About LA Weekly: Privacy Policy

Village Voice Media

Parent of LA Weekly and laweekly.com

Village Voice Media respects your privacy. Our privacy policy for this site follows, but the bottom line is this: Village Voice Media will not sell or share any of your personal information to a third party unless you say it's okay. Village Voice Media will gather personally identifiable information about you only when you provide it voluntarily for specific purposes such as posting an ad or signing up for an e-mail newsletter.

Policy effective as of September 25, 2006

Personally Identifiable Information

We do track how our visitors use this site so that we can see what people like and don't like. We also analyze and aggregate information about use patterns and share the aggregated data with our advertisers (for example, we keep track of how many users see and click on particular advertisements). We may also collect personal information about you via registration for contests, surveys and newsletters, which may include contests, surveys and newsletters for certain third parties. We will not, however, release your name, e-mail address or any other personal information to anyone else outside Village Voice Media unless we have your consent, we are under a legal order to do so, or there is an emergency involving danger to a person or property. This means that we will not provide our advertisers or anyone else outside Village Voice Media with any information specific to you unless we have your consent. If you chose to provide your personally identifiable information for the purposes of a third-party contest, survey, or newsletter, you consent shall be deemed to be given for the release of your personally identifiable information with regard to that third party only, in addition to Village Voice Media. The only Village Voice Media employees or consultants allowed access to personal information about you are those who need to have access. Any employee or consultant who violates our privacy and security policies is subject to disciplinary action, including possible termination or prosecution.

We occasionally have third party agents, subsidiaries, affiliates, and joint ventures that perform functions on our behalf, such as credit card processing, shipping or stocking orders, providing customer service, etc. They have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, and are contractually obligated to maintain the confidentiality and security of the data. They are restricted from using or altering this data in anyway other than to provide the requested services to the Site.

Please remember that any information you share in public area, such as message boards becomes public, and therefore this Privacy Policy does not apply to any information you choose to make public. Please be careful about what you disclose and do not post any personal information that you expect to keep private.

Cookies

"Cookies" are small text files that allow Web sites to store and retrieve information about you from your computer system. Village Voice Media does serve cookies to track individual site usage for later aggregation. But we do not use cookies in order to retrieve any information from your computer other than information originally sent in a Village Voice Media cookie, such as a user code. We have no control over whether and how our advertisers use cookies that originate from their website. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, but you may not be able to take full advantage of our site's features, and we recommend that you leave them turned on.

IP address tracking: All computers and servers on the Internet use IP addresses to recognize and communicate with each other. We collect IP addresses to administer and analyze our site and report aggregate, non-personal information (such as how many visitors we have). When you call up our site on your computer, our servers enter the IP address of that computer into a log. To maintain our users' anonymity, we do not associate IP addresses with records containing personal information.

We do not and cannot use cookies or IP address tracking to retrieve personal information from your computer.

Your Letter to the Editor Contributions

As with our print editions, we insist that you supply your real name, daytime telephone number or e-mail address. That is because we may need to contact you, and because your identity may be important to understand your point of view. If you send us such commentary, we reserve the right to publish it in print or display it on this site in full or in edited form. To protect your privacy, however, we will withhold your name and address upon request, both in print and on-line.

Communication from Village Voice Media

From time to time, we may send you information with announcements and updates about the site and Village Voice Media and our partners. Any ongoing communication you may receive from Village Voice Media via e-mail, such as newsletters, subscriptions, contest results, survey inquiries, etc. may be terminated via a simple "opt out" procedure. You need only reply to the communication with the word "unsubscribe" (without the quotation marks) in the body of your e-mail response and your name will be removed from that mailing list.

Giveaways and Contests