FORBES.COM PRIVACY STATEMENT

Revised and posted as of: May 1, 2005

Forbes.com is committed to safeguarding your privacy online. Please read the following statement to understand how your personal information will be treated as you make full use of the Forbes.com Web site. The Forbes.com Web site is owned and operated by Forbes.com Inc.

If you have any questions regarding our privacy statement, please feel free to contact us by e-mail at privacy@forbes.net.

Summary

Our primary goal in collecting user information is to enhance your experience on our Web site. We use aggregated (gathered up data across all user accounts) information to develop content targeted to users' interests and to better the Web site user experience. Forbes.com is committed to your privacy and will not share any personal information with any third party at any time, unless required by law.

What this Privacy Policy Covers

This privacy policy covers the Web site Forbes.com. Forbes.com charges a nominal fee to access Forbes magazine content that is aged fourteen days or older. Formatted versions of Forbes lists and subscriptions to investment newsletters also require payments. This privacy policy covers all these transactions as well. Other Forbes.com sites linked to from this Web site, including Forbesautos.com, have their own privacy statements which can be viewed on those sites.

Please be aware that Forbes.com sponsors, advertisers, co-branded Web site or Web sites that have links on our site may collect personally identifiable information about you on their Web sites. The information practices of those parties are not covered by this privacy statement. Forbes.com users should also be aware that, when you voluntarily disclose personal information in chat areas or bulletin boards, that information may be collected by others and may result in unsolicited messages from others.

Gathering of Information

Voluntary Submission
Forbes.com does not collect personally identifying information about any individual Forbes.com Web site user except when knowingly provided by such individual. For example, we may ask you for information, such as your e-mail address, zip code and the country in which you are viewing the Web site when you register to become a member of Forbes.com, to customize your Attaché or other personalization applications, to enter a contest or complete a survey or to receive a newsletter. When you purchase aged articles or subscriptions to investment newsletters, you will be asked for additional personal information, such as your address, telephone number and credit card information, in order to complete the purchase. You always have the option not to provide the information we request. If you choose not to provide the information we request, you can still visit most of the Forbes.com Web site, but you may be unable to access certain options and services.

Cookies
A cookie is a data file that certain Web sites write to your computer's hard drive when you visit such sites. A cookie file can contain information, such as a user identification code, that the site uses to track the pages you have visited. Forbes.com uses cookies to track user traffic patterns throughout the Forbes.com Web site and to remember your passwords and video plug-in preferences so that you don't have to reset them each time you visit the Web site. We use this data on an anonymous basis and we do not correlate this information with personal data of any user. Business partners of Forbes.com and vendors providing hosting and other services for Forbes.com., as well as advertisers who contract directly with a third-party service to serve their advertisements, may set their own cookies which may collect similar anonymous information.

Most Web site browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually change your browser settings to display a warning before accepting a cookie, or to refuse all cookies. However, if you choose to disable the receipt of cookies from our Web site, you may not be able to use certain features of the site.

Browser Level Information
Forbes.com Web servers automatically collect information about a site user's IP address, browser type and the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on the Web site or not) and which URL you next go to (whether this URL is on the Web site or not) by reading this information from the user's browser (information provided by every user's browser). This information is collected in a database and used--in an aggregated, anonymous manner--in our internal analysis of traffic patterns within our Web site. This information is automatically logged by most Web sites. Forbes.com also uses a third party to collect information, including through the use of web beacons. Click here to learn more about how we use a third party service to collect and use information on our Web site.

Use of Information
Our primary goal in collecting user information is to enhance your experience on our Web site.

To Target Content
To develop content targeted to your interests, we use aggregated user information to determine which areas of our Web site users prefer based upon traffic to those areas. We do not track what individual users read, but instead how well each page or content area performs overall.

To Provide Interactive Communications From Forbes.com
To enhance your experience we may provide you with interactive communications, such as our electronic newsletters, to the e-mail address that you provide to us. Such interactive communications are provided only to those users who have expressly provided us with their permission to receive them as part of their user profile.

From time to time we may provide e-mails highlighting new features, promotions or contests on the Web site to those users who have expressly provided us with their permission to send such communications as part of their user profile.

To Provide Communications From Third Parties
We respect the privacy of our users and shall not disclose or distribute our user list to any third party, nor shall it permit anyone else to do so. However, we do make available for rental our list of those registrants who have expressly provided us with their permission to receive third party information and offers as part of their user profile. In those cases, your personal information is not transferred to the third party.

Control of Your Information
Users may change their user profile to stop receiving newsletters or marketing material from Forbes.com or on behalf of external third party business partners. Users may choose to stop receiving such communications at any time by visiting the "edit my profile" page at http://www.forbes.com/membership/editprofile.jhtml, or by following instructions at the end of any e-mail.

Sharing of Information
When you are on an area of Forbes.com and are asked for personal information, you are sharing that information with Forbes.com as well as business partners and vendors providing hosting and other services for Forbes.com. If you do not want your information to be shared, you can choose not to allow the transfer of your information by not using that particular service. In addition, any personally identifiable information provided by our users as part of an advertiser promotion online may be provided directly to advertisers.

Aggregate, Anonymous Information With Advertisers
Forbes.com derives the majority of its revenue from advertising and sharing information is essential to keeping our services affordable to users. In order to attract and retain advertisers we use the aggregated, anonymous information that we gather (as well as information from third-party market researchers) to describe our services to partners and to assist our advertisers and sponsors to better understand our audience. We do not disclose personally identifying information about our users to these parties.

As Necessary to Provide Services to You
We occasionally hire other companies to provide limited services on our behalf, such as handling the processing and delivery of newsletter mailings, processing transactions, or performing statistical analysis of our services. We will only provide those companies the personal information they need to deliver the service. In some instances, one of these companies may collect information directly from you (such as for credit card processing for purchase of archived articles). In these cases, you will be notified of the involvement of the external service provider. In all cases, these companies are subject to agreements that require them to maintain the confidentiality of your information and they are prohibited from using that information for any other purpose.

As Required By Law
Forbes.com may disclose your personal information if required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Forbes.com or to protect and defend the rights or property of Forbes.com.

Security
Your information is stored on Forbes.com's servers located in the United States. We use procedural and technical safeguards to protect your personal information against loss or theft as well as unauthorized access and disclosure to protect your privacy, including encryption, "firewalls" and Secure Socket Layers. We treat data as an asset that must be protected against loss and unauthorized access. We employ many different security techniques to protect such data from unauthorized access by users inside and outside the company. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.

Privacy of Children
Kids under 13: Do not send any information about yourself to us--including information such as your name, address, or e-mail address. We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under 13. In the event that we learn we have collected any personal information from a child under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information from our database as quickly as possible.

How to Contact Us
If you have any questions regarding our privacy statement, please feel free to contact us by e-mail at privacy@forbes.net. We read every message submitted and try to reply promptly to every one.

How Will I Know if the Privacy Policy Is Changed?
This statement may change from time to time, so please check back periodically. [If we are going to be using the information collected from users in a manner materially different from that stated at the time of collection, we will send affected users written notice of the change by e-mail.]

© 2005 Forbes.com Inc. All Rights Reserved.

DEFINITIONS:

IP address: Every computer connected to the Internet has a numeric address called an "IP address." This may or may not correspond uniquely to a particular computer. In some cases, IP addresses can be resolved to domain names, which may indicate a site visitor's Internet service provider, employer, university, etc. As part of its database analysis Forbes.com resolves IP addresses to domain names.

Browser type: A user's browser is a software program running on a computer that allows users to access documents on the World Wide Web. Browsers can be either text or graphic. They read HTML coded pages that reside on a server and interpret the coding into what the user sees as Web pages. Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer are examples of Web browsers. Browser type typically discloses hardware platform, operating system, and browser software and version.

Referrer: The referrer is the URI of the Internet resource or page that causes a browser to request a page or image from Forbes.com servers.