR Web Sites, when they make a purchase from the NPR Online Shop, when they post, upload, transmit and/or otherwise submit ("Submit") a comment, message, story idea, essay, photo, image, or other text, content or material ("User Materials"), and when they register for any online contests. NPR also may ask visitors to provide personal information in other limited circumstances specified at the time the information is gathered. Any information that you Submit on or through the NPR Community or other social networking features, as part of story or blog comments, or otherwise Submit to the NPR Web Sites, may become public, including the full name and nickname that you provide when registering for the NPR Community.
Like all other Web servers, NPR's Web server automatically creates log files for each visitor who accesses the NPR Web Site. These "access logs" allow us to make our site more useful to our visitors. The access logs do NOT record a visitor's name, address, e-mail address, phone number, credit card numbers, or any other personally-identifying information. Rather, they contain some or all of the following information:
- The Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) of the machine which accessed our Web site.
- The date of the visit.
- The time of the visit.
- The path taken through our Web site.
- The browser being used.
- A list of files downloaded or viewed.
- The amount of time spent listening to/viewing media files.
- Any errors encountered.
Cookies and Other Technologies
NPR also uses 'cookies' to collect information. A cookie is a string of characters that can be written to a file on the user's hard drive when the user visits a Web site. Only the Web site that set the cookie can read it, and it can only be used as a record keeping device to store user IDs and information that the site already has. It cannot be used to read other information from the user's hard drive.
NPR uses cookies to track users' activity through the site in order to improve the site's architecture, to offer the user interactive features that would not be possible without them, and to recall specific information to save the user time during subsequent visits to the site. For example, cookies allow NPR to remember your registration information while you are logged in. Local station customization, the NPR Online Shop, and other interactive features also use cookies. Our sponsorship service vendors, which serve sponsorship messages onto our site, and third party vendors that measure and analyze the use of the NPR Web Sites for NPR, may also use their own cookies.
NPR and the third party vendors that measure and analyze use of the NPR Web sites for NPR also may use web beacons, alone or in conjunction with cookies, to help compile information about usage of the NPR Web Sites, including usage of certain API Content. A web beacon is an electronic image, also known as a single-pixel (1x1) or clear .gif., which can be used to recognize certain information on your computer, such as cookies, the time and date of a page viewed, and a description of where API Content is placed. We may use web beacons on this site from time to time for this and other purposes.
If you wish to prevent certain or all cookies or web beacons from being set to your hard drive you may disable them in your browser's preferences, although your browser might then be unable to accommodate certain functionalities on the NPR Web sites.
Use of Information
The use of personally-identifying information is limited to the following: managing and administering the NPR Web sites; responding to user messages; listing name and location (city, state and/or country) information provided by users when broadcasting or publishing User Materials; fulfillment of transcript orders; fulfillment of NPR Online Shop orders; contest management; editorial purposes such as contacting users for an online survey; sending NPR e-mail newsletters and other communications, including marketing and promotional communications, from NPR or NPR member stations to users who have 'opted in' to the receipt of such communications; other internal NPR or NPR member station purposes; and other purposes specified at the time the information is gathered. NPR may contact users regarding their submissions in certain circumstances.
Any information that you disclose when participating in the NPR Community (including creating a profile or submitting a comment to a story or blog or in a discussion thread), such as your full name and any nickname, is likely to become public. This information may be posted on the NPR Web Sites. In addition, NPR, its member stations and their licensees, may use, copy, sublicense, modify, transmit, publicly perform, display, create derivative works of, host, index, cache, tag, encode, and/or adapt any User Materials, and any information contained therein, in any and all media formats or channels, whether now known or hereafter devised, including, but not limited to, the NPR Web Sites, NPR member station web sites, other third party web sites, over the air (on radio or television), and on mobile platforms. Further, other users of the NPR Web Sites may embed a widget or feed that allows your User Materials to appear on their personal, noncommercial web site, blog or other application, subject to conditions set forth in the Terms of Use.
In addition, if you send User Materials to NPR through our Web site, we may print the User Materials, or an excerpt from the User Materials, on the NPR Web site, read them on air, or otherwise publish them in any other medium, together with your name and location (city, state and/or country) if you provide that information to us.
Excluding information provided by the user when participating in the NPR Community or sending User Materials to NPR, which may become public as discussed above, personally-identifying information collected by NPR is not provided to outside parties except NPR member stations, NPR service vendors (such as NPR's transcript fulfillment service, the NPR Online Shop fulfillment service, and NPR's email list manager), and other third parties when the user specifically consents to such distribution (such as the disclosure of your name to a friend when you email a story to that friend). In these circumstances, the information is provided for the sole purpose of -- and only to the extent necessary for -- delivering the requested transcript or goods to the user, delivering communications from NPR or NPR member stations to users who have 'opted in' to the receipt of these communications, providing services for and on behalf of NPR, or serving other internal NPR or NPR member station purposes.
NPR also may disclose personal information if required to do so by law or if it believes that such action is necessary to (a) comply with the law or with legal process, (b) protect against misuse or unauthorized use of the NPR Web Sites, or (c) protect the personal safety or property of users of the NPR Web Sites, the public or NPR and its employees.
If you do not want your personally-identifying information to be collected or used for any of these purposes, please do not provide it (although if you do not provide it, you may not be able to use or participate in certain features of the NPR Web Sites). You can also 'opt out' according to the process described below.
NPR, with the assistance from time to time of its third party service vendors, uses non-identifying aggregate information to analyze use of and better design the NPR Web Sites and to share with third parties in aggregate form only as appropriate. For example, we may tell a third party that a certain number of users accessed a particular audio stream on our Web site. However, we will not disclose any information that could be used to identify those users.
Security
NPR has in place what we believe to be appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online. Credit card information provided to the NPR Online Shop is protected against unauthorized use by 128-bit encryption and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security features, which scramble your personal information so that only your web browser and our Web site's server can decipher it. However, no Internet or e-mail transmission is ever fully secure or error free. Because most e-mail is not encrypted, you should take special care in deciding what information you send to us via e-mail.
Children
Under 13: You must be at least 13 years old in order to register for e-mail newsletters or other features of the NPR Web Sites. If you are under 13 years of age, please do not send any information about yourself, including your name, address or e-mail address. If we discover that we have collected any personally-identifying information from a child under the age of 13, we will remove that information from our database as soon as possible.
13-18: You must be at least 18 years old in order to Submit any User Materials on or through the NPR Web Sites, create a profile in the NPR Community, participate in any online contests, order NPR transcripts, or place an order on the NPR Online Shop. Visitors between the ages of 13 and 18 must obtain permission from their parents or guardians before registering for e-mail newsletters or other features of the NPR Web Sites (excluding the NPR Community, for which they cannot register) or otherwise sending any personally-identifying information.
Corrections to Personal Data; Opting Out
Please Contact Us to a) correct or update any personal information in the NPR database that you state is erroneous, b) opt-out of future communications from NPR, or c) request NPR to make reasonable efforts to remove your personal information from the NPR Online database, thereby canceling your NPR Community profile, NPR newsletter registration and other NPR registrations. This will not necessarily remove previous public comments and other User Materials Submitted for public display on the NPR Web Sites. The user understands that it may be impossible to delete personal information entirely because of backups and records of deletions.
Acceptance of Privacy Policy Terms
NPR reserves the right to change this policy. Any changes to this policy will be posted to this page as soon as reasonably possible, so please check this page periodically. Use of the NPR Web Sites constitutes consent to any policy then in effect. Please make sure that you read NPR's Terms of Use to understand additional terms and conditions which apply to the use of the NPR Web Sites.
If you have any questions or comments concerning our Privacy Policy, please Contact Us via e-mail or send a letter to:
Director, User Experience Delivery, Digital Media
National Public Radio, Inc.
635 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20001-3753
Links to other Sites
It is important to note that the NPR Web Sites contains links to other sites that may not follow the same privacy policies as the NPR Web Sites. For instance, clicking on a sponsorship notice on npr.org will take you to an entirely different site. These sites may use cookies, collect data, and use the data in ways that the NPR Web Sites would not. NPR is not responsible for the privacy practices or any information or materials on these other sites. Please visit these sites if you wish to review their privacy policies. Furthermore, the privacy policy for NPR's www.getmyvote.org, which can be viewed here, is separate and distinct from the Privacy Policy for the NPR Web Sites.