This Privacy Policy applies to the GoodDentistOrNot.com website ("GoodDentist," "we," "us" and "our"). GoodDentist may share information among its subsidiaries or sites that it owns or controls, but it is always protected under the terms of this Privacy Policy.
Our website contains links to other sites. Once you enter another website (whether through an advertisement, service or content link), be aware that GoodDentist is not responsible for the privacy practices of these other sites. We encourage you to look for and review the privacy statements of each and every website that you visit through a link or advertisement on GoodDentist.
We hope that reading our Privacy Policy helps you understand how we manage your information. Capitalized terms not otherwise defined elsewhere in this Privacy Policy can found under the section of this Privacy Policy under the heading "Definitions."
While you may use some of the functionality of GoodDentist without registration, many of the specific tools and services on our website require registration. If you choose to register with our website for certain interactive tools or other services, we require you to submit Personally Identifiable Information. Depending on the tool or service you have selected, we may also collect Personal Health Information. You are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information you submit to GoodDentist. Inaccurate information will affect the information you receive when using our site and tools and our ability to contact you as described in this Privacy Policy.
Non-Personal Information We Collect About You
Even if you do not register with GoodDentist, we collect certain information about your use of our website.
A. Cookies. We may collect Non-Personal Information about your use of our website and your use of the websites of selected sponsors and advertisers through the use of Cookies. Every computer that accesses our website is assigned a different Cookie by GoodDentist. Such Cookies store tracking codes to enable our system to locate information from past visits to our website, but do not contain information that identifies you personally. The information collected by Cookies (i) helps us dynamically generate advertising and content on Web pages or in newsletters, and (ii) allows us to statistically monitor (A) how many people are using our website and selected sponsors’ and advertisers’ sites, (B) how many people open our emails, and (C) for what purposes these actions are being taken. We may use Cookie information to target certain advertisements to your browser or to determine the popularity of certain content or advertisements. Cookies are also used to facilitate a user’s log-in, as navigation aides and as session timers. You may set your browser to reject cookies, but this may impair your usage of our website.
B. Third Parties Collecting Non-Personal Information on GoodDentist’s Behalf. GoodDentist may contract with third parties who may use Cookies to collect Non-Personal Information about your usage of GoodDentist’s sites, and this information may used by GoodDentist to tailor the advertising you may see on sites within the networks of these third parties. This Non-Personal Information is anonymous and does not contain any personal information about you. These third parties may collect this information, on our behalf, to help GoodDentist target our advertising on these third-party sites. We will require that these third parties not to use this non-personal Cookie information except to help us target our advertising on these other websites and have agreed to not link any non-personal Cookie information collected by them on our sites to Personally Identifiable Information they or others collect from other sites. If your browser is set to reject cookies, this Non-Personal Information will not be sent to these third parties.
Personally Identifiable Information We Collect About You
A. Registration Information. We collect Personally Identifiable Information, like your name, email address, date of birth, zip code and other information that you provide to us when you register as a user of GoodDentist and/or when you update your user profile. We use the Personally Identifiable Information that you provide to respond to your questions, provide you the services you select, to send you emails about the website, and to inform you of material changes to this Privacy Policy.
B. Reviews, Message Boards and Other Forums. As a service to our users, GoodDentist features dentist or dental specialist reviews, message boards and other user forums on our website. Any information shared (including Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information) that you reveal in reviews, message boards and other user forums on our website is not private or secure. You should think carefully before disclosing any Personally Identifiable Information or Personal Health Information in any public forum. What you have written may be seen, disclosed to or collected by third parties and may be used by others in ways we are unable to control or predict, including to contact you for unauthorized purposes. As with any public forum on any site, this information may also appear in third-party search engines. GoodDentist does not control the information indexed and cached by search engines. Once information has been indexed by a search engine, such information cannot be retrieved, deleted or modified by GoodDentist.
C. Emails to You. At registration and at various times as you use GoodDentist, you may Opt-In to receiving recurring informational/promotional emails on specific dental or other health topics from GoodDentist and/or directly from third parties. When you sign up for our email newsletters or at any time, you can choose to Opt-In to receiving additional promotional emails from GoodDentist or our Sponsors. In order to subscribe to GoodDentist newsletters via email, we need your contact information, including email address. You can unsubscribe from the newsletters by clicking on the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of any email newsletter. There are certain emails that you cannot Opt-Out of, such as an update to this Privacy Policy, and these emails will be sent to you as long as you are a registered user of GoodDentist.
D. Emails and Suggestions You Send to GoodDentist. This Privacy Policy does not apply to any information, ideas, concepts or inventions that you may elect to send to GoodDentist by email or post anywhere on our website, including the dentist reviews and other information that you post on our website. If you want to keep such information, ideas, concepts or inventions private or proprietary, do not send them in an email to GoodDentist or post such information on our website.
Information from Children
We do not collect personally identifiable information from any person we actually know is under the age of 13. A parent or guardian, however, may use GoodDentist to post a review of a dentist or dental specialist for a minor and such parent or guardian is solely responsible for such information.
Information Collected by Third Parties Not Acting on Behalf of GoodDentist
Sponsors or advertisers on GoodDentist may use their own Cookies or other online tracking technologies in the banner advertisements served on GoodDentist and in emails, special promotions or newsletters we send you. Some advertisers use companies other than GoodDentist to serve their ads and to monitor users’ responses to ads, and these companies ("Ad Servers") may also collect Non-Personal Information through the use of Cookies on our website. In certain situations, information collection may be facilitated by momentarily directing your browser to the website of an Ad Server or other third party acting on behalf of the sponsor, partner or advertiser before re-directing your browser to its selected destination (e.g., back to GoodDentist to show the ad, or to the advertiser’s website); this re-direction process may not be apparent to you. We do not control these third parties’ use of Cookies or how they manage the Non-Personal Information they gather through them. You should review the privacy policy of other sites you visit or link to from our site to understand how these other sites use cookies and how they use the information they collect through the use of cookies on their own sites. Certain Ad Servers allow you to prevent them from collecting data through the use of cookies. In order to do so, you must Opt-Out of such data collection with each individual site.
Disclosure of Your Information
In addition to disclosures that you specifically authorize, GoodDentist may disclose personal information as follows: We may release Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information to third parties: (1) to comply with valid legal requirements such as a law, regulation, search warrant, subpoena or court order; (2) in response to a physical threat to you or others; (3) to protect our property or to defend or assert our legal rights; or (4) in connection with a transaction or proceeding involving the transfer of all or part of our business relating to the information, or involving the transfer of control of those assets involved in such business. In the event that we are legally compelled to disclose your Personally Identifiable Information or your Personal Health Information to a third party, we will attempt to notify you unless doing so would violate the law or a court order. In addition, we may disclose Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information as described below.
A. Disclosure to GoodDentist Staff and Moderators. GoodDentist staff and moderators sometimes have limited access to your Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information in the course of providing products or services to you and other registered users, to troubleshoot problems or resolve complaints. Access to your Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information is limited to the information reasonably necessary for the employee to perform the function needed to resolve the issue or to improve the service.
B. Disclosure to GoodDentist Operations and Maintenance Contractors. GoodDentist operations and maintenance contractors sometimes have limited access to your Personally Identifiable Information in the course of providing products or services to GoodDentist. These contractors include vendors and suppliers that provide us with technology, services and/or content for the operation and maintenance of our website. Access to your Personally Identifiable Information by these contractors is limited to the information reasonably necessary for the contractor to perform its limited function for GoodDentist.
C. Disclosure to Third-Party Contractor Websites. Certain content and services offered to you through our website may be served, hosted and operated by a third-party company ("Third-Party Contractor Websites"). GoodDentist does not disclose your Personally Identifiable Information to these Third-Party Contractor Websites without your consent, but you should be aware that any information you disclose once you access these third-party websites is not subject to this Privacy Policy. GoodDentist does not endorse and is not responsible for the privacy practices of these Third-Party Contractor Websites. You should review the privacy policy posted on the other website to understand how that Third-Party Contractor Website collects and uses your Personally Identifiable Information. GoodDentist makes an effort to make it obvious to you when you leave our website and enter a Third-Party Contractor Website, either by requiring you to click on a link or by notifying you on the site before you visit the third-party site. In addition, if you see a phrase such as "Powered by" or "in association with" followed by the name of a company other than GoodDentist, then you are on a website hosted by a company other than GoodDentist.
D. Disclosure to Third-Party Advertising Companies. GoodDentist may use technology provided by a third-party advertising company to serve ads when you visit our website. This technology may use information about your visit to our website in order to provide advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest to you. In the course of serving advertisements to our website, such third-party advertising technology may place or recognize a Cookie on your browser. You have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser. GoodDentist may also use a third-party ad network provider to help present advertisements on our website. Third-party ad serving enables GoodDentist to target advertisements to you for products and services you might be interested in. These third-party network advertisers, along with other advertisers and sponsors on the website, may use Cookies or similar technologies (and, in the case of cookies, access them on your computer if you choose to have cookies enabled in your browser) to serve you advertisements tailored to interests you have shown by browsing on this and other sites you have visited, to determine whether you have seen a particular advertisement before and to avoid sending you duplicated advertisements. In doing so, the provider collects Non-Personal Information such as your browser type, operating system, Web pages visited, time of visits, content viewed, ads viewed and other clickstream data. The use of third-party Cookies and similar technologies by these ad network providers is governed by each third party’s specific privacy policy, and not this Privacy Policy.
GoodDentist may also provide links to sites provided by Third-Party Contractor Websites that have business arrangements with GoodDentist to pay commissions based on sales of products or services generated through GoodDentist.
E. Disclosure to or by Co-branded Channel Partners. GoodDentist may provide co-branded content and services to Channel Partner Websites hosted and operated by companies other than GoodDentist. In some cases, you may only be able to access these co-branded content and services only through the Channel Partner Website. The co-branded GoodDentist pages that you may access through Channel Partner Websites may have different registration processes and opportunities for information collection and be subject to the privacy policies of such Channel Partner Websites.
F. Disclosure to Linked Sites. In addition to the Third-Party Contractor Websites that you may access as described above, for your convenience there are links to Third-Party websites operated by companies that are not affiliated with our website and that do not have contracts to provide content or services through our website. These links may be found in advertisements, referenced within content or placed beside the names or logos of sponsors. GoodDentist does not disclose your Personally Identifiable Information to these third-party websites without obtaining your consent. GoodDentist does not endorse and is not responsible for the privacy practices of these websites. If you choose to link to one of these third-party websites, you should review the privacy policy posted on this other website to understand how that third-party website collects and uses your Personally Identifiable Information.
G. Disclosure of Aggregate Information. GoodDentist may provide Aggregate Information to third parties. For example, we might inform third parties regarding the number of users of our website and the activities they conduct while on our site. We might also inform dentists or others (that may or may not be an advertiser on our site) that "30% of our users see a dentist more than four times a year" or that "55% of our users have had a root canal." Depending on the circumstances, we may or may not charge third parties for this Aggregate Information.
How GoodDentist Handles Privacy and Security Internally
GoodDentist uses various measures to protect the privacy of your Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information. Despite GoodDentist’s efforts to protect your Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information, there is always some risk that an unauthorized third party may find a way around our security systems or that transmissions of your information over the Internet may be intercepted. If you provide your user name and password to other people or if you use a public computer that does not log you off GoodDentist, your data is no longer protected. Please do not share your GoodDentist credentials and always log off when using public computers.
Updating Your Information and Contacting GoodDentist
GoodDentist allow you to correct, update or review your registration information you have submitted. Upon your request, we will delete your Personally Identifiable Information from our active databases and, where feasible, from our back-up media. You should be aware that it is not technologically possible to remove each and every record of information you have provided to GoodDentist from our servers. We reserve the right to retain the reviews, posts or comments submitted by you on our website. Any information you provided in reviews and message boards may only be deleted at the discretion of GoodDentist.
Changes to This Privacy Policy
We will inform registered users of a material change to the Privacy Policy, which means a change that expands the permissible uses or disclosures of Personally Identifiable Information allowed by the prior version of the Privacy Policy. Your continued use of our website will be subject to the revised Privacy Policy. You may of course choose to Opt-Out of continuing to use our website. Please exit the site immediately if you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy or any revised policy. GoodDentist reserves the right to discontinue or limit functionality in all its products and services. If we decide to change our Privacy Policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement and other places appropriate throughout our site so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here or by email.
Definitions
Aggregated Information: As a website gathers individual pieces of Non-Personal Information from its users, it may combine similar data from many or all the users of the website into one big "batch." This sort of statistical information is called aggregate information because it reflects the habits and characteristics of a large group of anonymous people. We may use Aggregate Information or share it with our business partners so that the information and services they provide best meet the needs of the users. Aggregate Information also helps advertisers and sponsors on the Web know how effectively they are reaching and meeting the needs of their target audience.
Channel Partner Website: A third-party website to whom GoodDentist provides content and services for that website’s dental channel.
Cookie: A small data file that is stored on the hard drive of the computer you use to view a website. Cookies are placed by that site or by a third party with a presence on the site, such as an advertiser, and are accessible only by the party or site that placed the Cookie (i.e. a Cookie placed on your computer by GoodDentist isn’t accessed by any other site you visit but a Cookie placed on your computer by an advertiser may be accessed by any site on which that same advertiser has a presence). Cookies can contain pieces of Personally Identifiable Information. These Cookies often are used to make the site easier to use. For example, if you check a box to ask that we store your user name on your computer so that you don’t have to enter it each time you visit the site, it’s stored in a Cookie on your computer.
IP Address. An IP address is a numerical identifier assigned either to your Internet service provider or directly to your computer and is necessary for connecting to the Internet.
Non-Personal Information: Information that is not traceable back to any individual and cannot be used to identify an individual. For example, click stream information is Non-Personal Information, as is information such as IP addresses, gender, age, city and state when not linked with other Personally Identifiable Information.
Opt-In: Means you are actively indicating your preference to participate in a program, email, feature, tool or enhancement on a website. Typically, if you "Opt-In" you must provide certain information, usually Personally Identifiable Information, to the website or otherwise actively indicate your choice or preference to participate in the website program. For example, if you wish to use a tracker, you must select the tracker you want to add, enter in information about yourself or your condition, and select how often you wish to receive reminder notifications. Examples of Opt-In emails include the watch list and reminders to update your tracker.
Opt-Out: Means that if you do not take some action, you are indicating your preference to participate in a program, email, feature, tool or enhancement on a website. Typically, if you "Opt-Out" you must uncheck a box next to a stated preference or otherwise take some action to indicate your preference not to participate in a program. For example, if you do not wish to receive GoodDentist newsletters or emails, you must uncheck the corresponding box in your email notification preferences.
Password: A secret series of characters, typically alphanumeric (meaning it consists of both letters and numbers) that enables you to access a file, computer or program. You must enter your password before the computer or system will respond to commands. The password helps ensure that unauthorized users do not access the system. In addition, data files and programs may require a password. Ideally, the password should be something that nobody could guess. In practice, many people choose a password that is easy to remember, such as their name or their initials. This is one reason it is relatively easy to break into many computer systems.
Personal Health Information: When your Personally Identifiable Information is combined with your dental information or other information concerning your health. For example, if you indicated that you have a certain dental condition or disease, when that information is combined with your Personally Identifiable Information, it becomes Personal Health Information.
Personally Identifiable Information: This is information that can be traced back to an individual (contrast with Non-Personal Information and Aggregate Information). Examples of Personally Identifiable Information include your name, home address, telephone number, email address and Social Security number. If other pieces of information are linked to Personally Identifiable Information, they also become Personally Identifiable Information. For example, if you use a nickname to chat online and give out your real name while chatting, your nickname becomes Personally Identifiable Information when linked with other Personally Identifiable Information.
Username: A name used to gain access to a computer system or program. Usernames, and often passwords, are required in shared systems, such as the Internet. In most such systems, users can choose their own usernames and passwords. On GoodDentist, as part of your registration, you will be required to provide a username in addition to your email and a password. Your GoodDentist username is the name that will appear on any of your public forum postings. This public nickname should not include any Personally Identifiable Information, such as your name.