Effective April 25, 2006
If you need Napster Customer Support assistance, please click here. Sending an email to Napster's privacy officer will cause a delay in response and assistance.
Welcome to Napster. We value your privacy, and we want you to know what information
we collect and what we do with it.
Napster is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. TRUSTe is an independent,
non-profit organization whose mission is to build users' trust and confidence in the
Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. This privacy statement
covers the site www.napster.com and all products and services offered at the site,
including Napster's free, web-based music service and "n-archive", Napster's premium music services and the "Shop Napster" online store that can be linked to from the site and from the premium music service. Because Napster wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has agreed to disclose its information practices and have its privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe.
If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact
privacy@napster.com. If you do not receive
acknowledgment of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed,
you should then contact TRUSTe http://www.truste.org/watchdog.html.
TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with the Web site to resolve your concerns.
The TRUSTe program covers only information that is collected through this Web site, and does
not cover information that may be collected through software downloaded from the site.
Napster complies with the EU Safe Harbor framework as set forth by the Department of Commerce
regarding the collection, use, and retention of data from the European Union.
From time to time, we may make changes to this policy, so please review it frequently. Whenever
we make a change, we will post or otherwise make available the revised policy. We will endeavor
to post the changes before they become effective. The effective date of the most recent version
of this policy will appear at the top of this page. This policy applies to any information we
collect from you. If we make any material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by
email or by means of a notice on our home page and/or sign-page that you must view to enter the
service.
WHAT INFORMATION WE COLLECT
We have several areas where you can submit information to us, and we also have features that
automatically collect information from users of our service.
INFORMATION YOU PROVIDE TO US.
We have certain areas where we ask you to provide information to us: For the Napster Website (and free web services) and for Napster's premium services:
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Browsing the Site. If you are simply browsing the Napster site, you will not be required to register with Napster or provide any other personal data. We may track your site usage on a non-personally identifiable basis for our own internal use or to share with third parties.
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Registration, Services. You must register with us to use any of our services, including services offered at the site, such as the free streaming music service (the "Music Service"), the free user-contributed music encyclopedia ("n-archive") and more (collectively and together with the site, the "Web Services") ) and/or our digital music services that may require additional registration, software download(s) and/or payment (the "Premium Services"). Some of the Premium Services may be integrated with the site and with some or all of the Web Services, including via use of the same member name. Currently, these include a digital music store (the "Music Store")" that lets you purchase permanent downloads of songs and a music subscription service (the "Subscription Service"). The terms and conditions of use of the Web Services can be accessed at http://www.napster.com/terms/, while the terms and conditions of use for the Premium Services can be accessed at http://www.napster.com/terms/service_terms.html. We may also offer options for you to sign up for our mailing lists without having to use any product or service.
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Non-Biling Registration. If you register for any of the Web Services, you will automatically be eligible to become a member of the other services offered from our site, including the Premium Services, using the same username and password, though you may need to complete additional registration steps for certain services.. During this joint registration, you will be asked to provide your email address, and to choose a member name and password. You may also be asked during registration, but not required, to provide further information about yourself (such as favorite genre, IM client, age, city, state, interests, brief bio), some of which may be part of your "Public Profile" that other service users will be able to access as part of Napster's "Community Features" as described further below.
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Billing Registration. After you register for the Web Services, if you decide to purchase any items from us (via Shop Napster, the Music Store or otherwise) and/or register for the Subscription Service, you will be required to provide credit card and personal billing information. If you register for our Subscription Service, any billing information that you provide will be used to bill you for a recurring subscription fee which may vary depending upon the tier of service and billing option that you select. For certain promotional offers, you may be able to access the Subscription Service without first providing a credit card. The Subscription Service has a standard tier, as well as a "Napster To Go" tier, for which you may register and pay an additional amount.
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Communications from Us and Mailing Lists. In order to keep our members informed about the operation of our site and services, we may send e-mails and announcements to your personal email address that you have provided to us upon registration. ForMusic Storeand Subscription Service users, we may also send promotional emails to your service "Inbox" (described below). For additional information and offers, we give our members the option of joining our mailing lists and/or those of other promotional partners that we think will be of interest to you (see "With Whom We Share Your Information" below). You can change your options in the "My Account" section of the applicable service. Each promotional e-mail from us will come with instructions for how to unsubscribe from the mailing list. We may send emails via third-party service providers that act on our behalf.
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Communications with Us. Our services have features that allow you to submit information to us (such as when contacting us with a question or problem related to the service). We may retain your emails and other information you submit to us for our internal purposes and to help us to serve you better.
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Community Features. We also may offer community features designed to help members find songs, articles or information that they may be interested in. For example, Premium Services members may view songs that other members have recently streamed or made part of their personal music collections, and n-archive users may view entries submitted by other n-archive users. In all cases, only a user's member name will be shown in connection with features like these (and, if you have created one, other members will be able to access your Public Profile). However, with respect to the Premium Services, during registration or at any time afterwards in the "My Account" section of the service, you may choose to have your membername hidden from other service members for these purposes. With respect to the n-archive, all of your entries will be attributed to your user name and you may not make your entries anonymously. members may also be offered access to features such as public message boards. All personal information you send or post via community features, including in your Public Profile or any entry on the Napster site, becomes public information. Napster is not responsible for verifying the accuracy of any such information, for the use of such information by any third party in any manner or otherwise for protecting such information We may, but are not obligated to, monitor such community features via electronic software or personnel to check for obscenity, defamation or other types of abusive language, as well as for content that may infringe our rights or the rights of others, all of which we may remove at any time.
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Communications with Friends. The Music Store and Subscription Services have mailing feature that allows you to send song links and information to others (via the "Send Track" prompt). Music Store and Subscription service members will be provided with a Napster "Inbox" that allows them to send messages to a person's Napster member name or to any personal email address. Messages may contain compilations of Napster tracks as well as a brief amount of text. Napster will keep copies of those messages for as long as you keep them in your Inbox. We may monitor such messages via electronic software or personnel to check for obscenity, defamation or other types of abusive language, as well as for content that may infringe our rights or the rights of others, all of which we may remove at any time. We will not otherwise access these messages except in unusual cases, including but not limited to times when we receive specific complaints related to a particular message or are compelled to do so by law. To maintain storage capacity, we expect to regularly delete message files, including messages in any user's Inbox, that are older than 30 days and we reserve the right to do so more or less frequently. Also for administrative purposes, we will keep a mail log that will include a record of which users sent messages and to which users or email addresses they were sent. We will use the addressee information you enter only to send the emails you request.
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Contests and Sweepstakes. We may conduct contests or sweepstakes in connection with the site and/or services, and/or in partnership with one or more of our partners or sponsors, as part of which we may request contact information from you when you enter. We will use the information you provide to conduct the contests or sweepstakes and for other purposes to which you consent. If we offer contests or sweepstakes with our partners, we may notify you that we will share the information we obtain from you with them and will give you the opportunity to choose whether or not to participate at the point where we collect such information.
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Surveys. We may occasionally ask you to participate in voluntary surveys. These surveys are intended to improve your service experience and any information you provide we may associate with your member name for future use. Any personally identifying information collected will be used only by us unless we specify otherwise. However, we may share aggregate survey result information with others.
For the "Shop Napster" online store:
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Shop Napster: You may access the Shop Napster store to purchase items from Napster via our main website, www.napster.com, via links from the Premium Services or elsewhere on the Web or directly from your browser at www.shop.napster.com. To make any purchases via Shop Napster, you will be required to provide your credit card and billing information, as well as your email address and zip code. For certain products, you may also be required to provide additional information, if indicated during the purchase path. The information that you provide here will only be used by Napster (and/or its third party fulfillment partners, if applicable) to support these purchases. However, we may give you the opportunity to opt to receive promotional communications from Napster or our partners, in which case, your email or mailing information may be used for those purposes as well.
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Optional Express Checkout for Shop Napster. In order to expedite future purchases, Shop Napster also allows any customer to create a continuing account. All the information that you may supply when creating an account will be held according to the same policy and only be used to manage the payment of future orders and the shipping.
INFORMATION WE RECEIVE FROM THIRD PARTIES.
There are instances where we may receive information from third parties.
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You may also separately provide registration and purchasing information to websites, retailers, OEMs, software suppliers or other commerce, product or service providers through which we provide access to registration for our services or for Shop Napster. Depending on the particular promotion, when you register for a service through such a promotional partner of ours, that partner may provide us with a user/member name that you already use with that partner's products or services or that you or it have otherwise pre-selected as part of the promotion.
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As you are using our services or sites, you may click through certain links or promotions that will enable you to purchase products or use services provided by promotional partners or other sites or commerce providers. Some of those entities may share with us certain information that you provide to them. By clicking through to those links or promotions, you agree to allow us to receive and use any information, except for credit card information (account number, expiration date) that you may provide to such entities, under the same terms as if you provided it to us directly.
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You may also separately share your information with other sites or entities, such as those that create professional marketing lists, to receive special offers and promotions from its partners. These entities or sites may agree to share your information with us. Whether or not any third party actually shares your information and to what extent they do share with us will depend on their agreement with us and their individual privacy policy. Napster is not responsible and will assume no liability if another site or commerce provider collects, uses or shares, any information about you in violation of its own privacy policy, or applicable law.
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We may purchase marketing data from third parties and add it to our existing user database, to better target our advertising and to provide pertinent offers in which we think you would be interested. To enrich our profiles of individual customers, we may tie this information to the personally identifiable information they have provided to us.
AUTOMATIC DATA COLLECTION
Napster Site. As you browse our site and as you use any of the Web Services, we may track your movement through the site through our web logs. We will only use this data on an aggregated basis with that of other users for general business purposes, such as site analysis and ad sales.
Napster Client. After you register for any of the Premium Services (or when you first want to utilize the Napster Music Store), you will be prompted to download our Napster Client software application. In order to make sure the Napster Client is functioning at its best, from time to time we may send the Napster Client automatic fixes, support files, etc. Napster employs software that is used to protect the copyrights associated with the tracks you listen to or obtain. In order to make sure that artists and copyright owners receive applicable royalties, this software identifies and counts the songs you have obtained and/or accessed including, if you are a Napster To Go member, tracks that you may have listened to offline on compatible portable devices. At the aggregate level (i.e., not tied to the personally identifying information of any user), we use this data to report and pay royalties, for internal analysis and we share this data with certain promotional or other business partners or advisors of ours for their own analysis. We do not share your personally identifying usage data with any third parties. We may use your personally identifying usage data for a variety of service-related purposes.
From time to time, the security on the Napster Client software may be upgraded by our supplier, which is currently Microsoft. Microsoft advises us that for security upgrades, your player will connect to an Internet site operated by Microsoft and will be sent a security file, along with a unique identifier, which does not contain any personal information about you and is not used to personally identify you or track your activities. Microsoft uses this information to prevent security breaches that could affect you. For more information, please feel free to read Microsoft's privacy policy at http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsmediacom.aspx.
Further, when you access the service through a promotional partner of ours and download the Napster Client, we will add certain of your registration information (such as your member name and, if applicable, the partner or promotion through which you registered) to the registry settings on your computer's hard drive, so that we can recognize which of our partners or other sign-in pages to send to you when you log on to the service.
Cookies. We use cookies for several purposes. Within all of the Napster services, we use what are commonly called "session" cookies, meaning that they only last as long as you are online. We use these cookies to identify you as a valid member so that we can deliver music to you, to ensure that no one else can sign on simultaneously with your account from another computer and to help us personalize your service experience based on your registration preferences (such as genre choice, your connection speed, your preference with regard to receiving songs that contain explicit lyrics and the country you live in). We may also use session cookies to help us facilitate any promotions or surveys that we provide. Within the Shop Napster site, we may also use session cookies to keep track of your shopping cart. These cookies do not contain any personally identifying information and we do not store data collected by them.
As part of the sign-in process for our services or for Shop Napster, we may also use what are commonly called "persistent" cookies which stay with you after your session is over and you are offline. We use these cookies in connection with a sign-in feature that allows you to save your member name and password so that the next time you sign in, these fields will be pre-populated for you. If we make this cookie available, it can only be activated if you select that option during your sign-in. If you select that option you can always deselect it each time you sign-in.
We sometimes use cookies, as well as tracking technology, such as web beacons, within the promotional emails that we send to our members or advertisements for our service or sites. These technologies help us to track, for example, whether an e-mail recipient has completed an event, such as signing up for a free trial. The generated information is related to non-personally identifying customer identification numbers and is only analyzed at aggregate levels.
We sometimes utilize third party service providers to help us track the activity and user flows within our service or sites. These third parties may use temporary cookies and/or web beaconing technology to facilitate such tracking. Such tracking would track an individual user's movements but the data would not be tracked in a personally identifiable way. Such data would be stored and analyzed on an aggregated basis for purposes of internal analysis by Napster to improve the service.
Third Party Advertising and Use of Cookies
Most Ads appearing on our websites are delivered to you by DoubleClick, our Web advertising partner. Information about your visits to our site, such as number of times you have viewed an ad (but not your name, address, or other personal information), is used by Doubleclick to serve ads to you. In the course of serving advertisements to our site, Doubleclick may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information about DoubleClick, cookies, and how to "opt-out", please click here: http://www.doubleclick.net/us/corporate/privacy. Like Napster, Doubleclick is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. In addition to Doubleclick, we may work with other advertisers and other third parties whose products or services are promoted on our site or within our services that may also use cookies. In those cases, we advise you to check their privacy policies for information about their cookies and other privacy practices.
Other. In order to personalize our service for your enjoyment and to monitor and improve the performance of our technology, we capture other data such as members' search and browse criteria and results. We only share this data on an aggregate basis. Also for internal purposes, we gather information such as date, time, connection speed and IP address of all service users. We keep this information for our internal security audit log, aggregate trend analysis, and system administration.
WITH WHOM WE SHARE YOUR INFORMATION
Unless you consent to receive information from our partners (or from a specified partner) during your Napster registration, we will never share your registration information with any marketing or promotional partners. The only third parties with whom we may ever share some of your information are described in the bullet point list of exceptions below. If you do consent to share your information with our partner(s), their use of such information, including targeted promotions, will be subject to our and their privacy policy. Any personal registration data that we would so share is not authorized by us to be transferred by the recipients of that data to third parties or used for mass distribution of emails or other activities that might be considered "spamming." We do not share your credit card account information with partners or any other third parties.
The following are the ONLY exceptions, with respect to whom we may share your information with:.
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We will share information with companies acting as our agents in hosting or otherwise supporting our site and in providing our services or our Shop Napster site (e.g. credit card processing, customer/support services, email providers) to you, all of which agree to use it only for that purpose and to keep the information secure and confidential.
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Also, entities into which our company is merged, or to which our assets, site or operations have been transferred, will be able to use your personal information under the terms of this privacy policy. You will be notified via email and/or prominent notice on our Web site and in our service for 30 days of any such change in ownership or control of your personal information.
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We will also disclose information we maintain when required to do so by law, for example, in response to a court order or a subpoena or other legal obligation, in response to a law enforcement agency's request, or in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) our rights or property.
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You should also be aware that courts of equity, such as U.S. Bankruptcy Courts, may have the authority under certain circumstances to permit your information to be shared or transferred to third parties without your permission.
SECURITY
Napster endeavors to protect the security of your personal information and your choices for its intended use. We use secure SSL technology to protect the transmission of sensitive information such as your credit card number. We store your personal information on a secure server, and use procedures designed to protect the information we collect from loss, misuse, unauthorized access or disclosure, alteration or destruction.
ACCESS/CHOICE
You can modify your registration information at any time in the "My Account" area of the applicable service. Also, promotional e-mails from Napster will come with instructions for unsubscribing from the email mailing list.
LINKS
We may display links to other sites within the Napster site and services. We are not responsible for those other sites, their privacy policies or how they treat information about their members. We advise you to check their privacy policies to find out how they are treating your personal information.
CONTACT US:
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, or the privacy practices of Napster, you can email privacy@napster.com or write to: Napster, 28 West 44th Street, 6th Floor, New York, 10036, Attn: PRIVACY OFFICER.
Effective April 25, 2006
