Privacy Policy

Effective July 10, 2011

Scope

This Privacy Policy describes how Hunch collects, process and stores your personal information. You accept this Privacy Policy when you sign up for or use the Hunch website ("the Site") or Hunch services.

By registering for an account or using the Hunch Site or services, you agree to the terms ofthis Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with this Privacy Policy, please do not use the Site. Your continued use of the Site or services following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.

We may update this Privacy 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.

Overview

We are committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected when you use theSite. 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. Here's a summary of how you can control that information:

  • You can control whether your Teach Hunch About You ("THAY") answers are publicly visible in your account profile, using the 'Preferences' tab in your Hunch account profile. External applications that you authorize may also give you options to share your answers with other users or to make changes to your Hunch account preferences.
  • You can also choose to change or delete any previous THAY answers by visiting your account profile.
  • When you rate an item on Hunch by choosing the number of stars you associate with it (alternatively, if you 'Like' or 'Favorite' a result), that feedback may be publicly attributed to you; this is one of the key social features of the site. You can review or edit things you have rated by visiting your account profile.
  • You can review or remove third party external applications which you've authorized to access your Hunch data, by going to hunch.com/authorize.

Binding Corporate Rules

In addition to the privacy practices set out in this Privacy Policy, our ultimate parent company eBay Inc., has established a set of Corporate Rules (also referred to as Binding Corporate Rules), approved by a number of European Union privacy regulators. These Corporate Rules are a commitment by eBay Inc. to adequately protect your personal information regardless of where the data resides, and depending upon your location, may provide additional privacy rights through your privacy regulator or a court. If you would like additional information regarding the Corporate Rules contact us via the contact details below.

Collection and Use of Your Personal Information

When you use the Site or our services, 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.

Our primary purpose for collection your personal information is to provide you access to the Site and services, and provide you with a secure, smooth, efficient and customized experience.

  • 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.
  • When you create a Hunch account using an external application such as Facebook or Twitter, or when you connect your Hunch account to external applications, Hunch may access data from those applications. Examples would be things you like, your 'star' rating of Hunch results, who you follow, or who your friends are on those applications. A data disclosure page will be shown in these cases and you can decide whether to proceed or not.
  • You may choose to spruce up your Hunch profile be adding a photo, descriptive text, tags, your location or other information. This content is public and can be viewed by people not logged into Hunch.
  • Other portions of your Profile can be customized by you to be either public or not. The 'Preferences' tab of your account profile gives you many options to control what you want to display and what you don't.
  • THAY (Teach Hunch About You) answers: You can review, change, or delete answers you have made to Teach Hunch About You questions by visiting your account profile.
  • Sharing your THAY (Teach Hunch About You) answers: By default when you are logged in, your answers to THAY questions are not visible by other users on your account profile. You can optionally choose to make them public by enabling a setting in your account profile. External applications which you authorize may also give you the option to share your THAY answers within the application.
  • When you 'rate' Hunch results (provide a star rating, or click 'Like' or 'Favorite' feedback), that feedback is considered public and may be publicly attributed to you; this is one of the key social features of the site. You can review or edit things you have rated by visiting your account profile.
  • Mobile applications or 3rd-party applications may display your ratings including 'Like', 'Dislike', 'Favorite', or the number of stars you've rated an item, within mobile or 3rd-party applications.
  • 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 results. 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"). Individual, public data (such as 'Likes', 'Favorites', or star ratings) may also be made available through the Hunch 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.

Disclosure of Personal Information

Any personal information that you voluntarily disclose on public areas of the 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.

We may also 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.

Use of Cookies

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 Teach Hunch About You (THAY) answers to past questions
  • Review or edit results that you have 'Liked' or 'Favorited'
  • Block other users from seeing your previously answered questions by setting your THAY answers to 'private' mode
  • Delete your account completely

Confidentiality and Security

We store and process your information on our servers located in the United States. We maintain appropriate technical and administrative security measures to protect the security of your personal information against loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure or alteration

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.

Third Party Websites

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 that are under thirteen years of age, and we do not intend to collect any personally-identifiable information from such individuals.

Contact

Please address questions related to our privacy practices to: eBay Inc. Attn: Legal - Global Privacy Practices, 2145 Hamilton Avenue, San Jose, California 95125. You can also send us an email.