Privacy Policy (original) (raw)

Date Last Updated: October 1, 2024

The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC and its subsidiaries (referred to throughout this policy as “The Atlantic,” “we,” and “our”) cares about your privacy and the security of your information. This policy details our practices in connection with our print, digital, and live event products and services, including The Atlantic magazine, theatlantic.com, our mobile applications, newsletters, and any other content we provide (collectively, the “Services”) as they relate to your data. It describes the kinds of personal information we may gather about you in connection with the Services, how we use that information, to whom we disclose it, and how you can manage it.

By using our Services, you accept the practices described in this Privacy Policy, including our use of cookies and similar online tools If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, please do not use our Services.

Our services are constantly under development, which may cause our data practices to change from time to time. We will update this policy with any changes we make, so please visit this page often to stay current. Any changes to this policy will become effective as of the date “last updated” noted above. Your continued use of our Services following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.

If you are located in the European Economic Area , United Kingdom, or Switzerland, please see the Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom section of this policy.

If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, Oregon, Texas, Utah, or Virginia please see the Additional Information for Users in Certain U.S. Jurisdictions section of this policy.

Table of Contents

1. Information Collected
2. How We Use Your Information
3. How We Share Your Information
4. How Long Your Information Is Stored
5. Privacy Choices Regarding Personalized Advertisements
6. Statement on No Children’s Data
7. Contests, Sweepstakes or Games
8. Contact Us
9. Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom
10. Additional Information for Users in Certain U.S. Jurisdictions

1. Information Collected

Information You May Provide
When you use our Services, you may voluntarily provide us with certain pieces of information about yourself, including the following.

Contact Information - When you create an account on our website or mobile app, subscribe to the magazine, register for one of our live events, or participate in one of surveys or contests we ask you for your contact information, which may include your name, email address, phone number, and physical address.

Billing Information - When you purchase one of our products or register for certain live events we collect your billing information, which may include your name, email address, and billing address. While you may enter your credit or debit card information on an Atlantic website or mobile app, we do not have direct access to or possession of that information beyond the last four digits of your card. Instead a third-party payment processor is responsible for the processing and storing your payment information.

Demographic information - When you register for a live event or participate in one of our surveys we may ask you to tell us more about yourself, such as your job title and level, the name of your employer, the industry in which you work, your household income, your age, your race or ethnicity, or your gender. Some of this information may be considered sensitive personal information under applicable laws. Questions inquiring about your sensitive information are always optional.

Communication Information - We collect information about you when you communicate with us, such as by contacting our Customer Care team, including the content of the communication and any contact information you provide.

Business Information - If you have a professional relationship with The Atlantic we may collect information such as your job title, employer’s name and contact information, and your business email address, physical address, and telephone number.

Profile Information - When you create or use an account on our Services, we may collect information such as your username, password, photographs, interests, preferences, and any other information you choose to provide. When you link an existing account from a third-party platform, we may additionally collect information such as that account’s ID information and associated preferences.

Information Collected Automatically
We may automatically collect certain pieces of information about you when you use our Services, including the following. Much of this information is collected via cookies. Please review Section 5 of this policy to learn more about how they function and how to turn them off.

Device Information - This lets us know how you are accessing our Services and may include information such as the kind of device you are using, your operating system, your browser, your mobile carrier, certain device settings, referral URLs, your IP address and other unique device identifiers.

Usage Information - This lets us know how you are interacting with our Services and may include information such as which parts of Service visit, how long you visit, your search history within our Services, and how you interacted with advertisements and emails.

Location Information - As previously mentioned, we collect your device’s IP address when you use our Services. Your IP address may disclose or allow us to infer the general location of your device at the time you access the Services.

Inferred Information - In order to better understand our user base, we may infer some information about you, such as your age, gender, education level, and household composition, based on your survey responses.

Information Collected from Third Parties

Other Individuals - We may receive personal information about you from other individuals such as when someone purchases you a gift subscription to The Atlantic magazine.

Social Media and Other Third-Party Platforms - If you interact with our pages or accounts on social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.), we may collect personal information about you available on that platform. This may include your social media account ID, username, user ID, profile picture, cover photo, networks to which you belong, friends, connections, and contact information Additionally, you may choose to log-in to our Services using your account on certain social media or other third-party platforms. If you do so, we and that platform may share certain information about you and your activities. You can read more about your choices in Section 5 of this policy.

Publicly or Commercially Available Sources - We may obtain contact details and other personal information of media contacts and influencers from a variety of publicly or commercially available sources/databases.

Information for Media Contacts and Influencers - We obtain contact details and other personal information regarding media contacts and influencers from a variety of sources including Cision. If you wish to know more about how such information is collected and used, please refer to Cision’s privacy notice.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information for the purposes described below.

Providing the Services - Your personal information helps us to provide you with our Services such as giving you access to the Services, fulfilling your subscription, maintaining your account, processing your payments, providing you with customer support, and allowing you to participate in sweepstakes, contests, or other promotions.

Personalizing the Services - Your personal information allows us to give you a customized experience with our Services including offering you content recommendations, promotions, and advertisements that are more relevant to you.

Communicating with You - Your personal information, such as your contact details, allows us to communicate with you in a variety of ways. We may send you The Atlantic magazine, newsletters, and updates; inform you about content, products, and promotions that may be of interest; provide you with invoices and payment reminders; send you surveys and other research material; and provide you with customer support.

Advertising - We may use your personal information to deliver advertisements that are of interest to you, both on our own behalf and on that of third parties. We may also use this information to measure the effectiveness of a given ad campaign (for example, by measuring the number of unique viewers for that advertisement). To find out more about personalized advertising, please review Section 5 of this policy. We may also email you on behalf of our advertisers or event underwriters to inform you about their products or services and offers that may be of interest. You can opt out of such communication at any time by emailing us at privacy@theatlantic.com or contacting our Customer Care team as detailed in Section 8 below.

Social Media - We may use your personal information, including information provided to us by social media or other third-party platforms to enable you to log into our Services, to connect your social media account to our Services, or to enable you to interact with our social media accounts and activity. We may also use your information to help us determine what content or advertising to deliver to you on those social media platforms.

Providing Services to our Business Customers - We may use your information to facilitate the provision of services to business customers by our business-focused divisions, including without limitation Atlantic57 (our creative consulting division) and Re:think (our sponsored content studio).

Analytics, Research, and Development - We may use your personal information, including information that may be considered sensitive, to learn more about who uses our Services and how they use it. This helps us to make business and marketing decisions, improve our current products and develop new ones that will be of interest to you.

Maintenance & Security - We may use your personal information to assist us in maintaining and securing our Services, including evaluating our security systems, debugging, detecting security incidents, preventing malicious, fraudulent, and illegal activity, enforcing our terms of service, and protecting the rights and safety of The Atlantic and others.

Compliance with Law - We may use your personal information when we believe it is necessary to enforce our Terms & Conditions, Terms of Sale, or to comply with laws and regulations.

We may share your personal information with third parties. In general, the reasons we may share your information falls into one or more of the following categories.

Affiliates - We may share your personal information with our corporate parent, subsidiaries, and affiliates, for purposes consistent with this Privacy Policy.

Service Providers - We may share some of your personal information with service providers who perform functions on our behalf to help us to offer our Services and manage our business. This includes:

• Processing payments
• Fulfilling purchase orders
• Managing email communications
• Providing customer service
• Storing data
• Building and distributing surveys
• Conducting research and development
• Running analytics
• Serving advertisements and measuring their performance
• Maintaining the safety and security of our Services

Content or Advertising Partners - Third parties that provide content, advertising, or functionality to the Services may collect or receive information about you and/or your use of the Services, including through the use of cookies, beacons, and similar technologies (please review Section 5 of this policy to learn more). These third parties may use your information to provide you with advertising that is based on your interests; to measure and analyze ad performance on our Services or other websites or platforms; and may combine it with information collected across different websites, online services, and other devices. These third parties’ use of your information will be based on their own privacy policies.

Event Partners and Underwriters - When you register for or attend one of our Live events, we may share some of your registration information, such as your email address, with our event partners or underwriters. They may use this information to let you know about their products and services. We will only share your information with your permission and you can opt out at any time.

Social Media - If you log into our Services via a social media service or if you connect a social media account with our Services, we may share information about you or your activities on that social media service, including what you view on our websites and applications, with that social media service and/or its users Social media services will use that information based on their own privacy policies If you do not want your information shared in this way, do not connect your social media service account with our Services, or log out of your social media service before using our Services.

For Legal Compliance or Public Interest - We may share your personal information when we believe it is necessary to comply with the law or legal process; to protect and defend our rights or to prevent misuse of our Services; or to protect the personal safety of our employees, agents, partners, the users of the Services, or the public.

Corporate Transactions - In the event that we sell or transfer our business, merge with another entity, or engage in another sort of corporate transaction, we may share your personal information with the acquiring entity.

At Your Direction - We may also share your personal information with third parties when you instruct us to do so.

4. How Long Your Information Is Stored

There is no singular retention period for personal information we may hold about you. In general, we store your information for as long as needed to fulfill the purpose(s) for which we collected it. We typically keep personal information considered sensitive under applicable laws for no more than a year from the date it was collected, but may keep it (and other information) for longer when it is necessary to fulfill a legal obligation.

5. Privacy Choices Regarding Personalized Advertisements

When you visit our website or use our mobile application (our “Services”), we and our third-party partners may use online tracking technology such cookies, web beacons, SDKs, and other similar technologies to analyze your use of our Services and your engagement with advertisements, and to serve you interest-based advertisements. The following explains cookies in greater detail and provides you with information on how to opt out of them.

Types of Online Tracking Technologies

• Cookies - Cookies are small text files stored in your device’s browser when you visit a website. They make it possible to recognize you as the same user across one or more browsing sessions, and across one or more websites We and our partners use cookies for a variety of purposes, including remembering your sign-in credentials and preferences so that you do not have to input them each time you use the Services; allowing us and third parties to customize your experience using the Services, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you on our websites and elsewhere online; and allowing us and third parties to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our Services and your experience. For more information on cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set on your device and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
• Web Beacons - Web beacons (also called “web tags” or “pixels”) are tiny graphics or scripts that communicate information from your device to a server Beacons can be embedded in online or mobile content, videos, advertisements, or emails They allow a server to read certain types of information from your device, such as when you viewed content that contains a beacon and the IP address of the device on which you viewed it. We and third parties use beacons for a variety of purposes, including to analyze the use of our Services and to provide content and ads that are more relevant to you.
• SDKs - SDKs are third-party computer code that we may incorporate into our mobile applications that can be used for a variety of purposes, including to provide us with analytics regarding the use of our mobile applications, to integrate with social media, to add features or functionality to our app, or to facilitate online advertising.

How to Opt Out

There are a number of ways to opt out of having your online activity and device data collected by third parties, which we have summarized below. We hope you find this information to be a helpful reference. Please note that using these tools to opt out of tracking and targeting does not mean that you will receive no advertising while using our Services. Instead, you will cease receiving advertisements tailored to your interests.

• On Your Browser
  • Changing your browser settings - Most web browsers automatically accept cookies by default, but typically allow you to change your settings to disable or reject them. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser; links to instructions provided by several of the most common browsers are below. You can also learn more at www.allaboutcookies.org. Note, however, that if you reject or disable cookies, some features of our Services may not work or may not work as designed.
    * Cookie settings in Google Chrome
    * Cookie settings in Firefox
    * Cookie settings in Microsoft Edge
    * Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS
  • Using Privacy Plug-ins or Browsers - You can block our websites from setting cookies used for interest-based ads by using a browser with default privacy features, like Brave, or installing browser plugins like Privacy Badger, Ghostery or uBlock Origin, and configuring them to block third party cookies/trackers.
• Advertising Industry Opt Out Tools Many of the third party advertisers that use tracking or targeting tools in connection with our Services offer you additional choices regarding the collection and use of your information You can learn more about the options available to limit these participating third parties advertisers’ collection and use of your information by visiting their websites:
  • On Your Browser:
    * Opt Out of Interest Based Advertising (National Advertising Initiative)
    * Your Ad Choices (Digital Advertising Alliance)
    * Your Online Choices (European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance)
  • On Your Mobile Device:
    * Mobile app users may opt out of receiving targeted advertising from participating members of the Digital Advertising Alliance by installing the AppChoices mobile app, available here, and selecting the user’s choices
• Platform-Specific Opt Outs If you choose to connect to our Services via a third-party platform or social media network, you may have the ability to limit the information that we obtain from the third-party, either at the time you login to our Services or subsequently via your settings on the third-party platform or network. Additionally, some third-party platforms or social media networks have features that allow you to opt-out of interest based advertising. Below are links to further information on platforms that integrate with our Services.
  • Facebook - About Facebook Ads and Facebook Privacy Policy
  • Google - Our Services may deliver advertising using the vendor DoubleClick, a Google company. You can read about how DoubleClick uses cookies, use Google’s controls for blocking certain ads, or use Google’s ad settings page to control how DoubleClick personalizes your ad experience The Services also may use Google Analytics to track your usage, including the stitching of authenticated and unauthenticated sessions (which allows for the combination of data from your use of the Services while not signed in to your Atlantic account with your use of the Services while signed in to your Atlantic account). If you wish to opt-out of Google Analytics’ tracking, use this browser add-on provided by Google.
• On Your Mobile Device
  • Block Advertising ID - Your mobile device settings may permit you to limit use of the advertising ID associated with your mobile device for interest-based advertising purposes.
  • Opt-Out via Advertising Networks - You can learn about your options to opt-out of mobile app tracking by certain advertising networks through your device settings. For more information about how to change these settings visit the links below:
    * Apple Devices
    * Android Devices
    * Microsoft Devices

6. Statement on No Children’s Data

The Services are not intended for children under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13 (under 16 for those located in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland) and we do not target the Services to such children. If you are under 13 years of age, or if you are under 16 years of age and are located in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, do not provide personal information to The Atlantic without providing us with consent from your parents. If we discover that any child under the age of 13 or a child from the EEA, UK, or Switzerland under the age of 16 has provided us with personal information and we do not have parental consent, we will delete that child’s information as soon as reasonably practicable. If you believe that we have been provided with the personal information of a child from the EEA, UK, or Switzerland under the age of 16 without parental consent, or have been provided with the personal information of any child under the age of 13 without parental consent, please notify us immediately at privacy@theatlantic.com.

7. Contests, Sweepstakes or Games

When we run a contest, sweepstakes, or game relating to the Services, it will be accompanied by a set of rules. The rules for each contest, sweepstakes or game will specify how the information gathered from you for entry will be used and disclosed if it is different than as described in this Privacy Policy. In conjunction with your entry in such contests or sweepstakes, personal information will be collected only if you voluntarily submit it.

8. Contact Us

If you have an account with www.theatlantic.com, you may review and change your information by logging into your account and editing your account profile.

If you have questions about our Privacy Policy, please contact us at:

ATTN: General Counsel

The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC

610 Water Street, SW

Washington, DC 20024

Phone: +1 (202) 266-7000

Email: privacy@theatlantic.com

If you have questions about subscriptions to The Atlantic, please contact us at:

Atlantic Customer Care

PO Box 37564

Boone, IA 50037-0564

Phone: +1 (855) 940-0585

Email: support@theatlantic.com

9. Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom

The following information is provided for and applies to those located in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and other similar laws.

Legal Bases for Processing

We process your personal data consistent with the ways described previously in this policy. When we do, we rely on one or more “legal bases” to do so. The legal bases we rely on are:

• With your consent, such as when you accept cookies;
• To perform our agreement to provide you with Services, such as to maintain your account or to fulfill your subscription; or
• For our “legitimate interests,” such as maintaining the security of Services, preventing fraud, or marketing. We only engage in legitimate interest-based processing where it has little to no impact on your data privacy-related fundamental rights and freedoms.

International Data Transfers

We may store your personal information on servers located outside of Europe or the United Kingdom, including on servers based in the United States. When you access our Services from Europe or the United Kingdom, your personal data may be subject to an “international data transfer” as defined in the European Data Privacy Laws. In order to protect the security of your information when making such transfers, we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and/or the United Kingdom’s International Data Transfer Agreement/Addendum depending on the source of the data and the specific circumstances of the transfer.

Your Rights and How to Exercise Them

You have certain rights related to our processing and retention of your personal information, which are described below. To exercise these rights, please visit our Help Center or contact us at privacy@theatlantic.com and include as complete a description of the request as possible.

Access - This Privacy Policy describes the personal information we collect and how we use and disclose it. If you would also like to know the specific pieces of personal information we hold about you, we will provide you with a copy upon your request.

Correction - If you believe that any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate you may request that we correct it. You can update some information, like your contact details, yourself by visiting your account page. For other corrections, please contact us as described above.

Deletion - You may request that we delete the personal information we hold about you. Please note that we may need to retain limited amounts of personal information after completing your request for legal compliance purposes.

Objection/Restriction/Withdrawal of Consent - You may object to, restrict, and/or withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information if you believe our processing (i) uses inaccurate information; (ii) is unlawful; or (iii) when our processing is based on your consent or our legitimate interests. You may also opt out of receiving marketing communications from us. You may do so by (i) following the unsubscribe link in the footer of any email you receive from us; (ii) altering your communication settings on your account page; or (iii) emailing us as described in the Section 8 of this policy above. If you are withdrawing consent to our processing of special categories of data, you may alternatively fill out our Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information form on our data opt-out page.

Right to Lodge a Complaint

If you believe that we have processed your personal information in violation of a European Data Privacy Law, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority in your country of residence. You can find a list of supervisory authorities and their contact information on this website.

10. Additional Information for Users in Certain U.S. Jurisdictions

This section only applies to residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Residents of these U.S. states are afforded additional rights in accordance with their respective state data privacy laws. It describes how we collect, use, and share personal information in operating our business as well as your individual rights with respect to your personal information.

How We Collect, Use, and Share your Personal Information

We may collect the following categories of personal information about you:

Identifiers (e.g., device identifier, IP address, unique browser ID, cookies, beacons, pixel tags, account login, other unique identifiers, name, site log-in, email address, mailing address (or state / province and country of residence), phone number, images of yourself you provide us for your account page you are creating and completing in order to attend an event we are hosting.

• Commercial information (e.g., subscription records, site engagement).
• Internet or network information (e.g., browsing and search history, site and advertisement interactions, audience research data).
• Geolocation data (e.g., location derived from GPS-enabled services).
• Professional and employment-related information (e.g., your job title, income level, and the name of your employer.
• Financial information (e.g., your financial account numbers or payment card information; please note that a third party payment processor is responsible for all collection, processing, and storage of your Financial Information and we do not have direct access to or possession of any payment card information.)
• Education information (e.g., highest level of education attained).
• Protected classification characteristics (e.g., age and gender)
• Inferences (e.g., information about your interests, preferences, and favorites).

The sources from which we collect information and additional details on the information we collect are described in Section 1 of this policy; the business and commercial purposes for which we collect this information are described in Section 2 of this policy; and the ways in which we may share this information are described in Section 3 of this policy.

Your Privacy Rights and How to Exercise Them As a California, Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, Oregon, Texas, Utah, or Virginia resident, you have certain rights related to your personal information, which are detailed below. We encourage you to invoke these rights if you wish. Rest assured that we will not discriminate or retaliate against you for doing so.

Except where otherwise noted, you can exercise these rights by visiting our Help Center or by contacting us at privacy@theatlantic.com. If you opt to email us, please include as detailed a description of your request as possible.

Upon receiving certain types of requests, we may ask you to verify your identity before we can move forward. Typically this will involve asking you to confirm information we already have on file about you. We will never ask you for sensitive information such as your credit card, driver’s license, or social security numbers for verification purposes.

You may also allow an “authorized agent” to submit a request on your behalf through the same means outlined above. Unless your agent has been given power of attorney, we will additionally need the following items to honor your request: (1) written authorization, signed by you, allowing them to act on your behalf; (2) proof of your identity; and (3) direct confirmation sent from you to us (without the authorized agent as an intermediary) affirming that the agent is authorized to act on your behalf.

Types of Rights

• Access This policy describes the categories of personal information we may collect about you, and how that information is collected, used, and disclosed. We will also provide you with the specific pieces of personal information we hold about you upon your request. Oregon residents may also request to know the specific third parties to whom your personal information has been disclosed.
• Correction If you believe that any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate you may request that we correct it. You can update some information, like your contact details, yourself by visiting your account page. For other corrections, please contact us as described above.
• Deletion You may request that we delete the personal information we hold about you. We fulfill these requests by erasing the data or by anonymizing it such that you can no longer be identified. We will not attempt to re-identify anonymized data. Please note that we may need to retain limited amounts of personal information after completing your request for legal compliance purposes. Additionally, we may postpone completion of your request when your personal information is necessary to fulfill our obligations to you. For example, if you are an active subscriber we may wait until your subscription expires before fulfilling your request.
• Right to Withdraw Consent for or Limit the Use and Disclosure of Your Sensitive Personal Information When you participate in one of our surveys, we may ask you about information that could be considered sensitive under applicable privacy laws. The question will always be optional, but you also have the option to withdraw your consent to our use of this information or to limit our right to use or disclose your sensitive personal information after you’ve provided it to us. If you do so, we will delete it entirely; only use it as necessary to provide our Services to you; or as otherwise permitted by law. To opt-out, you can visit our data opt-out page or email us at privacy@theatlantic.com.
• Opt out of “Selling,”Sharing, or Using for Targeted Advertising You have the right to opt out of the “sale” of your personal information, or the sharing/use of it for targeted advertising. Under some of these state laws, the word “sale” means our disclosure of your personal information to a third party in exchange for money or any other thing of value, while others only consider it a “sale” if money was exchanged. For the purposes of this policy, when we say “sale,” “selling,” or “sold,” we mean in the broader sense: the exchange of personal information for money or any other thing of value. However, “selling” does not encompass disclosing your personal information to a third party for other purposes, such as those that enable us to provide our Services. We do not sell your personal information in the conventional sense (i.e., for money), but may disclose certain details to our business partners and underwriters.
  Sharing or using your personal information for targeted advertising means our disclosure of your personal information to a third party in order to serve you interest-based advertisements. Likewise, it does not encompass disclosing your personal information to a third party for other purposes.
  To opt out of one or both of these practices, please visit our data opt-out page. You may also opt out by enabling a legally-recognized, opt-out preference signal (such as the Global Privacy Control) on your device. Please review Section 5 above for more information on how to enable these signals. We recognize the signal on an account level, so your opt out request will be applied across your devices as long as you are logged into your Atlantic account. Please note that after opting out you will continue to see non-targeted advertisements on our Services.
  Additionally, when residents of California opt out of “sales,” we also treat your request as one made pursuant to California’s “Shine the Light” law to opt out of the disclosure of your personal information to third parties for their use for direct marketing.

If your request related to any of the rights detailed above is denied, you may appeal that decision by emailing us at privacy@theatlantic.com.

Information We Disclose To Third Parties

The chart below details the categories of (1) personal data we disclose to third parties, (2) third parties we disclose that information to for a business purpose, and (3) third parties we “sell” or share it with for targeted advertising. It reflects these practices over the 12 months prior to the day this policy was last updated. As a reminder, our service providers enable us to deliver our Services to you. For example, we use service providers to process your payments, to manage our email communications with you, and to maintain our Services’ safety and security. Please note that the lists below are likely to be overbroad for any single person. Similarly, not every data point that falls into the categories below is necessarily shared with all of the third parties listed. For more information on the categories used in the following chart and the reasons why we share personal data, please review Section 1 and Section 3 of this policy, respectively.

Category of Personal Data

Additional Information for California Residents

The following information applies to California residents only.

Notice Regarding Financial Incentives for California Residents - From time to time, we may offer the opportunity to participate in user research surveys, which may be emailed to you directly or publicized on our social media accounts. As a part of these surveys we may collect Personal Information, including but not limited to demographic information and information about your experiences with our Services. We use this information to help us gain further insight into and to improve our Services. In some instances, participation in a survey may make you eligible to win prizes, e.g, gift cards, in a sweepstakes. Under California law, this may be considered a financial incentive in exchange for Personal Information. We may also occasionally contact you about other opportunities to earn gifts or prizes from us. These too may be considered a financial incentive in exchange for Personal Information under California law. The value of a given gift or prize is reasonably related to the value of the information provided. We assess the value of your Personal Information by considering, without limitation, details such as the cost to us of providing you with the gift or prize, the potential revenue or improvements to the Services made possible by the direct or indirect use of the information.

Participation in any survey is voluntary. You may opt out of receiving surveys from us by emailing research@theatlantic.com. For more information regarding a sweepstakes linked to a particular survey, please refer to that sweepstakes’ official rules.

Notice Regarding California Residents We Know to Be Under the Age of 16 - California residents we know to be younger than 16 years of age will by default be treated as though they have exercised a request to opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal information with respect to information provided directly to us (as opposed to information automatically collected from them through technical means). We do not permit such users to opt-in to the sale or sharing of their Personal Information, unless they provide proof that they are no longer under the age of 16. To do so, please email us at privacy@theatlantic.com.