• Selling your e-mail address to third parties
• Tracking you down to your physical location.

Because we gather certain types of information about our users, we feel you should fully understand the terms and conditions surrounding the capture and use of that information. This privacy statement discloses what information we gather and how we use it.

Information Kitamura Gathers & Tracks

Kitamura gathers two types of information about users:

• Information that users provide through optional and voluntary submissions. These are voluntary submissions to receive our electronic newsletters, to participate in our message boards or forums, to email a friend, and from participation in polls and surveys, and using online contact forms, such as our Online Helpdesk.

• Kitamura gathers information through aggregated tracking information derived mainly by tallying page views throughout our sites. This information allows us to better tailor our content to readers' needs and to help our advertisers and sponsors better understand the demographics of our audience. Because Kitamura is a company, it derives its revenue mainly from sponsorships and advertising, plus its main profits from the services it provides, and providing such aggregated demographic data is essential to keeping our online service free to users. Under no circumstances do we divulge or disclose any information about an individual user to a third party, without your permission.

We gather user information in the following areas:

Optional Voluntary Information

We offer the following free services, which require some type of voluntary submission of personal information by users:

1. Electronic newsletters

We offer a free electronic newsletter to users. We gather the email addresses of users who voluntarily subscribe. Users may remove themselves from this mailing list by following the link provided in every newsletter that points users to the subscription management page. Users can also subscribe to the newsletters at the time of registration. We provide users and customers with the newsletter in order to keep them informed about any service changes, new products, company changes, product recalls, and any other relevant information.

2. Message boards/forums

Users of the site's message board (a.k.a. forum) such as our Support Forum are not required to register any personal information. A user account is needed for posting messages, however, under no circumstances do we insist you provide credentials (such as date of birth, physical address, telephone number) and nothing more than email address is required. You do not have to give out your real name. However, a working, verifiable email address is all that is required for registering.

3. "E-mail this to a friend" Service

Our site users can choose to electronically forward topics from the message board to someone else by clicking "e-mail this to a friend". The user must provide their email address, as well as that of the recipient. This information is used only in the case of transmission errors and, of course, to let the recipient know who sent the email. The information is not used for any other purpose.

4. Polling

We may offer interactive polls to users so they can easily share their opinions with other users and see what our audience thinks about important issues. Opinions or other responses to polls are aggregated and are not identifiable to any particular user.

5. Surveys

Kitamura may occasionally conduct user surveys to better target our content to our audience. We sometimes share the aggregated demographic information in these surveys with our sponsors, advertisers and partners. We never share any of this information about specific individuals with any third party.

Usage tracking

We track user traffic patterns throughout all of our sites. However, we do not correlate this information with data about individual users. We do break down overall usage statistics according to a user's domain name, browser type, and MIME type by reading this information from the browser string (information contained in every user's browser). You can see your User Agent string on the footer of every page of our website.

We sometimes track and catalog the search terms that users enter in our Search function, but this tracking is never associated with individual users. We use tracking information to determine which areas of our sites users like and don't like based on traffic to those areas. We do not track what individual users read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to build a better service for you.

Cookies

We may place a text file called a "cookie" in the browser files of your computer. The cookie itself does not contain Personal Information although it will enable us to relate your use of this site to information that you have specifically and knowingly provided. But the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie can't read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. We use cookies to track user traffic patterns (as described above). Our advertising system delivers a one-time cookie to better track ad impressions and click rates.

You can refuse cookies by turning them off in your browser. If you've set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies, you will receive the warning message with each cookie. You do not need to have cookies turned on to use this site.

USE OF INFORMATION

Kitamura uses any information voluntarily given by our users to enhance their experience in our network of sites, whether to provide interactive or personalized elements on the sites or to better prepare future content based on the interests of our users.

As stated above, we use information that users voluntarily provide in order to send out electronic newsletters and to enable users to participate in polls, surveys, and forums. We send out newsletters to subscribers on a regular schedule (depending on the newsletter), and occasionally send out special editions when we think subscribers might be particularly interested in something we are doing. Kitamura never shares newsletter mailing lists with any third parties, including advertisers, sponsors or partners.

When we use tracking information to determine which areas of our sites users like and don't like based on traffic to those areas, we do not track what individual users read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to build a better service for you. We track search terms entered in Search functions as one of many measures of what interests our users. But we don't track which terms a particular user enters.

Kitamura creates aggregate reports on user demographics and traffic patterns for advertisers, sponsors and partners. This allows our advertisers to advertise more effectively, and allows our users to receive advertisements that are pertinent to their needs. Because we don't track the usage patterns of individual users, an advertiser or sponsor will never know that a specific user clicked their ad. We will not disclose any information about any individual user except to comply with applicable law or valid legal process or to protect the personal safety of our users or the public.

SHARING OF THE INFORMATION

Kitamura uses the above-described information to tailor our content to suit your needs and help our advertisers better understand our audiences demographics. This is essential to keeping our service free. We will not share information about individual users with any third party, except to comply with applicable law or valid legal process or to protect the personal safety of our users or the public.

SECURITY

Kitamura operates secure load-balanced data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection systems. Our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary and only authorized Kitamura staff have access to the information provided by our customers.

OPT-OUT POLICY

We give users options wherever necessary and practical. Such choices include:

• Opting not to register to receive our electronic newsletters.
• Opting not to participate in certain interactive areas, which completely alleviates the need to gather any personally identifiable information from our users

By using this site, you consent to the collection and use of this information by Kitamura UK. If we decide to change our Privacy Policy, we will post those changes on this page so that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances we disclose it. This page can be readily accessed from any page in the site, the link is always at the bottom of each page, on the footer, with Copyright statement.