Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (original) (raw)

Advance Local Privacy Notice Overview

When you access, use, subscribe to, sign-up for, or register to use any of the websites, mobile apps, products, services, publications, or other Products and Services owned or operated by Advance Local or one of our brands, Personal Information about you. In this section we provide an overview of our privacy practices. You'll find the full Advance Local Privacy Policy (the “Privacy Policy”) below. We encourage you to read the full Privacy Policy in addition to this overview. All Capitalized terms used in this overview are defined in the full Privacy Policy below.

Personal Information We Collect

In general, we only collect the Personal Information that is reasonably necessary for and proportional to the purposes for which we process it.

We collect Personal Information:

Why We Collect and How We Use Your Personal Information

We and our Identity Resolution Partners may use Personal Information, including your name, email address, phone number, and Activity and Device Information to deliver Targeted Advertising and identify the different devices and browsers you may use to access our Products and Services. Where required by applicable law, we and/or our Identity Resolution Partners will obtain your consent, provide you with the opportunity to opt out of such use, or take other appropriate action. Please note we are not responsible for the privacy practices and policies of our Identity Resolution Partners, which are separate from our own and not covered by this Privacy Policy.

Where We May Share Your Personal Information

To fulfill all the purposes described in our Privacy Policy, we may need to share your Personal Information with our subsidiaries, service providers, social media companies such as Meta (Facebook & Instagram), YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snap and X, third-party consumer marketing, advertising, and business partners, including those referenced in the Tracking Techniques and Technologies and Targeted Advertising section of this Privacy Policy, and others who support our business operations, as well with organizations and our parent company that may be involved in an acquisition or other substantive change of our business.

If you have an account with a social media company you may have agreed to allow them to use tools, features, or other technologies that collect Personal Information about your activities across the internet, including in connection with your use of our Products and Services.

The activities of social media companies and their collection and use of your Personal Information is subject to their privacy policies, and we encourage you to review those privacy policies.

Your Rights

You may have rights related to your Personal Information, including the right to access, delete, correct, transfer, and opt out of the use of it for certain purposes. Those rights vary, depending on your relationship with us, where you are located, and the laws that apply in your location.

For example, residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Oregon, Texas, Montana, and certain other states have a variety of privacy rights, including, but not limited to, the right to opt-out of “sales” and/or “sharing” of Personal Information, which includes Targeted Advertising; and limit, opt-out, or opt-in, as applicable, to the use and disclosure of your Sensitive Personal Information. For a more detailed description of these and other rights that may be available to you, please see these sections below:

There is more detail, including on the topics above, in the Privacy Policy, and we encourage you to read it.

Advance Local Privacy Policy

Last Updated: July 1, 2024

Note for Residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Oregon, Texas and Montana: : This Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use, disclose, sell, share, and retain your Personal Information in connection with our Products and Services and your rights and choices over our processing of your Personal Information. The Exercising Your Privacy Rights, Including the Right to Opt Out of Targeted Advertising section below contains specific details related to your rights under California and other applicable laws, including your right to opt-out of “sales” and/or “sharing” of Personal Information, which includes Targeted Advertising; limit, opt-out, or opt-in, as applicable, to the use and disclosure of your Sensitive Personal Information and know, access, correct, delete, restrict, object, and/or have portability of, your Personal Information.

This Advance Local Privacy Policy ("Privacy Policy") describes how Advance Local Media LLC and its Local Media Groups (“Advance Local” “we,” “us,” or “our”) collect, use, disclose, and retain Personal Information about the individuals and the devices and browsers that interact with each website, mobile site, application, email/text/SMS campaign, event, and/or other activity, offering, or publication (regardless of how distributed, transmitted, published, or broadcast) provided by us that links to, or references, his document, including without limitation all Content, features and functionality thereof, such as widgets, plug-ins, and embeddable players (collectively, the “Services”), as well as any merchandise, item, product and/or service, or other online or offline activity, offering, product or services that links to or references this Privacy Policy, including without limitation Content, sweepstakes, contests, surveys, events, email newsletters, newspapers, magazines and other publications that may be featured, mentioned, reviewed, described, auctioned, given away, rented, sold, distributed, or otherwise available on or through the Services either by us or third parties (collectively, the “Products”). This Privacy Policy also describes the rights that you may have regarding our processing of your Personal Information under applicable local law.

By accessing or using any of our Products and Services, you acknowledge that your Personal Information will be processed in accordance with this Privacy Policy. Your use of the Products and Services, and any dispute over privacy, is subject to this Privacy Policy and our User Agreement, including its applicable limitations of liability and the resolution of disputes by Arbitration, absent an appropriate exception or if you opt-out. The Advance Local User Agreement is incorporated by reference into this Privacy Policy.

You may download a printable copy of this Policy (PDF): here.

All Capitalized terms not defined in this section are defined or described below.


Table of Contents

  1. Categories of Personal Information We Collect About You
  2. How We Use Your Personal Information
  3. How We Disclose the Personal Information We Collect
  4. Tracking Techniques and Technologies and Targeted Advertising
  5. Opting-Out of Third-Party Tracking Technologies
  6. Understanding Your Privacy Rights and Choices
  7. Exercising Your Privacy Rights, Including Opting Out of Targeted Advertising
  8. Opting Out of Marketing Communications
  9. Retention
  10. Security of Your Personal Information
  11. Third-Party Links
  12. Publicly Posting Personal Information
  13. International Transfers
  14. Children
  15. CCTV
  16. Contact Us
  17. Changes to this Privacy Policy
  18. Additional Information Under Applicable Local Law

  1. Categories of Personal Information We Collect About You

For purposes of this Privacy Policy, Personal Information means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly to you or to devices and browsers reasonably linked to you. Anonymous, de-identified, or aggregate information is not Personal Information as the term is used in this Privacy Policy.
Depending on the Products and Services you use, we may collect the following categories of Personal Information directly from you, automatically through your use of the Products and Services, and from third parties:

  1. How We Use Your Personal Information

We and our third-party business partners may combine the Personal Information we collect from you with Personal Information we collect from other sources. Where required by applicable law, we obtain your consent before using your Personal Information for the purposes described below. We may also collect non-Personal Information for the purposes described below. However, when we combine it with Personal Information, we treat it as Personal Information.

  1. How We Disclose the Personal Information We Collect

We may disclose each of the categories of Personal Information described above for our business and commercial purposes as follows:

Where required by applicable law, we enable you to opt out of or provide you with the ability to consent to the disclosure of your Personal Information to these third parties or related parties.

  1. Tracking Techniques and Technologies and Targeted Advertising

Tracking Techniques and Technologies
We and our third-party business partners use various tools and technologies such as cookies, pixels, localStorage, web beacons, software development kits, and similar technologies (collectively, “Tracking Technologies”) to collect data when you interact with our Products and Services, including our websites, mobile applications, and email communications. Some of these technologies store data in the browser or on your device. Other technologies may use network-related or other information to recognize your device (e.g., IP address).
Our Products and Services use Tracking Technologies, for example, when you first request a web page and data is then stored on your computer or other device so the website can access Personal Information when you make subsequent requests for pages from that Product or Service. These technologies may also be used to collect and store information about your usage of the Products and Services, such as pages you have visited, and Content you viewed or searched for. We may also use these technologies to save your preferences, consent, and choices; determine if you opened or interacted with our emails or newsletters; troubleshoot and resolve technical issues or outages; conduct research; deliver editorial Content and advertising; maintain subscription and registration information; and store information you may want to retrieve on a regular basis. Additionally, we may use these technologies to collect analytics and measure the use of our Products and Services.
The use of these Tracking Technologies helps us serve you better by understanding what you are interested in, track trends, measure the effectiveness of ads, conduct frequency capping, and tailor offers about our Products and Services to you. We also allow specific, approved third-party business partners and/or service providers, including Google Analytics, to collect data from your browser or device for Targeted Advertising, analytics, and measurement purposes using their own similar tools. For more information about Google Analytics including how to opt out, visit How Google Uses Information and to Opt-out of Google Analytics.
We and our third-party business partners may also use these Tracking Technologies to gather Personal Information, including Sensitive Personal Information, about how you view and use our Products and Services and to connect your activity with other data we maintain about you.
Targeted Advertising and Identity Resolution Partners
We and our third-party business partners may collect and share Personal Information about your online and offline activities over time and across unaffiliated websites and mobile applications to predict your preferences and interests, and, in conjunction with third parties, may use your Personal Information for cross-context behavioral advertising and to serve advertising believed to be of interest to you ("Targeted Advertising").
We may collaborate with our service providers and our third-party Identity Resolution Partners to deliver Targeted Advertising and identify the different devices and browsers you may use to access our Products and Services. We and these Identity Resolution Partners facilitate identity resolution by creating probabilistic and deterministic identifiers. These identifiers may use Personal Information, including your name, email address, phone number, and Activity and Device Information to generate an online identifier reasonably linkable to you and/or your device or browser.
For example, we may disclose hashed email address, phone number, or other information about your device to our Identity Resolution Partners, who may, in turn, return an online identifier that we may store in a first party cookie or similar technology and disclose to our advertising partners to provide you a more personalized advertising experience. These identifiers may also help us with fraud detection and security, to enforce our User Agreement, verify user authentication for accessing Content behind a paywall, and to determine eligibility for offers available exclusively to new subscribers, among other things. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of our Identity Resolution Partners, which are separate from our own and which are not covered by this Privacy Policy. You can Opt-Out of Identity Resolution Partner LiveRamp’s use of your Personal Information for these purposes by visiting https://optout.liveramp.com/opt_out, or, as described in the Opting Out of a “Sale” or “Sharing” of Your Personal Information or of its Use for Targeted Advertising section below.
As noted in the Social Media Company Integration section above, we may utilize Tracking Technologies to disclose information about your use of our Products and Services to social media companies and other third-party business partners to serve you and other segments of users Targeted Advertising and to facilitate marketing communications.
We and our advertising partners may make inferences about your interests and these inferences may be used for Targeted Advertising. In certain U.S. states, these inferences may be considered Sensitive Personal Information. When we obtain this information from our third-party business partners, we will, where required by law, contractually ensure that they have obtained your consent or offered you an opportunity to opt out before sharing it with us. Similarly, if we collect Sensitive Personal Information directly from you, where required by law, we will obtain your consent, provide you an opportunity to opt out, or take other appropriate action. For more information about your rights regarding Sensitive Personal Information under local laws, please refer to the Exercising Your Privacy Rights, Including the Right to Opt Out of Targeted Advertising section below. 5. ## Opting Out of Third-Party Tracking Technologies
As noted above, when you use our Products and Services, our third-party advertising partners, social media companies, and analytics providers may collect Personal Information about your online activity on our Products and Services and on third-party websites. These providers may use Tracking Technologies to deliver advertisements to you when you visit third-party websites within their networks.
There are a variety of methods available to you to opt out of certain third-party Tracking Technologies, including using tools provided within your device, browser, or the settings menu within a mobile application which may include an option that allows you to refuse the placement of certain Tracking Technologies.
If you would like more information about this practice and your choices with respect to it, please visit YourAdChoices.com, NAI Opt Out of Interest-Based Advertising, or Your Online Choices, and/or click the “Ad Choices” icon that appears in Targeted Advertising on our websites. Please note that if you exercise these choices, you may continue to receive ads that are not based on your preferences. 6. ## Understanding Your Privacy Rights and Choices
The states of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Oregon, Texas, and Montana provide its residents certain rights regarding our processing of your Personal Information, including the right to opt-out of Targeted Adverting and/or what is sometimes called “sales” or “sharing” of your Personal Information, and other rights detailed immediately below.

  1. Exercising Your Privacy Rights, Including the Right to Opt Out of Targeted Advertising

To exercise your rights under applicable local law, or if, in accordance with applicable local law in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Oregon, Texas, and Montana, you are an authorized agent, or a parent or guardian seeking to exercise rights on behalf of a minor, please follow the instructions provided below.
Opting Out of a “Sale” or “Sharing” of Your Personal Information or of its Use for Targeted Advertising
Please note that when following the processes described below, you may need to make your Opt-Out choices on each website, mobile application, browser, and device that you use, and if your browser's cookies are cleared, you may need to repeat the process. However, if you have created an account to log in across several of our apps and/or websites, we will make reasonable efforts to apply your opt-out request to each of those apps and websites.

  1. Opting Out of Marketing Communications

If you do not wish to receive future marketing or other commercial messages from us, follow the unsubscribe instructions contained within the message you receive. Note, however, that you may continue to receive certain communications from us that are necessary for the Products and Services, such as renewal notifications, invoices, technical notices, updates, security alerts, and support and administrative service bulletins. 9. ## Retention
We will retain Personal Information from or about you as reasonably necessary and proportionate to achieve the purpose(s) for which the Personal Information was collected or processed as outlined in this Privacy Policy unless a longer retention period is required or allowed by law. 10. ## Security of Your Personal Information
We implement physical, technical, and organizational security measures designed to safeguard Personal Information. These measures aim to protect the Personal Information we collect from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Please be aware that despite our efforts, no measures can guarantee security. 11. ## Third-Party Links
Our Services may contain links to third-party websites and applications. Any access to and use of such linked websites and applications is not governed by this Privacy Policy but is instead governed by the privacy policies of those third-party websites and applications. We are not responsible for the information practices of such third-party websites and applications. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any third-party websites or applications that you choose to visit 12. ## Publicly Posting Personal Information
Please be aware that Personal Information and Content that you disclose in publicly accessible portions of the Products and Services may be available to other users and may also be made available outside the Products and Services by third parties, so you should be mindful of all Personal Information, especially Sensitive Personal Information, that you may wish to post. Where required by applicable local law, we may ask you to obtain consent from any individual before posting that individual’s Personal Information on our Products and Services. 13. ## International Transfers
Your Personal Information may be processed, transferred to, and maintained on servers and databases located outside of the jurisdiction in which you are based and where the privacy laws may not be as protective as your jurisdiction. Where required by applicable law, we have put in place appropriate safeguards (such as contractual commitments) in accordance with applicable legal requirements to ensure that your Personal Information is adequately protected. For more information on the appropriate safeguards in place, please contact us as noted in the Contact Us section of this Privacy Policy. 14. ## Children
As noted above, our Products and Services are not designed for or directed to, children under the age of 13. If we discover that a child under the age of 13 has provided us with Personal Information, we will delete such information from our systems.
We do not have actual knowledge of selling or sharing the Personal Information of consumers that are younger than 16 years of age. To the extent we have actual knowledge that a consumer is at least 13 and less than16 years of age, we will request affirmative authorization from the individual before selling or sharing the Personal Information, to the extent required under applicable local law. 15. ## CCTV
We may use CCTV video recording to protect the physical security of our property and Products and Services in line with applicable laws. We do this to comply with our contractual obligations (e.g., with customers and insurers) and our internal physical security policies to safeguard our properties, workplaces, people, and data. 16. ## Contact Us
Advance Local is the controller of your Personal Information. If you have any questions about the privacy aspects of our Products or Services or would like to make a complaint, request, or have a question about your rights under this Privacy Policy please contact our Privacy Policy Coordinator as follows:
Privacy Policy Coordinator
Advance Local Media LLC
30 Montgomery Street
Suite 430
Jersey City, NJ 07302
Privacy_inquiry@advance.com
Make sure to include enough information for us to help you, including for example your name, contact information, and the specific website, mobile site, application, and/or other service you’re contacting us about. 17. ## Changes to This Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy is current as of the Last Updated date set forth above. We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time, so please be sure to check back periodically. We will post any changes to this Privacy Policy on our Products and Services. If we make any changes to this Privacy Policy that materially affect our practices with regard to the Personal Information, we have previously collected about you, we will endeavor to provide you with notice in advance of such change by highlighting the change on the Product or Service or otherwise communicating such change to you. 18. ## Additional Information Under Applicable Local Law
As may be required under applicable local law, below is a chart that describes our business and commercial purposes for processing your Personal Information, as well as the categories of third parties to whom we may disclose, “sell,” or “share” for cross-contextual behavioral advertising (Targeted Advertising), as those terms are defined under applicable law.
Depending on how you interact with our Products and Services, we may have processed Personal Information about you for each (or any) of these purposes: