Privacy Policy

The following statement explains how the websites operated by the Yakima Herald-Republic collect and use your personally identifiable information.

The basic principle

We will never intentionally disclose your personally identifiable information to any third party for their use without first receiving your express permission. We will not send you email unless you have requested it or unless it’s in the course of a transaction you have initiated.

When do we collect your personally identifiable information?

You must provide some personally identifiable information in order to use some features of our websites. Some examples:
· Signing up for email services such as news alert, and email alerts for various types of classified listings
· Participating in online sweepstakes, contests and games
· Participating in online forums
· Placing an online classified ad of various types
· Purchasing items such as event tickets and online photos
· Participating in an online survey

What personally identifiable information do we collect?

The information we collect for services such as these will vary, but can include your name, address, ZIP code, gender, user name, password, email address and phone number. We also collect credit card information for purchases. Wherever we collect personally identifiable information, we will make an effort to link to our privacy statement.

How do we use your personally identifiable information?

We do not share or provide personally identifiable information we may collect, such as names, email addresses and phone numbers with our advertisers without your express permission.

Please note that some of our online sweepstakes or contests are sponsored by advertisers. Aggregated, nonpersonally identifiable data about contest entries are collected and can be shared with these advertisers. In addition, you may choose to provide your personally identifiable information to these advertisers in exchange for the opportunity to receive future communication from them (such as coupons or special offers). If you do not wish to have your personally identifiable information shared or receive such communication, you will be given a clear choice to opt out of having your personally identifiable information sent to the advertiser, or you will be advised not to enter the contest.

We will not send you email unless you have requested it, or specifically given us permission to contact you in the future, or unless it’s in the course of a transaction you have initiated.

When you submit a comment about a story or topic on one of our websites, an editor or reporter may contact you for clarification or for permission to use your comments in the newspaper or other publications of the Yakima Herald-Republic.

Who else has access to your personally identifiable information?

Third-party technology providers: In some cases, the service you sign up for is provided by a third-party technology or content provider. When you use these third-party services offered on our sites, personally identifiable information you provide may be collected directly by these third parties solely in order to deliver the services you have requested. These third-party partners may not use or distribute our users’ information in any capacity outside of the service for which we contracted and they must comply with our privacy policies.

Transactional partners: In some cases we partner with another company to co-promote their services within our websites. In these cases, you are transacting directly with the other party, and the personally identifiable information you enter on those services is shared both with that transactional partner and the Yakima Herald-Republic. On those pages requiring personally identifiable information, the transactional partner’s brand is clearly visible, and their privacy statement is posted. We encourage you to read it.

How do we use site usage statistics?

The Yakima Herald-Republic collects some information automatically via server logs and cookies. This information can include your IP address, browser type, domain names, access times and referring URLs. We use this information to prepare for peak usage times and ensure a fast-loading site, to help diagnose problems with our servers and to understand which features of our sites are being used and when.

How do we use cookies and web beacons?

A cookie is a small file that stores information in your browser on your computer. The Yakima Herald-Republic places cookies in your browser that contain some of the information you provide when you register with us and when you set up a personalized service such as a “favorites list.” We do not store highly sensitive personal information such as your password, email address or credit card number in cookies. Cookies enable us to summarize overall usage patterns for our analysis. In addition, we use cookies to provide personalized services. We also use cookies to provide a more useful online experience — such as allowing you to quickly enter a sweepstakes if you’re already logged on. And it can allow us to limit users to only one entry for an online poll.

A web beacon is an invisible graphic on a web page that is programmed to collect nonpersonally identifiable information about your use of a given site. Like cookies, web beacons allow the Yakima Herald-Republic and its technology providers to summarize overall usage patterns for our analysis and provide personalized services. We do not share or provide personally identifiable information we may collect, such as names, email addresses and phone numbers with our advertisers without your express permission.

We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Web site. These companies may use aggregated information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, please see: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

You may opt-out of the cookies delivered by the Yakima Herald-Republic by changing the setting on your browser. Depending on your privacy settings, please be aware that this may disable all cookies delivered to your browser, not just the ones delivered by the Yakima Herald-Republic.

Disclosures Required by Law or for Security and Safety

Regardless of your choices with respect to your information, the Yakima Herald-Republic will disclose personally identifiable information when it believes in good faith that such disclosures are (a) required by law, including, for example, to comply with a court order or subpoena, or (b) will help enforce our terms of use, enforce contest and sweepstakes rules, protect your safety or security and/or protect the safety and security of the Yakima Herald-Republic, our websites, our property, or our employees; or (c) to protect the safety or security of third parties.

Children’s guidelines

In general, our sites are not intentionally targeted at children younger than 13, but some educational areas of our sites are targeted to middle-school and high-school age children. We require written parental consent for children younger than 13 to register or submit personally identifiable information on our sites. Contact webmaster@yakimaherald.com for information on how to provide parental consent.
· Children: Be sure to ask your parents for permission before you send any personally identifiable information about yourself to us or anyone else over the Internet.
· Parents and guardians: We encourage you to get involved with your children’s online usage and to be aware of the activities in which they are participating.
We retain the right, at our discretion, to change any of these policies in the future. Our current procedures will be disclosed on this page.

How to contact the Yakima Herald-Republic

If you have any questions about these commenting guidelines, our terms of service, the practices of our website, or to resolve a dispute, you can contact us:

By email: click here
By mail: Yakima Herald-Republic
Attn: Online Manager – Commenting
114 N. Fourth St.
Yakima, WA 98901-2707
Last updated July 12,2011