Privacy Policy

Effective date: 01 July, 2024

Introduction

We value your privacy and are committed to safeguarding your personal information. Focused Buzz (the “Company”, “we”, “us”, “our”, “focusedbuzz.com”) is providing this Privacy Policy (the “Policy”) to further the relationship between us and our customers.

This Policy makes disclosures concerning our collection of personal information, purposes of collection, sources of collection, and measures we use to protect your personal information.

In this Policy, personal information means any information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular consumer or household (“personal information” or “personal data”). Business or controller in this Policy means a legal entity that collects personal information on its own or by others on its behalf and that alone or jointly with others determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal information (“Business” or “Controller”).

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Who We are?

Focused Buzz is your one stop destination for guidance on autos, health, finance, home and garden.

Personal information we collect about you

Personal information you provide directly to us.

For certain activities, such as when consumers contact us directly, we may collect some or all of the following categories of personal information:

Voluntarily Shared Information: We collect information that you voluntarily share with us while communicating with us directly or through the Website. Such information may vary depending on the nature of your correspondence with us but may include without limitation, your personal information such as name, email address, and any other information that you choose to share with us. We ensure that, unless expressly permitted by you, this information is not used for purposes other than to respond to your requests, queries, or otherwise communicate with you and is not shared with any third parties.

Personal information we collect automatically.

Internet Protocol Address (IP address): We use the Internet Protocol address (or IP address) associated with your device to display to you, to help advertisers and their partners deliver ads to you, and to determine your general geographic region.

Information about your web browser or your connected device: When you interact with our website or a media property that is using our services, we receive information about your browser and/or device. We use this to help ensure that advertising is displayed to you in the right way for you to view it.

User IDs (including cookies and Mobile Ad IDs): We use unique identifiers for ad delivery, to ensure ads are not shown to you too often, to detect fraud, and even to track your choices about the use of your personal information. We also use them so that we can compile aggregate information for reporting and analysis of our services and the performance of advertising. We use reporting and analysis to account to media properties and advertisers and to improve our services.

Media Property Information: We receive information about the web page URL or application you are viewing, the page or application you were on when you navigated to the media property, information about formats for advertising on the page and the types of content or advertising you view on the page.

Online Activity, or “Web Usage” information: When you visit our website, and sometimes when you visit a media property where we provide services, we receive information about which content and advertisements you view. If a media property, advertiser, or business partner collects information about other websites and apps you have visited, we receive that or an analysis of that, in order to provide relevant advertising.

Choices you make: We use information about the choices you make in order to honor your preferences. For example, when you opt out of targeted advertising, opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information, or exercise other rights you have under applicable law, we use the personal information we receive with your request only for this purpose.

Business contact information or other PII: When you communicate with us for any reason, including expressing an interest in our services, or to initiate or continue a business relationship, we receive your contact information to respond to your request or provide services.

Personal information we collect from third parties.

When media properties or their partners instruct us to do so, we may receive information from third parties, such as demographics information like your estimated age, and information about your behavior and interests, to help them request advertising that is relevant to you.

How do we use personal information we collect from you?

We may use, share, sell, or otherwise disclose the personal information we collect for one or more of the following purposes:

  • I. To fulfill or meet the reason for which the personal information is collected. e.g. we use your IP address to ensure the right ads are delivered to you and to determine your general geographic area (such as the metropolitan area you are visiting the website from).
  • II. To improve our services to consumers.
  • III. For testing, research, analysis, and product development.
  • IV. As necessary or appropriate to protect the rights, property, or safety of us, our clients, or others.
  • V. To respond to law enforcement requests and as required by applicable law, court order, or governmental regulations.

We will not collect additional categories of personal information or use the personal information we collected for materially different, unrelated, or incompatible purposes without providing notice.

With whom we share your personal data and for what purposes?

We may disclose personal information for valuable consideration (for example, when we provide services to media properties and others) in a way that some U.S. states consider a “sale” of personal information. We may also disclose personal information in ways that are not considered a “sale.”

When you visit our website, and sometimes when we provide services to media properties, we disclose the information we collect from your browser or device to service providers who assist us in providing services, but are not permitted to use this personal information for their own or other purposes. We also share information collected on our website with our analytics partners.

We share information about the interaction of your browser or device with media properties, search services, and advertisements with media properties and their representatives and business partners and with advertisers and their partners so that they can determine whether certain advertisements are likely to interest you and decide whether they want to present those ads to you. We also share personal information with media properties and with advertisers to report on how we performed the services and how effectively advertising performed. Some of this reporting is in aggregate form that does not require sharing any personal information.

We share some information, such as cookies or similar IDs, with media properties and advertisers and their partners to help them manage ad selection and delivery so that you see ads that make sense in the context (on the page) where you are viewing them, and don’t see ads too many times.

When we share device information with third parties and service providers, we contractually require them to post privacy policies that describe their own practices, and to comply with applicable privacy laws.

As discussed below, if we receive notice of choices you make when you visit a media property on which we provide services, we will act on that information and pass it on to the third parties and service providers who work with us, requiring them to honor certain choices also, such as your choice to opt out of sale or sharing.

We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of children under 18.

We also share personal information with government or law enforcement authorities to protect the personal safety of users, employees, or others.

We disclose personal information when we determine that we are required to do so:

  • • To comply with applicable laws, or with valid legal process served on us;
  • • To protect or defend our rights or the rights of our users or business partners;
  • • To enforce our agreements with end users or business partners;
  • • To protect anyone’s rights, property or safety (including ours).

If we are involved in a corporate transaction, such as the sale of our business, a divestiture, merger, consolidation, or asset sale, or in the unlikely event of a bankruptcy, we will share personal information with an acquiring entity and its advisors.

How do we safeguard your personal information?

We seek to protect personal information using technical and organizational measures based on the type of personal information and applicable processing activity. We are committed to minimizing personal information collection to the information that is necessary for some defined purpose. As part of our effort to safeguard personal information collected from you, we implement the following information security measures:

  • • Having comprehensive security policies and procedures.
  • • Limiting the amount of personal information that we collect.
  • • Using SSL or other secure connection technologies when receiving or sending personal information beyond internal networks.
  • • Destroying the personal information that we no longer need.
  • • Performing regular information security risk assessments.
  • • Mitigating risks by following a risk treatment plan.
  • • Screening all employees with access to personal information.
  • • Providing regular information security awareness training to our employees.
  • • Performing due diligence before onboarding our vendors.
  • • Performing regular due diligence of our vendors.

Cookies and other trackers

Our website uses certain tags, log files, web beacons, and similar trackers from third parties (collectively, “Cookies”), of which you should be aware.

Cookies are small data files stored on your hard drive or in device memory that help us to, among other things, improve the services and your experience. Web beacons are clear, electronic images that may be used on the services or in our e-mails and help deliver cookies, count visits, understand usage and campaign effectiveness and determine if an e-mail has been opened and acted upon.

Click here to view our list of cookies.

Children’s privacy

Our services/products are not intended for children under 18 years of age, and you must be at least 18 years old to have permission to use our services and/or access our website/application. We do not knowingly collect, use, or disclose personal data from children under 18. If you believe that we have collected, used, or disclosed the personal data of a child under the age of 18, please contact us using the contact information provided in this Policy, so that we can take appropriate action.

Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live and where you access our services, you may have one or more privacy rights:

Access, correction and deletion of personal information and sensitive personal information

You have the right to Access, Correct, and Delete your personal information across our business platforms, services, businesses, and devices. If you have any questions about your rights, or you would like to exercise any of them, please review information in “How can you exercise your privacy rights section?” of this Policy or contact our Privacy Officer by submitting a privacy rights request here or via email at [email protected].

Right to opt out of selling or sharing

You have the right to opt-out from the sale or sharing of personal information at any time across business platforms, services, businesses, and devices.

Limit the use of sensitive personal information

You have the right to limit the use of your sensitive personal information to only those purposes that are reasonably necessary for us to provide our products and services and purposes that are reasonably expected by the consumer and do not create a heightened risk of harm to you as a consumer across our business platforms, services, businesses, and devices.

Request information

You have the right to request the disclosure about collection, use, disclosure, and sale of personal information; you may request information beyond the 12-month collection period preceding the verifiable consumer request.

You may request the disclosure of the following:

  • (1) the categories of personal information we have collected about you.
  • (2) the categories of sources from which the personal information is collected.
  • (3) the business or commercial purpose for collecting, selling, or sharing personal information.
  • (4) the categories of third parties to whom we have disclosed personal information.
  • (5) the specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you.

No retaliation or discrimination

We do not discriminate against a consumer because of the exercise by the consumer of any of their privacy rights such as right to access, deletion or opt-out from sale or sharing of your personal information. This means that we will not, because of the exercise of consumer privacy rights granted by the CCPA (as amended):

  • • Deny goods or services to you.
  • • Charge you different prices or rates for goods or services.
  • • Provide you a different level or quality of goods or services.
  • • Suggest that you will receive a different price or rate for goods or services or a different level or quality of goods or services.

Additional U.S. state privacy rights and choices

If you are a California consumer, you have the right to:

  • • know what information we have collected about you, ask us to delete your personal information;
  • • ask us to delete your personal information;
  • • ask us to correct personal information if you believe we are keeping inaccurate information about you; and
  • • ask us to delete your personal information;
  • • opt-out of the sale or sharing of your personal information, including by sending a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal from your browser.

You can exercise these rights by submitting a privacy rights here or via email at [email protected]. If you have a business account with us, we may use information in that account to authenticate you.

For certain requests (requests to know or correct the information we maintain about you) we may email you to confirm your identity. If we cannot confirm your identity for a request to delete information, we will treat it as a request to opt out of sale and sharing. An authorized agent may make requests on your behalf, but we will request proof that you gave permission for that agent to act for you.

If you are a Virginia, Connecticut, Colorado, Oregon, Texas, or Utah consumer, (or, beginning in October 2024, a Montana consumer), you have the right to:

  • • Confirm whether or not we are processing your personal information and access your personal information;
  • • Correct inaccuracies in your personal data and the purposes for which we are processing it;
  • • Delete your personal information;
  • • Obtain a copy of personal data you have previously provided to us, or in some states, all the personal data we have obtained about you, in a form that allows it to be shared with another controller;
  • • Opt out of targeted advertising
  • • Opt out of the sale of your personal information;
  • • Opt out of profiling that would be used for significant decisions about you.
  • • If and when global privacy controls or other universal opt-out mechanisms are approved and honoring them is required in your state, you will also have the right to opt-out of sale, targeting, or profiling, or all of these, using these browser-based controls.

For certain requests, we may email you to confirm your identity. You can exercise these rights by submitting a privacy rights request here or via email at [email protected].

For certain requests (requests to know or correct the information we maintain about you) we may email you to confirm your identity. If we cannot confirm your identity for a request to delete information, we will treat it as a request to opt out of sale and sharing. An authorized agent may make requests on your behalf, but we will request proof that you gave permission for that agent to act for you.

How can you exercise your privacy rights?

You can exercise these rights by contacting our Privacy Officer by submitting a privacy rights request here or via email at [email protected].

Additional information for the residents of the European Union, European Economic Area, the United Kingdom

Contacts

For the purposes of EU/UK data protection regulations, we are a controller of your personal information.

You contact us by reaching our business at:

Our EU-GDPR Representative is:

EU-GDPR Representative

[email protected]

Our UK-GDPR Representative is:

UK-GDPR Representative

[email protected]

Why do we collect your Personal Data?

In the European Union, we rely on three different legal bases for processing data – consent, legitimate interest, and contractual requirements.

If you are in the European Union, we obtain your consent before we place cookies or other tracking technology on your browser or device. When we provide services that assist in the delivery of personalized advertising, we require that the websites where the advertising is displayed obtain your consent to the use of your personal information for this purpose first and provide evidence of that consent to us.

When we rely on our legitimate interest as the legal basis for processing personal information, we first weigh whether the risk that the processing poses to data subjects outweighs the benefits we obtain by processing the data. If we are not able to reduce the risk to the data subject, or the benefit of the processing does not outweigh it, we do not process the personal information.

We rely on our legitimate interest when we use limited information (such as the content on the page where an ad appears), without developing a profile of data subjects, to assist in ad selection and delivery. We do not believe that the use of this general information, which is not used to create a profile of you, presents a substantial risk to you and it permits us to provide advertising you may find relevant based on the content you are viewing. When a website relies on its legitimate interest to present advertising to you and it communicates that to everyone involved in ad delivery we too rely on legitimate interest.

We also rely on legitimate interest to determine how many times an advertisement has been presented to you (so that you do not see it too often) and to detect fraud. There is little risk to you from the limited use of data in these processes compared to the benefit of maintaining the integrity of the ad process.

We rely on contracts or potential contracts as the legal basis for processing the business contact information of our business partners and potential partners.

How Long We Store Your Personal Data?

Where we process account data collected via our website, we generally retain it for as long as you are a customer. Where we process personal data in connection with performing a contract with you or your organization, we keep the data for so long as the contract remains in force and for a certain period after its expiration. We encourage you to contact us to obtain more specific information on how long we may retain your personal data

Where we collect certain information about you or your device automatically, we retain this information for various periods, depending on the lifespan of the specific cookie that facilitated collection. Please click here to know more about the lifespan of cookies that we use on our website.

Where we process personal data for marketing purposes or with your consent, we process the data until you ask us to stop and for a short period after this (to allow us to implement your request). We also keep a record of the fact that you have asked us not to send you direct marketing or to process your data so that we can respect your request in future.

Your Rights

Refer to the “How can you exercise your privacy rights section?” of this Policy or contact our Privacy Officer by submitting a privacy rights request here or via email at [email protected].

Withdrawal of Consent

You have the right to withdraw consent at any time for the personal data processing purposes where we rely on your consent, without affecting the lawfulness of the processing based on consent before withdrawal.

International Transfer of Personal Data

Our Website and technology infrastructure is primarily maintained in the United States. If you are visiting our Website from the regions with laws governing data collection and use that may differ from those in the United States, please note that you may be transferring your information to the United States and in other countries around the world. You freely and specifically give us your consent to export and use your information within the United States and in other countries as specified in this Privacy Policy. If you are situated in the EU, EEA, UK, whenever we transfer your Personal Data out of the EU, EEA, UK, we ensure appropriate and suitable safeguards are used in such transfer. Where we use certain service providers, we may use specific contracts including data processing agreements based on the EU/EEA Standard Contractual Clauses.

Changes to this Policy

20 December 2023: The information in this Privacy Policy changed to reflect our compliance to the changes in the CCPA (as amended), CPA, CDPA, CTDPA, UCPA US state laws.

01 July 2024: The information in this Privacy Policy changed to reflect our compliance to the changes in the Montana Consumer Data Privacy Act (MCDPA), Oregon Consumer Privacy Act (OCPA), Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (TDPSA) US state laws.

Contact information

If you have any comments or questions in connection with this Policy or for further information on our personal information processing practices and your rights in relation to your personal information, please contact us at:

Contact Information