Site Policy
Comments Policy
User agreement for comments & reviews
STARS AND STRIPES values your comments and encourages an open, energized discussion topics of interest to our readers. But, as with all good things, there are limits to what is suitable for posting in our comments forums. You are solely responsible for your comments, and we ask your cooperation in ensuring that all of your comments are civil in nature and that you avoid inappropriate postings.
The following is a list of the types of comments that we deem inappropriate and that are subject to removal:
- Posts that are invasive of another person’s privacy or include personal information, such as phone numbers or email addresses
- Off-topic posts
- Posts that have links to websites that are not related to the topic of discussion
- Posts that include derogatory information that cannot be easily substantiated
- Remarks that are abusive, threatening, harmful or libelous
- Personal attacks, including name-calling and “SHOUTING”
- Comments that are obscene, vulgar, profane or incoherent
- Comments that are racist, sexist, homophobic or contain other types of hate-speech
- A post that purports to be written by someone else
- Spam and unsolicited advertisements
We want uk.stripes.com to be a useful site for intelligent discussion and we welcome thoughtful comments representing a range of views that make their point concisely and politely. Comments that we feel violate these rules or are otherwise inappropriate may be removed.
If you feel a comment violates these rules or is objectionable in other ways, please contact us. If we all take responsibility for maintaining an appropriate and constructive environment, the discussion itself is improved and everyone benefits.
Submissions of Text and Images
If you submit stories, artwork, photos or other materials to uk.stripes.com through the “Submit Your Story” link or in any other manner, you are granting STARS AND STRIPES a non-exclusive license to use your content in its newspaper, in print or in digital format, or in any other commercial manner of its choosing. You further warrant that you own or control the copyrights to the content being submitted and that its republication by STARS AND STRIPES will not violate the intellectual property rights or privacy/publicity rights of any third party. Stars and Stripes will identify you as the author or creator of the work you submit.
Privacy Policy
STARS AND STRIPES and uk.stripes.com are committed to bringing you information tailored to your individual needs, but also recognize the importance of protecting the privacy of your personally identifiable information. In adopting this privacy policy, our intent is to balance our legitimate business interests in collecting and using personally identifiable information and your reasonable expectations of privacy.
What personally identifiable information do I provide to uk.stripes.com?
uk.stripes.com asks you to provide various types of personally identifiable information to enhance your experience on our site. During registration, uk.stripes.com may ask for information such as your name, email address, birth year, gender, and optional information regarding military status, rank, household income, etc. The more information you provide, the better we are able to customize your experience. We may also ask you for other information at other times — such as when you enter a contest or participate in a promotion, when you post an online ad, or when you order products from us. See below about “cookies” and what other information is collected.
If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we will gather and store certain information about your visit automatically. This information does not identify you personally. We automatically collect and store only the following information about your visit:
1. The Internet domain and IP address from which you access our website.
2. The type of browser and operating system used to access our site;
3. The date and time you access our site;
4. The pages you visit; and
5. If you linked to the uk.stripes.com website from another website, the address of that website.
We use this information to help us make our site more useful to visitors — to learn about the number of visitors to our site and the types of technology our visitors use. We do not track or record information about individuals and their visits.
How does uk.stripes.com use my personally identifiable information?
Our primary goal in collecting personally identifiable information is to provide you, the user, with a customized experience on our site. This includes personalization services, interactive communications, online shopping and many other types of services, most of which are completely free to you.
uk.stripes.com uses the personally identifiable information you provide to us in several ways. Some examples follow.
- A user's personally identifiable information may be used by uk.stripes.com for editorial purposes such as to contact you as part of an online survey. We may also use the information provided by you to contact you with legal notices, or to advise you of any material changes in our terms and conditions.
- In order to provide services free of charge, we display advertisements. uk.stripes.com delivers targeted advertisements on behalf of advertisers. Advertisers give us an advertisement and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (for example, males over 25 years old). We take the advertisement and display it to users meeting that criterion. In this process, the advertiser never has access to individual account information. You will only receive special offers via email from uk.stripes.com consistent with your stated preferences. You can change your preferences at any time.
- uk.stripes.com also does research on our users' demographics, interests and behavior based on the information you provide to us upon registration, on order forms, during a promotion, as well as from our server log files or from surveys. We do this to better understand and serve our users. This research is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis and uk.stripes.com may share this aggregated data with advertisers or other businesses. In addition, under confidentiality agreements, uk.stripes.com may match user information with third party data.
Do other companies or people have access to personally identifiable information I provide to uk.stripes.com?
When you are on an area of uk.stripes.com and are asked for personally identifiable information, you are providing that information to European and Pacific STARS AND STRIPES, or vendors providing contractual services for uk.stripes.com (such as hosting vendors). If personally identifiable information is being provided to and/or maintained by any company other than these, our policy is that we will not transfer that personally identifiable information unless notice is given prior to transfer. If you do not want your information to be shared, you can choose not to allow the transfer by not using that particular service or by expressing this preference, if requested. Additional information about personally identifiable information follows.
Promotions: Promotions that run on uk.stripes.com or stripes.com may be sponsored by companies other than STARS AND STRIPES or may be co-sponsored by STARS AND STRIPES and another company. Some or all personally identifiable information provided by you during a promotion may be shared with the sponsor. If information will be shared, we will disclose such sharing prior to the transfer. You can decide not to participate in the promotion if you don't want your personally identifiable information to be shared. In certain circumstances, you may not be able to participate in a particular promotion if you choose not to share personally identifiable information.
Advertisers: Advertisers and ad vendors on uk.stripes.com who use their own cookies are subject to their own privacy policies, and not this policy. Some content, products and services available at uk.stripes.com are provided by third party vendors whose privacy policies may differ from ours. If you have any questions regarding the privacy policy of one of our providers, you should contact that provider directly for more information
Marketplace: If you make a purchase or request a service from a business, the information you provide for that transaction (as well as tracking information and cookies as described below) may be provided directly to the business. Businesses listed in uk.stripes.com have separate privacy and data collection practices. uk.stripes.com has no responsibility or liability for these independent policies. For more information regarding the business and its privacy policy, go to that business' home page and click on the appropriate link.
Other: If we run competitions or contests on the site, you may be required to provide information such as your telephone number and address in order to participate. The exact rules may vary in each case but the specific rules for any contest will state how that information may be used. If you told us in your account preferences that you would be interested in receiving email from us, we may send you emails about uk.stripes.com products, promotions, or services as well as on behalf of other companies. You can change your account preferences at any time.
We do not control the privacy policies of our advertisers, sponsors or other sites or businesses to which we provide hyperlinks or access. Please visit the sites of these businesses to review their privacy policies. uk.stripes.com users should also be aware that, when you voluntarily disclose personal information in chat areas or bulletin boards, that information may be collected by others and may result in unsolicited messages from others.
Except as stated in this privacy policy or at the time of collection, a user’s personally identifiable information will not be transferred to a party outside STARS AND STRIPES, or its service vendors unless notice is given at the time of collection or prior to transfer. If you do not wish to receive any email or to have us share such information with any another party, you may change your preferences for the future at any time by (i) clicking the box on the registration form requesting us not to email you or to share such information, (ii) contacting us by mail at (529 14th Street, NW, Suite 350, Washington, DC 20045). uk.stripes.com may also disclose account information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our User Agreement or may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) uk.stripes.com’s rights or property, other uk.stripes.com users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities.
Data Security: We have in place physical, electronic and managerial procedures to protect the information we collect online. However, as effective as these measures are, no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that the information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet.
What information do web servers collect?
Web servers serving uk.stripes.com automatically collect certain non-personally-identifiable information, such as which pages each user visits and the domain name (e.g., earthlink.net) of visitors. This information is used for various purposes including internal review, to tailor information to individual visitors, and for traffic audits. We also provide this information (as well as information from third-party market researchers) about our users on an aggregated, anonymous basis to our advertisers.
What are cookies and how does uk.stripes.com use them?
uk.stripes.com places a “cookie” on the browser of a uk.stripes.com user’s computer to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie can be used to tell when your computer has contacted a website; we may also use the information for editorial purposes and for other purposes such as measuring certain traffic patterns. For example, cookies are used to ensure that you don't see the same ad too many times in a single session and that you do not have to reenter your login name or password during your visit. We may also use cookies to track your progress and number of entries in some of our promotions and contests.
Advertising service vendors that serve ads into our site may also use their own cookies. You may opt-out of the cookies delivered by uk.stripes.com by changing the setting on your browser. Please be aware that this will disable all cookies delivered to your browser, not just the ones delivered by uk.stripes.com.
Technology on the Internet is developing at a rapid pace, and we need to maintain our flexibility in the online arena. If we need to change our policy in the future, we will post these changes as soon as they go into effect.
Last updated May 18, 2012
