Last Updated: March 2024
This Privacy Notice describes how AllSides (“our,” “we”) collects, uses, and shares personal information. AllSides provides balanced news, media bias ratings, and additional content and services focused on media literacy and dialogue. In particular, this Privacy Notice applies to:
- Our website and content hosted at https://www.allsides.com (the “Site”), mobile application, and other online products and services (collectively, the “Services”). This Privacy Notice applies to general visitors to our Site and Services (“Visitors”).
- As part of our online services, this Privacy Notice also describes our data practices of our Mismatch by AllSides service, an online platform connecting classrooms of different backgrounds to engage in thoughtful guided dialogue (“Mismatch”).
- This Privacy Notice applies to those who choose to register or donate, including registration for premium access to certain content and services (“Premium Members”). Premium Members include Sustaining Members and School Memberships.
For all users who interact with us online, we collect information you choose to give us and other information that may be collected from your use of our Site and our Services. We use that information to operate our business, and for a variety of other purposes set forth below. Below, we also describe choices we offer with respect to your information. This Privacy Notice does not apply to information that cannot be identified to any individual, household, or their devices, such as de-identified or anonymized information.
This Privacy Notice does not apply to third parties, including those that may be linked from or support advertising accessible from or through our Site or Services. We are not responsible for other third parties’ privacy practices or communications. You should contact these parties directly to understand their practices.
If you are a resident of California, please see our Additional Notice for California Residents for additional disclosures.
- Information We Collect
- How We Use Information We Collect
- How We Secure Information
- How We Share Information
- Privacy Protections for Children Using the Internet
- What Choices Do I Have?
- Updates to Our Privacy Notice
- Contact Information
Information We Collect
We collect information about you from a variety of sources, including:
- Directly from you when you provide it to us.
- Automatically as you utilize the Services.
- From third parties, including analytics providers.
- In some cases, if you are a student, from your teachers or school; if you are an educator, from your school.
Information directly from you.
When you sign up for an AllSides membership account, we may ask for your name, email address, account username and password. If you are an educator signing up for a School membership, we may ask you for your school’s name and other general employment information. When you sign up for an AllSides mailing list, we collect your email address. In addition, we gather information through voluntary questionnaires, event registration forms, surveys, and feedback programs. Additionally, you may choose to provide us with information directly when you contact us to request customer support, request information, apply for a job, or participate in interactive features on our Services.
If you are an educator using our Mismatch platform, you may choose to provide us with the following information, including:
- For creating an account: We require your name, your role at the school you teach at, what subject you teach or what department you lead, and your school’s name, address, grade level, and time zone.
- For building a classroom profile: We ask you to provide your name, the grade you teach, the number of students in your classroom, the general political profile of the classroom (e.g., conservative, progressive/liberal, or a mix of the two), the socioeconomic profile of the classroom based on what percentage of students receive free or reduced lunches at school, the demographic profile of the classroom based on race and/or ethnicity, and the geographic profile of the classroom based on where students live (suburban, urban, or rural).
- To complete engagement surveys: We may provide surveys relating to Mismatch interactions in which students and classes are asked to review their interactions and experiences facilitated through the Mismatch platform.
If you are a student at a school which uses our Mismatch service, we may collect information about you – either from you or from the school or your teachers – in order to support the use of Mismatch. You should contact your school to understand their practices for handling your information.
Information we collect through automatic data collection technologies.
We may collect data regarding your use of our Services through cookies, web beacons, and other automatically collected information. This data may include your date and time you access our Services and the pages and content you access during your visit, websites that you link to or from, whether you receive or open an email or other communication from us, and the links you click on within those emails, the type of device used and the operating system on that device, browser type, and any errors encountered. We may also collect information from your mobile device or your computer about how you interact with our Services. This information helps us address customer support issues, provide you with a personalized experience, prevent fraudulent use of our services, and manage the Services we provide, including gathering aggregated data about engagement.
Other parties may collect personally identifiable information about your online activities over time and across third-party websites when you use our Services , such as analytics and marketing services that help us understand our services. We do not control any personal information once collected by these parties. We do not respond to “do not track” signals or other mechanisms that provide consumers the ability to exercise choice regarding the collection of personally identifiable information about an individual consumer’s online activities over time and across third-party websites or online services. However, we do honor Global Privacy Control opt-out signals, and we provide a consent management tool that permits you to set cookie and tracking preferences. Please note that these preferences may be limited to the device or computer you used to access our Site when setting such preferences. You can manage your consent preferences by clicking the button in the site footer, or directly below:
Information we collect from third party sources.
We may collect information from advertisers, marketing service providers, affiliates, promotional partners, and application providers. These and other third parties may provide us information in connection with content, widgets, components, or other tools deployed on our Services. These third parties may collect information from these sources when you use our Services. The information third parties collect may be associated with your personal information or they may collect information about your online activities over time. They and we may use this information to provide you with interest-based advertising or other targeted content, and for other purposes (such as to better understand our Site’s audience).
From other Service users.
Occasionally, students, teachers, administrators or others who interact with our Services may disclose information about their schools and students.
How We Use Information We Collect
We may use data we collect to operate our business and for a variety of purposes, including the following:
- To manage your account and membership, including with respect to our Services for Premium Members.
- To match classrooms and schedule dialogues in connection with our Mismatch services.
- To analyze interactions in connection with our Mismatch services, including processing survey results.
- To process your transactions and payments, and track your membership status.
- To maintain, analyze, customize, and improve your experience on our services.
- To communicate with you about our services, to send promotional and marketing materials, and to provide you information that you request from us.
- To provide customer and technical support.
- To monitor and enforce our contracts, legal terms, acceptable use or other policies or similar terms.
- To comply with law and satisfy our regulatory and compliance obligations. Additionally, to support compliance efforts on behalf of others and ourselves that support our provision of services to you.
- To detect and prevent fraud and other prohibited, illicit or illegal activity, and to protect the rights and vital interests of you, others, and ourselves.
- To address existing or anticipated disputes.
- To otherwise operate our business, including support for transactions impacting our company as a whole (such as mergers, acquisitions, or asset purchases).
- To fulfill any other purpose for which you provide your information to us.
- For other purposes permitted by law, described to you when you provide your information or to which you consent.
As permitted by law, we may combine the information we gather about you in identifiable form, including information from third parties. We may use this information, for example, to improve and personalize our services, content and advertising.
How We Secure Information
We are committed to maintaining measures to protect the security of your information. Despite these measures, no network or system is ever entirely secure and we cannot guarantee the security of networks and systems that we operate or that are operated on our behalf.
How We Share Information
We may share your information with third parties as reasonable to operate our business, to provide the Services to you and others, as permitted or required by law, or as directed or authorized by you. For example:
Affiliated Companies. We may share some or all of your information with our parent companies, subsidiaries, joint ventures, or other companies under common control with us.
Third Party Sharing. We work with third party parties to help us provide our Site and Services and to support internal operations. They may use your information subject to their own privacy policies and to comply with their own legal and regulatory obligations. We work with different types of third parties, presently including:
- Data hosting, storage and cloud service providers;
- Platform and/or application security service providers;
- Payments processors;
- Technical and customer support providers;
- Analytics providers, including Google Analytics; and
- Marketing and promotions providers, including Freestar and Connatix.
Researchers. We may share your information with academic, scientific, and similar researchers, for example, to gauge the effectiveness of our Services, including the Mismatch platform.
Professional Advisors, Law Enforcement and Regulators. We share your information with our professional advisors who provide legal, compliance, auditing, accounting, banking, consulting, or similar services, and with regulators, law enforcement, or government agencies to:
- comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, including those compliance obligations of federal, state or local regulators;
- protect our interests, property or legal rights, or those of our customers or third parties;
- respond to a subpoena, court order, or similar law enforcement request, or when we believe in good faith that the disclosure of personal information is necessary to prevent physical harm or financial loss, to report suspected illegal activity, or to investigate violations of this Privacy Notice or other applicable terms; and
- for other legal purposes, such as to enforce our terms and conditions, or to exercise or defend legal claims.
Corporate Transaction. In the event of a corporate transaction, we may share your personal information with companies or other entities in connection with, or during the negotiation of, any merger, sale of company stock or assets, financing, acquisition, restructuring, divestiture or dissolution of all or a portion of our business, or other similar event.
Other Disclosures. In addition to the above disclosures, we may disclose personal information in the event that we believe such disclosure is (i) necessary to provide our services or operate our business; (ii) in accordance with purposes we describe when you share it with us; (iii) permitted by law; or (iv) with your consent or at your direction.
If you are a Visitor on our Site, we may share your information with advertisers and other promotional partners where we may provide aggregated reports and insights about the way you are interacting with their content.
We may disclose aggregated or deidentified information that does not identify any individual without restriction.
Privacy Protections for Children Using the Internet
We do not knowingly gather personal information (as defined by the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA) in a manner not permitted by COPPA. In California we do not knowingly sell the personal information of minors under 16 years old. Some parts of our Services are intended for use by children under the age of 13. In particular, this applies to students accessing content via a school membership. For these students, our Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Notice applies.
AllSides encourages minors to seek the consent of their parents before providing any information about themselves or their households to anyone on the Internet. AllSides encourages parents to take an active role to protect the privacy and security of their children and to prevent the inappropriate use of information about their children.
If you are a parent or guardian and you believe we have collected information from your child in a manner not permitted by law, contact us at privacy@allsides.com. We will remove the data to the extent required by applicable laws.
What Choices Do I Have?
Update personal information. If you are user with an account with us, you can adjust certain information you have provided to us about yourself by logging into your account and accessing your Settings page. As permitted by law, we may not accommodate a request to change information if we believe the change would violate any law or legal requirement, cause the information to be incorrect, or prevent the provision of our Services.
Marketing communications. You may receive marketing communications from AllSides. You may opt out of receiving marketing emails by following the unsubscribe link in each email, or by updating your newsletter preferences here. Please note that you may continue to receive non-marketing emails from us after you opt-out. Please note that we do not control communications from others, including those you may choose to interact with via our Site. You should contact them to understand your communication choices.
Cookies. You have a number of choices regarding certain cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you may modify your browser’s setting to notify you of cookie placement or decline cookies. If you choose to decline cookies, certain features of our website may not function properly or at all as a result. You can manage your cookie consent preferences by clicking the button in the site footer, or directly below:
Additional Opt-Outs. To learn how to opt-out of Google Analytics’ use of your information, please click here. To opt-out of interest-based advertising, please visit the Network Advertising Initiative's Opt Out page. To send a Global Privacy Control opt-out signal, use one of the browsers or extensions listed here.
Updates to Our Privacy Notice
We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time in order to provide clarification or notice of changes to our practices. If we make changes, we will revise the Last Updated date at the top of this Privacy Notice. Changes to this Privacy Notice will be effective once they are posted unless otherwise indicated. We may choose to notify you by email to the email address in our records.
Contact Information
If you have any questions or concern about this privacy notice or the privacy practices at AllSides, please contact us by emailing us at privacy@allsides.com or by writing a letter to:
AllSides Technologies, Inc.
8275 E 11th Avenue, #200241
Denver, CO 80220