Richmond Consumer Freelibrary Broadcast Group understands the concern of its visitors about how we will use their personal information. We are committed to maintaining the privacy of such information. This Privacy Policy will explain how we treat information you share with us, how we use it, and what we share with others. We hope you will take this into consideration in determining what information you share with us and whether you will “opt in” to our program of sharing information.

We need information about you and your complaint for many reasons. Obviously, we need to be able to reach you if there are any questions, follow-ups, or other communications which would help resolve your complaint or help others with similar complaints. Also, we need to know as much as we can about your complaint to be able to assist in its getting resolved. We should also have other information which may help us suggest other ways of helping you as a consumer get satisfaction; we may be able to suggest other sources of help or another way of getting the goods or services you wanted if you do not get an adequate resolution to your complaint. Finally, some information about you is combined with information about other users to develop statistical information; we use this statistical information to improve our service or to lower its cost by sharing the information with our marketing partners.

INFORMATION WHICH PERSONALLY IDENTIFIES YOU (YOUR NAME, ADDRESS, EMAIL, ETC.) WILL NOT BE SHARED WITH ANYONE ELSE WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION. We will need to share some of that information with the company about whom you are complaining if you want to be able to have your complaint resolved. Also, if you have come to CFB through a media affiliate, we will have to share the information with it if a news story develops from your complaint. On the “Complaint Form”, you are asked to give your permission for us to share that information with the other side and the television/radio station.

Other circumstances may arise which would make sharing your personal information appropriate; if we do not already have your permission to share the information, we may contact you later if we think it would be advisable.

Of course, courts and other governmental agencies have the power to require us to give out certain information even without your permission; under those circumstances, we will comply with the orders of proper legal authorities (and we do not normally fight such compliance once a subpoena or other legal document is served on us).

IF YOU ASK US TO SEND AN ACTION LETTER ON YOUR BEHALF, THE RECIPIENTS OF THAT LETTER WILL HAVE CERTAIN PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU. The person you are complaining about needs that information in order to address the situation. Anyone to whom you ask us to send a copy of the Action Letter will also have the same information. That information is being given out by your asking for an Action Letter, and we cannot control what happens to that information once someone else is given access to it.

If a complaint is posted on our bulletin board, all the information in the posting becomes public. We do not include the information which identifies you in what we post on the bulletin boards. However, if you write in your complaint information which is personal to you or which identifies you, it will become public. While we reserve the right to remove from the bulletin boards anything which might be libelous, obscene, or otherwise inappropriate, we do not edit the postings. If there is something in the information you provide which you do not the rest of the world to know, it is up to you to edit your messages.

Like all other websites, we collect certain information concerning our users and the way our site is used. We need to collect information about you – name, address, email address, etc. – and who and what you are contacting us about so we can either prepare the Action Letter for you or post your complaint on our bulletin board; we also have to keep our media partners informed about what is happening so they can assist in getting complaints resolved. To help us improve our service, we also want to know how you reached our site (i.e. your referring domain name) and what particular part of our site you visit; we also collect information about who and what you are complaining or commenting about.

Some of the information we collect is combined with information about other users in order to develop statistics which are useful to us or to our marketing partners, advertisers, media affiliates and other people. This “aggregate data” will not include information which identifies you personally. Rather, it is collective information which may be useful to identify trends or patterns (e.g. a problem which may affect more than one person), to point out changes we can make to focus in on the needs of our visitors, to target our advertising, and to find out about consumer attitudes. When we develop aggregate data for use by anyone other than CFB and its media affiliates, there is no personal data about you given out.

You may have heard about internet “Cookies”; most internet sites you visit use these cookies. Cookies store small amounts of date on your computer about your visit to our site. These are a way we can identify you when you are visiting our site and how you use it. A cookie will permit us to customize the content you see on our site so you will get information which is important or interesting to you. Cookies do not contain any personally identifiable information about you but only give information about your preferences. If you do not like cookies, you have the option of removing them by taking them off your web browser.

Finally, third parties may want to reach you to offer goods or services or to find out more about your complaint. Other than the media partner and the company to whom an Action Letter is sent (or people to whom you direct us to send copies of the Action Letter), we will not give out your personal information or send you third party material without your permission. Sometimes this may be useful to you (e.g. a lawyer suing the company you have had a problem with may want to include your information in the lawsuit, which may help get your problem addressed). If you want to give us permission to have other people contact you, please use the “opt-in” option on the complaint form.

If you still have any questions about our use of your information, contact us at www.richmondfreelibrary.org.