Discovery.com respects your privacy, and we want you to understand the ways in which we do and don't use the information that you transmit when you visit our Web site. This statement discloses the privacy practices for all United States-based Discovery.com Web sites, including Discovery Kids and the Students area of Discovery School. Our web site is intended for users in the United States. This statement does not pertain to our practices in the retail stores, catalog or in other parts of Discovery Communications, Inc. or its subsidiaries and affiliates.
Kids Privacy Notice
A Note to Kids
Discovery encourages you to get permission from your parents before sending any personal information about yourself (such as your name or your email address) over the Internet, to us or to anyone else.
A Note To Parents
PLEASE READ. This section of the privacy policy explains our information collection and use practices online for children under the age of thirteen, including what we do with information that we collect and with whom we share that information. We ask that you take the time to review our policy so that you can know exactly how we collect and use information from kids, and so that you will know how you can review or request that we delete your child's information. If you ever have any questions or concerns about this policy, please contact us.
What Information We Collect From Children Under Thirteen
On Discovery Kids and Discovery School, Discovery generally limits its collection of information from kids to information such as a fictional screen name that does not personally identify the child, nor link to information that will. This information is collected so that kids can participate in the activities offered on our sites without having to provide personally identifiable information.
However, from time to time we may request limited personally identifiable information from kids in order to offer promotions or other activities such as newsletters. If the offered activity involves only a one-time contact with your child, we will request only that the child provide his or her e-mail address and, sometimes, select a "handle" from a drop-down menu to serve as the child's screen name (we use handles so that children cannot accidentally submit his or her real name). However, if the activity might involve more than one contact with your child (such as where there are daily instant wins as well as a grand prize or for a newsletter), we will also request that your child provide your e-mail address. Discovery.com will use your e-mail address to send you an e-mail letting you know about your child's contact and entry, and giving you an opportunity to opt your child out of participation. Our e-mail will include details on how you may request that Discovery delete your and your child's information, and prohibit Discovery from any further contact with your child. Please note: If we do not receive a response from you requesting that we delete your child's information, your consent to your child's requested activity will be presumed.
We may also offer online postcards or e-mail messages that kids can send to their friends. In order to send these postcards or e-mail messages, Discovery will ask the child to submit either his or her e-mail address or first name, and the e-mail address of the recipient. Information collected for postcards or e-mails will only be used to send the requested postcard or e-mail, and all information collected for the purpose of sending a postcard or e-mail is deleted immediately once the postcard or e-mail is sent.
Some parts of the Discovery.com Web sites require that personally identifiable information (other than an e-mail address) be submitted in order to participate. For example, Discovery.com has a registration option where users are invited to become members of My Discovery. These activities will have an age-screening mechanism to prevent children under the age of thirteen from registering. We won't knowingly allow anyone under the age of thirteen to register with any of our sites, or to access those features that require registration except as explicitly disclosed herein.
If we become aware that we have inadvertently received personally identifiable information from a user under the age of thirteen, other than in a legally permissible situation, we will delete the information from our records as soon as we discover it.
As a parent or guardian, you may exercise your right to have your and your child's information deleted at any time. Additionally, you may review your child's personally identifiable information at any time. See Parent's Rights, below.
We will not condition participation in any online activity on disclosure by kids of more information than is reasonably necessary to participate.
How We Use Information We Collect From Children Under Thirteen
When we collect personally identifiable information from children under the age of thirteen, we will only use that information for the express purpose for which it was collected. For example, if your child enters a sweepstakes, we will only use your child's email address to enter him or her into the sweepstakes, to notify you of your child's entry, and to identify and notify your child if he or she is a potential winner. The information will not be used for any purpose and the information will not be used after the promotion is complete.
We do not share information collected from children under the age of thirteen with any third parties except those parties that help us administer our Web site and/or our sweepstakes or contests. These third parties may not use the information for any other purpose, and have agreed to maintain the confidentiality, security and integrity of the information.
If your child is selected as a potential winner of one of our contests or sweepstakes, we will notify you, via the email address that your child submitted. We will only collect full name, mailing address, and other personally identifiable information from you, the parent, and not from your child.
Additionally, in the unlikely event that all or substantially all of our assets relating to the family of Discovery.com Web sites are sold or transferred to another party, all personally identifiable information collected and saved by us may be transferred to this acquiring party. Finally, we may disclose your child's personally identifiable information to third parties in order to comply with law, law enforcement agencies, to protect our rights in or the safety of our web site, or to protect the safety or rights of other users of our web sites.
Cookies and Non-Personally Identifiable Information
To help make our sites more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we invoke a standard feature found in browser software, called a "cookie", to assign each visitor a unique, random number, a sort of anonymous user ID that resides on your computer. The cookie doesn't actually identify the visitor, just the computer that a visitor uses to access our site. A cookie can't read data off your hard drive. We do not link cookie data with personally identifiable information, nor do we store kid's personal information in our cookies. You can disable cookies at any time by changing the preferences in your browser.
Also, please note that our advertisers or third-party ad servers may assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we don't control. For more about third-party ad servers, click here.
Finally, Discovery keeps records of certain non-personally identifiable information such as the number of hits a Web page receives, IP address, and other aggregate data. We do not link this aggregate data with any personal information. Third parties that help us administer our Web sites may have access to this non-personally identifiable, aggregate data, as may our third-party ad servers. However, these third parties are bound to keep this information confidential.
We want you to be comfortable with what your child is doing on Discovery's Web sites. Therefore, you may contact Discovery at any time regarding privacy questions or concerns, or to request to review what personally identifiable information we have collected from your child. You may also contact us at any time to request that we delete your child's, and your, personally identifiable information, and/or refuse to permit further collection or use of your child's information. We will take steps to ensure that any person contacting us for a child's information is that child's parent or guardian.
Discovery Communications, Inc.
1 Discovery Place
Silver Spring, MD 20910
Phone: (240) 662-2000 (Legal)
E-mail: privacy_policy@discovery.com
General Privacy Notice
This section of our Privacy Policy relates to all of Discovery's Web sites except Discovery Kids and the kids' section of Discovery School. To review our Kids Privacy Policy, please click here.
What Information We Collect
The information gathered by Discovery.com falls into two categories: (1) personally identifiable information voluntarily supplied by visitors to our Web sites through optional registration or other methods and (2) non-personally identifiable information routinely gathered as visitors navigate through our sites.
Personally Identifiable Information
There is lots of content and other useful and fun activities on Discovery's Web sites that do not require that submission of personally identifiable information. However, we offer certain personalized features that our visitors can take advantage on our Web sites (such as My Discovery, Discovery Travel and the Discovery Store) through registration. In order to register on our site, we may ask for your name, email address, gender, age and zip code, and we might request information on your interest in science, animals, nature, travel, sports, books, television programs and the like. The information you supply will help us to offer you more personalized features, to tailor our sites to your interests and to make them more useful to you.
The more you tell us about yourself, the more value we can offer you. Supplying such information is entirely voluntary. But if you don't supply the information we need, we may be unable to provide you with services we make available to other visitors to our sites. For example, we can't offer you online travel reservations without knowing how to book your trip, nor can we offer personalized TV schedule listings and program reminders for Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, Animal Planet or any of our other TV offerings if you don't tell us which programs and topics you're interested in. We can't send you email alerting you to any new service we're offering or breaking news that may interest you if you don't tell us your preferences and give us your email address. Similarly, we can't notify you that you've been lucky enough to win a prize in a promotional contest if we don't know how to contact you.
Of course, even if you want to remain anonymous, you're still free to take advantage of the wealth of content available on our sites without registration.
From time to time, Discovery.com may offer contests, sweepstakes or other promotions on our sites to people over the age of thirteen [For information on contests or sweepstakes open to users under the age of thirteen, click here]. If you enter a sweepstakes or contest on our site, you'll have to provide information about yourself such as your name, address, and/or email address so that we can contact you if you win. We may share this information with any co-sponsor of the contest (as identified in the rules).
Non-Personally Identifiable Information
Cookies
To help make our sites more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we invoke a standard feature found in browser software, called a "cookie", to assign each visitor a unique, random number, a sort of anonymous user ID that resides on your computer. The cookie doesn't actually identify the visitor, just the computer that a visitor uses to access our site. Unless you voluntarily identify yourself (through registration, for example), we won't know who you are, even if we assign a cookie to your computer. The only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply. A cookie can't read data off your hard drive. Our advertisers may also assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we don't control.
We use cookies to help us tailor our site to your needs, to deliver a better, more personalized service. In addition, we may use cookies to track the pages on our sites visited by our users. We can build a better site if we know which pages our users are visiting and how often. Of course, you can set your browser not to accept cookies, but if you do, you may not be able to take advantage of the personalized features enjoyed by other visitors to our sites. For more about third-party ad servers, click here.
IP Addresses
Our Web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address, when you visit our sites. (Your IP address is a number that lets computers attached to the Internet know where to send you data - such as the Web pages you view.) Your IP address does not identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our Web pages to you upon request, to tailor our sites to the interests of our users and to measure traffic within our sites.
Also, please note that our advertisers or third-party ad servers may assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we don't control. For more about third-party ad servers, click here.
How Information Collected On Our Sites Is Used and Shared
From time to time, we may share personally identifiable information with third parties whose marketing products and services that we believe might be of interest to you, or who help us maintain our Web site. We also offer contests, sweepstakes and other promotions from time to time, sometimes in conjunction with a co-sponsor. We have administrators that help us with entry collection, winner selection and prize fulfillment. In these circumstances, the co-sponsor and/or the sweepstakes or contests administrators may have access to the personally identifiable information that you submit in your entry.
To make our sites more valuable to our visitors, we may also offer some features in conjunction with other providers. Our travel email fan clubs, for example, are made available through cooperative arrangements with providers that specialize in operating such services and that will receive the information you provide when you register for, and use, these services. To take advantage of these services, you may need to provide personal information to us and to the other provider.
If you would prefer that we do not share your information with third party marketers, please indicate on our My Discovery registration form if you'd prefer we not share such information with them. If you so indicate on our registration form, we won't share information about you with anyone other than those identified when the information is collected. Because those parties that help us administer our site will have access to users' personally identifiable information, if you do not wish for our administrators to have access to your information, please do not register or submit any personal information to us. And, if you do not wish for us to share your personally identifiable information with our sweepstakes or contest co-sponsors or administrators, please do not enter any contests or sweepstakes on our site. Of course, you are always free not to input the information we request and use our sites anonymously.
Sometimes, we might also contact you directly about our own or others' products and services. If you'd prefer that we not do so, just indicate on your registration form that you prefer not to receive offers and information. And remember, you can always change your preferences, or request that we delete your information.
When we present information to our advertisers - to help them understand our audience and confirm the value of advertising on our Web sites - it is usually in the form of aggregated statistics on traffic to various pages within our sites.
You should note that our sites include links to other Web sites whose privacy practices we don't control. Once you leave our servers (you can tell where you are by checking the URL in the location bar on your browser), use of any information you provide is governed by the privacy policy of the operator of the site you're visiting. If you provide information in the course of obtaining products or services through our site, use of any information you provide may be governed by the privacy policy of the provider of those products or services, even if it appears that you're on Discovery-branded pages throughout the transaction. These parties may have privacy policies and practices that differ from ours. If you can't find the privacy policy of any of these sites via a link from the site's homepage, you should contact the site directly for more information. We encourage everyone to be proactive in understanding how his or her information is collected and used online.
In the unlikely event that all or substantially all of our assets relating to our Web sites is sole or transferred to another party, your personally identifiable information may be transferred to this acquiring entity. Finally, we may disclose your personally identifiable information to third parties in order to comply with law, law enforcement agencies, to protect our rights in or the safety of our Web site, or to protect the safety or rights of other users of our Web sites.
For Users of DiscoveryHealth.com
We recognize that the confidentiality of medical and health-related information is of special concern to many visitors to DiscoveryHealth.com. Discovery is committed to safeguarding your medical privacy. We will not share with ANY third party personally identifiable information relating to medical conditions or health-related interests that you might disclose on DiscoveryHealth.com unless you opt in to our sharing that data.
The Discovery Store
Discovery.com knows that the confidentiality of purchase-related information is of special concern to visitors who purchase items through DiscoveryStore.com. Discovery.com is committed to safeguarding this information. We will not share any personally identifiable information (such as your name, address or telephone number) that you provide us when you make a purchase through DiscoveryStore.com with any other company, except where necessary for the vendor to fulfill the order. However, to help provide you with the best possible shopping experience, we may provide our strategic partners, vendors and advertisers with aggregated information (information that doesn't identify anyone personally) about those who have purchased items through the Discovery Store. We may also use the information you provide us when you make a purchase through DiscoveryStore.com to tell you about new products, services and special offers that we believe might be of interest to you. If you would prefer not to be contacted about such products, services or special offers, please let us know by checking the box marked "No Special Notices" located in the checkout section of the Discovery Store.
Discovery Travel
We are committed to safeguarding the information you submit to us when you make travel reservations and purchase travel services through Discovery Travel. We will not share any of the personally identifiable information (such as your name, address or telephone number) that you provide when you request information about a trip, make a reservation or purchase travel services through Discovery Travel, except to the company (for example, an airline, tour operator, hotel or travel agent such as Away.com) providing such services. We encourage you to enjoy Discovery Travel and all it has to offer, but please note that if you do request information or reserve or book a trip, it is likely that one of our preferred online travel providers will be fulfilling your request and receiving your personal information.
Accessing Your Information And Changing Your Elections
If you want to change your election on how we share your information, or you wish to review, update or delete the information you have provided us, just return to the registration form, enter the changes you want to make and resubmit the form. You may also contact us with privacy questions or concerns.
Encryption and Security
All information gathered on any Discovery.com Web site is encrypted or protected for storage within a Discovery.com-controlled database. Discovery.com seeks to safeguard the information you provide. As effective as encryption technology is, however, no security system is completely impenetrable, so we cannot guarantee the absolute security of our database, nor can we guarantee that information you supply won't be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet. And, of course, any information you include in a message you post to any chat room, forum or other public-posting area is available to anyone with Internet access. If you don't want people to know your email address, for example, don't include it in any message you post publicly.
A Final Note: The Web is an evolving medium. If we need to change our privacy policy at some point in the future, we'll post the changes here. Of course, our use of information gathered while the current policy is in effect will always be consistent with the current policy, even if we change that policy later. Thanks for making the Discovery.com family of Web sites a part of your discoveries online!
Last updated: October 30, 2003