Privacy Policy

Effective January 15, 2010

This Privacy Policy covers Hunch's treatment of personal information that Hunch gathers when you are on the Hunch website ("the Site") and when you use Hunch services.

The really big picture:

Your privacy is protected when you use the Hunch Site. We're here to help you get great recommendations, not to take your personal data and sell or rent it to outside parties.

Like a knowledgeable expert who gets to know you better over time, Hunch provides increasingly accurate recommendations to you the more you answer questions and provide feedback about the recommendations you've already received. It's up to you how your answers to these questions are shared and stored:

  • Your answers remain confidential and may not be viewed by other Hunch users, unless you specifically choose to share your answers.
  • You can also choose to delete any previous THAY answers and/or disable the 'remember answers' feature for future questions.

How Your Personal Information Is Used:

The Hunch basics: You can use basic features of Hunch without being logged in and without providing any personal information at all. In order to improve the quality of your recommendations as you use Hunch repeatedly, Hunch may use a temporary session cookie to remember how you recently answered previous questions. This temporary answer history is not stored on your computer and is not tied to personally identifiable information.

The cooler Hunch stuff: Certain other functions of Hunch are only available if you create and are logged in to a Hunch account:

  • We ask for your email address and a password when you create your account in order to control access to it. Your username is used to identify you to other Hunch users when you elect to share information or contribute reviews to Hunch.
  • You may choose to spruce up your user profile be adding a photo, descriptive text, your location or other information. This content may be shown to other Hunch users anywhere your username would otherwise appear (for example, adjacent to an item review you submitted.) That's the whole point!
  • THAY ANSWERS: By default when you are logged in, Hunch remembers your answers to questions. Over time this will increase the accuracy of the recommendations you receive. Alternatively, you can use your account profile settings to disable this feature or delete previously stored answers.
  • SHARED ANSWERS: By default when you are logged in, your answers to questions are not visible by other users. If, on the other hand, you decide to be more social and let the world gain some insight into what you like and don't, this setting can be enabled from your user profile.
  • While you are logged in we hope you'll provide written commentary and pros/cons about the recommendation outcomes on Hunch. Your submissions will be publicly credited to your username, and they're subject to Hunch's Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.
  • We also welcome your suggested contributions for topics, questions/answers and recommendation outcomes. These contributions are also subject to Hunch's Terms of Service and Community Guidelines and may be credited to your username.
  • Hunch may make certain aggregated and anonymized data available to developers via an Application Programming Interface ("API"). Data accessed from the API may be used in outside applications subject to the review and approval by Hunch.
  • Hunch may collect and display on the Site statistics about your usage of the Hunch service (such as the number of topics you've tried or the number of contributions you've made) and associate this data with your username.

Sharing of Personal Information by Hunch

Any personal information that you voluntarily disclose on public areas of the Hunch Site (reviews, message boards, profile descriptions, support forums, blog feedback, etc.) becomes publicly available and could be collected and used by other people, including bad people. We strongly discourage you from providing any sensitive or personally identifiable information (say, an email address or phone number) when submitting or contributing to such public content.

Spam stinks. So we do not use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages without your consent. We may, however, use your email address without further consent for infrequent critical non-marketing or administrative purposes.

We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal information such as the number of users who engaged in a particular topic, correlations between question answers and item preferences, and how many users choose to buy a recommended item. Such information does not identify you individually.

We may employ other companies and people to perform tasks on our behalf and sometimes need to share your information with them to provide products or services to you. Examples include analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, and providing customer service.

In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types of transactions, customer information is typically one of the business assets that is transferred. Moreover, if Hunch, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, customer information would be one of the assets that is transferred.

Additionally, we may disclose your personal information after notifying you and obtaining your consent.

Automatically Collected Information

When you use Hunch, our servers automatically record standard information that your browser sends whenever you visit a website. These server logs may include information such as the page you visited, your Internet Protocol address, Hunch cookie information, browser type, browser language, and the date and time of your request. Hunch uses this traffic data to help diagnose problems with its server, analyze trends and administer the Site.

Generally, Hunch automatically collects usage information, such as the numbers and frequency of visitors to our site and its components. This data is only used in the aggregate. This type of collective data enables us to determine how users interact with the Hunch service, so we can identify areas for improvement.

We use cookies to make Hunch easier for you to use, for example by remembering that you are logged in. Cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that we transfer to your computer's hard drive through your web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser and tell us how and when pages in our site are visited and by how many people. Hunch cookies do not collect personal information, and we do not combine information collected through cookies with other personal information to tell us who you are or what your screen name or email address is.

The "help" portion of the toolbar on the majority of browsers will direct you on how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to command the browser to tell you when you receive a new cookie, or how to fully disable cookies. You can set your browser to refuse all cookies, but some Hunch features and services may not function properly if your cookies are disabled. We strongly recommend that you leave the cookies activated, however, because cookies enable you to take advantage of some of Hunch's most attractive features.

Reviewing, Updating or Deleting Your Personal Information

You can visit your account profile page at any time to:

  • Update or correct your personal profile information, photo, or email preferences
  • Delete some or all of your THAY answers to past questions
  • Disable the 'remember answers' feature for future questions
  • Block other users from seeing your previously answered questions by setting your THAY answers to 'private' mode
  • Delete your account completely

Confidentiality and Security

Your Hunch account information is protected by a password for your privacy and security. You need to work to protect against unauthorized access to your password and to your computer by signing off once you have finished using a shared computer.

Only employees or agents who need personal information to perform a specific job (for example, a customer service representative) are granted access to it. All of our employees and agents are kept up to date on our privacy and security practices.

Though we make every effort to preserve your privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law, if we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process, enforce or apply our Terms of Service and other agreements; or protect the rights, property, or safety of Hunch, our employees, our users, or others.

The Hunch Site provides links to and information relating to many other websites, including websites with whom we may have a sponsorship relationship or marketing relationship. We do not exercise control over those websites, and each has its own privacy policy that is distinct from this one. These other websites may also place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data or solicit personal information from you.

Children

The Hunch Site is not directed at individuals under thirteen years of age, and we do not intend to collect any personally-identifiable information from such individuals.

Your Acceptance of These Terms

By using the Hunch Site, you signify your assent to this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with this Privacy Policy, please do not use the Site. Your continued use of the Site following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this policy at any time by simply posting such addition or modification on the Site. If at any point we decide to use personally identifiable information in a manner materially different from that stated at the time it was collected, we will notify users by way of an email or via a prominent notice on our Site.

Please address questions related to our privacy practices to:

Hunch Inc.
Privacy Officer
54 W. 21st St. Suite 1001
New York, NY 10010
USA

You can also send us an email.