Changes to the LiveJournal Privacy Policy: lj

Changes to the LiveJournal Privacy Policy

We're amending our Privacy Policy to catch up to our current practices regarding third-party advertising, cookies, and web beacons (including HitBox, see below). We wanted to let you know why we're making these changes and what they mean for you as a LiveJournal user.

Privacy Policy Changes:

Our Policy used to include the following paragraph about Third Party Advertising:

Third Party Advertising

Advertisements appearing on LiveJournal may be delivered to users by LiveJournal or one of our advertising partners. Our advertising partners may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement. In this way, advertising partners (or "ad networks") may compile information about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw their advertisements and determine which ads are clicked on. This information allows an ad network to deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This privacy policy covers the use of cookies by LiveJournal and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

We have amended that section (and that section only), and replaced it with this:

Third-Party Advertising and Cookies

Advertisements appearing on LiveJournal may be delivered to users by LiveJournal or one of our advertising partners (or "ad networks"). Ad networks include third party ad servers, ad technology vendors and/or research firms.

Ad networks may set cookies and/or include a file, called a web beacon, within pages served by LiveJournal so the networks may provide auditing, research and reporting for advertisers.

* Cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time it sends you an online advertisement.
* Web beacons are typically an invisible image that may be embedded in a web page or in an advertisement. A web beacon's primary purpose is to count the page's visitors.

Ad networks may compile information about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw their advertisements and determine which ads are clicked on. This information allows an ad network to deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This privacy policy covers the use of cookies by LiveJournal and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Please note that no personal identifying information you have provided to LiveJournal is shared with our advertisers as a result of their use of cookies or web beacons.

Opting Out of Ad Network Cookies

LiveJournal respects our users' wish for privacy, and understands some users may wish to opt-out and/or manage the cookies set on their computers by these ad networks. To understand how these networks allow you to manage cookies set by them, you will need to visit their respective websites. Ad networks generally provide an opt-out on their websites.

Currently, LiveJournal has relationships with the following ad networks and other third parties:

Advertising.com (an AOL Company) - http://www.advertising.com/
AdBrite - http://www.adbrite.com/
Blue Lithium (a Yahoo! Company) - http://www.bluelithium.com/
Casale Media - http://www.casalemedia.com/
DoubleClick (a Google Company) - http://www.doubleclick.com/
Google Ad Sense - https://www.google.com/adsense/
Omniture (includes HitBox) - http://www.omniture.com/en/
(HitBox specific privacy policy here: http://www.omniture.com/en/company/acquisitions/visualsciences/privacy/policy/)
Right Media (a Yahoo! Company) - http://www.rightmedia.com/

We will be updating this list as the list of ad networks with which we do business changes.

LiveJournal does not share any personally identifiable information with advertisers. LiveJournal may share general demographic information (such as information about members' aggregate interests and occupations) and non-personally identifiable information (such as browser type and IP addresses) with advertisers and partners. If you have a Plus account or are a Basic or Early Adopter account viewing a Plus account's journal or other content, LiveJournal shares your voluntarily-provided public profile information (such as sex, age, location and interests) and your voluntarily-provided advertising preferences information with advertisers. LiveJournal does not give advertisers access to your private personal account information (such as email address, or, if you have elected to make these private or friends-only in your profile, sex and location). However, by selecting, interacting with or viewing an ad you are consenting to the possibility that the advertiser will make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the ad.

*************************************************

In the past, we have acknowledged the use of web beacons in various communications to you, specifically here (regarding HitBox) and here (regarding Omniture). In general, however, the proper and accepted place to disclose changes to policies around cookies and web beacons is in a Privacy Policy. This is especially true as new users who are new to LJ might not be aware of all the various official LiveJournal communities. This update to the Privacy Policy is not a change in our practices; it is simply disclosing our current practices on the site, aggregating that information in one place, and having it available to all our users.

Our purpose in amending our Privacy Policy now is to acknowledge and codify changes on our site related to data collection by ad networks, and to provide a location for all users to go to if they want to see the ad networks LiveJournal has relationships with. If you want to manage the cookies set by these ad networks, you can do so by visiting the sites listed in our Privacy Policy.

HitBox

In 2005, LiveJournal had a relationship with HitBox, as mentioned above. Although we have not been using HitBox web beacon tags for quite some time, we're going to start using them again because of our new relationship with The Independent newspaper in the UK. We're doing this so we can accurately count the number of page views on The Independent newspaper's blogging and community sites that are "powered by LiveJournal". For more information on this partnership, check out the

news post.

First, a bit of history: HitBox was created by the web analytics company WebSideStory, which was acquired by Omniture in October 2007. HitBox is now part of a larger web analytics service called SiteCatalyst HBX. Through its various incarnations, some anti-spyware companies have identified HitBox as malware or adware. Strictly speaking, at one point in time there may have been some cause for concern about HitBox web beacons and cookies. We feel there should no longer be any cause for alarm by users finding HitBox beacons on their pages. This is in part due to HitBox now being part of Omniture, a larger organization that we have had a successful relationship with for quite some time now.

Although we think there is no cause for alarm, we recognize that some LJ users might feel differently. That is why we have included a link to their privacy statement in our Privacy Policy. At the bottom of their privacy statement is a HitBox opt-out link:

http://www.omniture.com/en/company/acquisitions/visualsciences/privacy/policy

EDIT: We're providing this direct link to our users due to previous concerns with HitBox. LiveJournal uses HitBox web beacon tags only on pages with the cobranded Independent/LiveJournal layouts (including journals, such as those ending with "exampleusersname.independentminds.livejournal.com" URLs), and nowhere else on the site. HitBox tags are used on those pages to ensure an accurate third-party count of the pages being served by LiveJournal that have layouts that are cobranded with The Independent. The reporting is anonymous and no personally identifiable information is transferred; they're only there to provide a count to understand unique visitors to these pages.

speck

November 25 2008, 23:11:33 UTC 9 years ago

New comment

Actually, I'd prefer we paying customers have the fully vetted list of uris that are part of this new policy; that is:

ads.doubleclick.com or ads.dcnetwks01.net et cetera.

primavera

November 25 2008, 23:34:52 UTC 9 years ago

Uniform resourse.. indicator?

9 years ago

November 25 2008, 23:12:26 UTC 9 years ago

(insert FIRST!!!! here)

Note you must temporarily allow javascript

November 25 2008, 23:17:29 UTC 9 years ago

On EACH machine on which you wish to opt-out on because you are OPTED IN BY DEFAULT and their site does not function fully without it.

Re: Note you must temporarily allow javascript

felis_sidus

fairestcat

November 25 2008, 23:15:17 UTC 9 years ago

Thanks for the detailed and clearly articulated explanation of the policy changes.

ex_uniquewo

November 26 2008, 06:07:27 UTC 9 years ago

Deleted comment

sarig

November 25 2008, 23:17:54 UTC 9 years ago

Wow, complete honesty. This is nice :)

schnee

November 25 2008, 23:29:45 UTC 9 years ago

Kudos to you folks for actually discussing and detailing the changes made to the privacy policy, as opposed to taking the more standard but highly annoying approach of simply informing users that a new version has been posted! :) I hate it when companies do that (take the standard approach, that is - how am I supposed to review a privacy policy if there is no list of changes and, in most cases, not even a copy of the old one to be found?), so I'm really glad you're not doing the same.

November 25 2008, 23:42:54 UTC 9 years ago

Second!

tsukinofaerii

More Expand

zooey_glass04

November 25 2008, 23:39:17 UTC 9 years ago

Thank you - this is very useful and informative.

flamencanyc

November 25 2008, 23:56:36 UTC 9 years ago

The problem with trying to opt out is that for some of those sites I couldn't find the opt out page. Others I found but don't work. The hitbox one you linked to, for example, times out when I click on the opt-out link.

baine

November 26 2008, 11:10:25 UTC 9 years ago

Mine is timing out, too, but it could be because we're all trying to access it right now and the page is overloading. I'm going to try again later.

z3bulin

soleta_nf

November 26 2008, 00:50:27 UTC 9 years ago

That's what I'm hoping.

jjm

raeyn

November 26 2008, 00:02:33 UTC 9 years ago Edited: November 26 2008, 00:03:42 UTC

Erm... so does anyone else find it mildly ironic and annoying when you go to opt out of some of these, cookie-wise, it puts ANOTHER cookie on your machine to tell it to not put cookies on your machine? That's some utter fail, yo.

http://www.advertising.com/opt_out_thanks.php

</3 Also, I can't find the opt-out on some of these; the links should probably be provided if at all possible.

mustuffa

November 26 2008, 01:11:14 UTC 9 years ago

the best practice would be installing NoScript and AdBlock Fx extensions (and/or any good filtering HTTP proxy) on every machine you usually access LJ.

everything else fails. don't even bother yourself trying to opt-out.

November 26 2008, 01:34:19 UTC 9 years ago

I've been meaning to raise this issue for a while, so since this post is about advertising now seems to be as good a time as any.

I paid for a permanent account in one of the previous sales in the belief that I wouldn't be bothered by ads on LJ (while logged in), and yet I still see them on many of the RSS feeds for some reason. It's especially noticeable on my public "news" filter, but the ads are intermittant and may come or go on individual entries when I refresh the page.

FAQ #262: "Paid and Permanent Accounts: You will never see ads on LiveJournal, even when viewing a Plus account's journal, as long as you're logged in." - does this not include RSS feeds and content from ad-partners?

marta

November 26 2008, 02:24:46 UTC 9 years ago

Can you give me an example of one of the RSS feeds you're looking at? If the ad is within the contents of what's being syndicated off of an outside site, that's part of that site's content and we won't have control over it. But if you're seeing ours, I'd like to bring it to someone's attention.

November 26 2008, 01:51:01 UTC 9 years ago

Thank you very much for the detailed info on the update. I appreciate it. <3 Of course you guys can't be held responsible for the gigantic fail on the part of the advertisers opt-out options (which don't affect me, but anyways!), but you also didn't have to tell us upfront who we go to in order to opt out. Double win LJ. <3 ILU.

justeps

November 26 2008, 03:02:02 UTC 9 years ago

If you have a Plus account or are a Basic or Early Adopter account viewing a Plus account's journal or other content, LiveJournal shares your voluntarily-provided public profile information (such as sex, age, location and interests) and your voluntarily-provided advertising preferences information with advertisers.

Has anyone else noticed how broken that is? The Plus account holder opted in, but the Basic/Early Adopter account holder did not. The latter has no way of knowing in advance the status of any other LJ account! You could change the policy so only Plus account holders automatically share information, or provide an interstitial such as:

	Plus Content Notice
The content that you are about to view discloses your personal information to Third Party Advertisers. To continue, you must confirm your willingness to share demographics and advertising preferences.

where the reader then has to click a button to proceed.

Otherwise, people are going to start suppressing or falsifying profile information ... are you sure that's in everyone's best interest?

November 26 2008, 05:32:54 UTC 9 years ago

We don't ever disclose personal (private) information at all. The only information used is what's already allowed to be shown publicly by the user (if any), and that's used in a non-identifying manner, which means it can't be stored or used in other ways, and can't be connected back to the username or other information.

stormcloude

Personal information is personal, whether it's public or private

November 26 2008, 04:24:55 UTC 9 years ago Edited: November 26 2008, 04:26:06 UTC

Why don't you make this post more useful and actually link to the opt out pages of the advertisers you list here?

EDIT: Omniture's opt out page is broken - it keeps returning error messages. We've tried it from two different IP addresses now.

raisexyourxhead

November 26 2008, 04:59:32 UTC 9 years ago

How is your Ip not personal information?

Can't you look it up though the ISP to get the bill-payer's name, address and phone number? Or is this a different kind of ISP than the ones you can look up like that?

Or do we have more than one ISP, and the one advertisers get is just this computer wherever it goes?

November 26 2008, 05:29:39 UTC 9 years ago

No, it's not possible to trace an IP to a particular person or address. An IP address can be traced only to the service (ISP) and the regional area it originates from (although that can sometimes be not too accurate too).

The ISPs typically do not ever give out a subscriber's information unless they're served with a court order or something like that. So the bill-payer or address and that kind of thing aren't revealed with an IP address. Additionally, most people don't have a static IP address - some have a dynamic one which changes pretty regularly, and most others have one that will change whenever the router is reset or under other circumstances.