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l About MLS

 

MLSnet.com Privacy Statement

Major League Soccer, L.L.C. ("MLS"), in association with SportsOnEarth, L.L.C. ("SOE") produces MLSnet.com, the Official Website of MLS (the "Website"). We are committed to safeguarding your privacy online. This Privacy Policy is applicable to this Website only.

General

You can visit and enjoy the Website without disclosing any personal information about yourself. However, we offer some special services, and for these services to work properly we will need you to share with us certain personal information about yourself. If you submit any personal information to us, or to our third party service providers acting on our behalf, you can be assured that we will not sell, lease, or share your personal information with or to anyone else, except as follows: (1) to our third party service providers, and only so that they may help us provide the services you've requested and in certain circumstances to provide you with ticket related offers; (2) to one or more MLS Member Clubs, to the extent that you've submitted information that relates specifically to them (e.g., you've asked to receive the newsletter of one or more Member Clubs via email; or you've purchased Member Club-specific merchandise from the store), so that they may learn more about fans like you, and provide better services to you; and (3) on occasion, we may offer a special promotion (such as a sweepstakes, contest, fantasy soccer or a free subscription to goods and services) on the Website in conjunction with a third party service provider, sponsor, or promotional partner, and share your information with that third party service provider, sponsor, or promotional partner so that it can send you other special promotions it offers, but only if you give us permission to do so.

Special Offers and Promotions. With your permission, we may also send you e-mails with special offers and promotions. If you don't want to receive these, you may change your preferences.

Cookies. To help us serve you better, we collect information that does not identify you personally, but rather identifies your computer or browser. This is done by using little files called "cookies" and by tracking IP addresses. A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes an anonymous unique identifier that is sent to your browser from a Website's computers and stored on your computer's hard drive. Cookies operate in the background, and you can turn them off if you wish, but doing so may impair your ability to use some of the features on the Website. We may use cookies to make the Website work better by, for example, keeping track of your login name, password and, if you want to buy things while on the Website, your "shopping cart."

We may also allow other companies that are presenting advertisements or providing services on our pages to set and access cookies on your computer. Those companies' use of cookies will be covered by their own privacy policies, not ours.

Specifically, we use a third-party advertising company to serve ads when you visit certain pages of the Website. This company may use aggregated information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to the Website in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about the information collection practices of this third-party advertising company, click here.

If you do not want information collected through the use of cookies, there is a simple procedure in most browsers that allows the user to accept or reject cookies. If you set your browser not to accept cookies, you may not be able to take advantage of certain services on the Website.

We may also use IP addresses to analyze trends, help us administer the Website, track the movement of visitors, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information, except as may be necessary to verify users' locations to determine the applicability of blackout restrictions for MLSnet.com video/audio subscription products, as applicable.

Aggregated Demographic Information. We may share aggregated demographic information with third parties, but this information is not linked to any personal information that can identify you or another individual person. Therefore, no personal information is disclosed in this manner.

Business Transfers. As time passes, Major League Soccer, L.L.C., may be sold along with its assets, or other transactions may occur in which customer information is one of the business assets transferred. In such a case, the customer information which we have gathered may be one of the business assets we transfer.

Disclosure for Legal Purposes. The law requires that we may be required to share your personal information and non-personal information (see "Cookies" section above for examples of non-personal information) pursuant to judicial or governmental subpoenas, warrants or orders. If we are required to do so, we will, of course, obey the law. In addition, notwithstanding any term to the contrary in this Privacy Policy, we reserve the right to use and disclose share your personal and non-personal information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of this Website's Terms of Service, or as otherwise required by law.

Our Security Practices

Your preferences are password protected for your privacy and security. In certain areas, we use industry-standard SSL encryption to protect data transmissions.

How You Can Review Your Personal Information

If you want to review your personal information, you can revise your preferences. Your preferences include your shipping, payment and account information, as well as whether you want to receive communications from us.

If you want to close your account with us and have us delete the personal information in it (except for information that we keep for record-keeping purposes), you should contact our Privacy Administrator.

Choice

Our registration and order forms contain a box for you to indicate whether or not you consent to receive special offers and promotions from us. Unless you give us your consent to use your personal information for these purposes, we and our partners will only use it to complete the transaction or provide the service or product you have requested. If you indicate that you consent to receive communications or solicitations, but you later change your mind, you can revise your preferences.

Links

The Website contain links to other sites produced by MLS and/or SOE and websites operated by unrelated third parties. Please note that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of third party websites. We encourage you to be aware of this when your leave the Website and to read the privacy policies of every website that collects personally identifiable information from you. The Privacy Policy applies only to this Website.

Special Rules For Children

Because of federal law, we cannot collect any personal information from a child under the age of thirteen without the consent of that child's parent. The statements in this Privacy Policy generally about our collection and use of personal information also apply to our treatment of personal information from children under the age of thirteen, with the added protection of the special rules that follow.

Parental Consent

Some services on the Website (e.g., Shop, Ticketing) require the submission of a credit card number along with personal information, and are therefore not available to children. Other services on the Website (e.g., fantasy soccer) are not available to children under the age of thirteen. For services that are available to children under the age of thirteen, if a child under the age of thirteen attempts to complete any registration form on the Website a screen will appear that says "Get Your Mom or Dad." We will then instruct the child to have a parent complete the registration form, either in person or by e-mail. We will provide the parent with a notice describing the Privacy Policy and will ask for the parent's consent to our collection and use of personal information from or about their child. The parent will also be asked to submit a credit card number (the card will not be charged) for verification purposes only.

If the registration form is not completed with a credit card number to verify parental consent, the child will not be able to access those of our activities requiring registration and we will not collect any personal information from that child. Failure to complete the registration form will also prevent the child from entering chat rooms or otherwise making personal information available to the public on the Website. A child's parent has the option to consent to the collection and use of their child's personal information without consenting to the disclosure of that information to third parties, but if such disclosure is necessary to make available a service which has been requested, then the child will not have access to such service.

Information Collected

Depending on the special service requested, personal information collected may include a name, email address, address or age of a child. We will not condition a child's participation in any activity on the Website, such as fantasy soccer, on the child's disclosing more information than is reasonably necessary to participate in that activity. A parent can review his or her child's personal information by accessing the child's preferences. A parent can instruct us to delete the child's personal information or to stop collecting or using the child's personal information by contacting the Privacy Administrator.

Information Use

We may use the personal information to provide the child with the special services for which he or she has registered, as well as for fulfilling a requested transaction, record keeping, marketing back to the child or making it publicly available through a chat room. (Please note that when anyone, including a child, uses a message board or chat room on the Website, the communications are publicly available to the other participants.)

Information Disclosure

After obtaining the consent of the child's parent, we, our service providers, and one or more Member Clubs (to the extent that any information disclosed is specific to them), will maintain the confidentiality, security, and integrity of the personal information collected about the child. A child's information will only be disclosed to our third party service providers and the applicable Member Club(s) as described in this Privacy Policy. The following are third party service providers of our services which may collect or maintain personal information from children under 13 on our behalf: Synacor, Inc. (vanity e-mail); and Prospero, Inc. (message boards). They can't use your child's personal information without your consent for any purpose other than the service you've requested on behalf of your child.

Contact Us

If you have questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, you can contact us at:

SportsOnEarth, L.L.C. Privacy Administrator 75 Ninth Avenue New York, New York 10011 Phone: (212) 485-8421 Fax: (212) 485-8111

Or send an e-mail to privacy@mlsnet.com.

Notification of Changes

If we decide to make an important change to our Privacy Policy, we will post a notification and link on our homepage so that you can review the updated policy. If at any point we wish to use your personal information in a manner different from that stated at the time it was collected, we will notify you by means of an e-mail and give you the opportunity to indicate whether you consent to the proposed use.

LAST UPDATED: April 16, 2004