Links to Third-Party Websites or Apps
This Privacy Policy only governs information collected by Merriam-Webster through your use of the Services. You may find advertising or other content on the Services that link to websites, apps, products, or services belonging to our third-party partners, suppliers, advertisers, sponsors, licensors and other third parties, or offer content, functionality, or apps developed and maintained by third parties not controlled by Merriam-Webster, including https://raptive.com/creator-advertising-privacy-statement>Rapitve for the purposes of placing advertising on pages in the Services. These third-party linked websites, apps, products, services and advertisements may use automated means to collect information about you and your use of these features. Merriam-Webster provides these links solely as a convenience to you. Merriam-Webster does not control and is not responsible for the practices employed by websites, apps, products, services, or advertisements linked to or from the Services. Therefore, Merriam-Webster disclaims liability for any information, materials, products or services offered at any third-party website linked to or from the Services. Such third-party websites, apps, products, or services may have terms and conditions (as well as privacy policies) that are different from those set forth here.
This Privacy Policy does not apply to the activities of Merriam-Webster’s third-party sponsors, advertisers, and other partners that may collect your user information while you access or use such third party’s services in connection with your use of the Services (e.g. social media and sharing services). Merriam-Webster is not responsible for the privacy practices or content of these third-party linked services once you leave the Services, click an advertisement or sign up for a special offer. We encourage you to read and review the privacy statement of each third-party service that you may choose to use and we urge all users of our Services to follow safe internet practices: Once you leave the Merriam-Webster Services, do not supply personal data to these third-party linked services unless you have verified their security and privacy policies.
Use of Our Services - Information Collected Automatically & Other Information
Like other commercial websites, Merriam-Webster and our authorized partners use cookies (small files transferred from a website to its users' hard drives or browsers for record-keeping purposes), including strictly necessary, performance, functional, and personalization cookies, software logs, and other similar information gathering technologies throughout our Services to collect certain information automatically and store it in log files to monitor the use of the Services, gather non-personal informational about our users, and for a variety of other legitimate business interests and purposes. This information may include (but is not limited to) internet protocol (IP) addresses, mobile device identifiers, the region or general location where your computer or device is accessing the internet, browser type (for example, Firefox or Internet Explorer), operating system (for instance, Windows or Macintosh), your internet provider (for example, Comcast), and other usage information about your use of our Services, including a history of the pages you view.
Web beacons, tags, and scripts also may be used on our Services or in email or other electronic communications we send to you. These assist us in delivering cookies, counting visits to our Services, understanding usage and campaign effectiveness and determining whether an email has been opened and acted upon. We may receive reports based on the use of these technologies by our third-party service providers on an individual and aggregated basis.
We may work with DigiTrust to set a cookie (DigiTrust Cookie) in your browser to enable us to collect web-viewing data that includes visits to a Merriam-Webster service and other non-affiliated websites over time.
We also may work with third-party analytics providers, ad networks, and advertisers in order to track your online activities over time and across third party websites, apps and devices, by obtaining information through the automated means (including cookies) mentioned above. The information received by us through these automated methods may include (but is not limited to) information about your activities across unrelated websites and mobile applications, information about the possible relationships between different browsers and devices, information that we receive from our third-party service providers, demographic data, information from social media providers, and information about your interests. We may add this information to the data we have already collected through our Services.
We have a legitimate interest in understanding how our users, subscribers, customers, and potential customers use our Services. Among other things, this assists us in providing more relevant products and services. Please refer to our Cookie Policy and Your Rights & Choices below for more information.
You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our Services. For more information about cookies, please visit All About Cookies.
Purposes for processing (using) information collected automatically & other information
We may use and disclose information collected automatically through our Services and other information for any purpose, except if it is considered personal data under applicable law. If we combine information collected automatically with the personal data provided by you, we treat the combined information as personal data and use it only in the manner described above. See Purposes for processing (using) personal data provided directly by you above.
On the basis of legitimate interests, we use this information (or combined information) to help us design our Services to better suit our users' needs, to provide and improve our Services, for identification verification, to provide support, for statistical and market research purposes to tailor content to usage patterns, for analytic purposes through tools such as Google Analytics and to personalize your experience by presenting content, products, and offers tailored to you. This information, along with other information we gather when you login, also can be used to understand use across websites and devices to further improve our Services, and show you advertisements on the Services or other third-party websites and apps that may be tailored to your individual interests and enable us to offer the Services to you free of charge. We also may use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our servers and to administer our Services, analyze trends, track user movements and gather broad demographic information that assists us in identifying user preferences.
Relevant content and recommendations
We use Google Analytics Demographics and Interest reporting, which is a Google Analytics Advertiser feature that collects and stores standard internet log and user information on our behalf and gathers information about what pages you visit, how long you are on our sites, how you got here, and what you click on during your visit. This Google Analytics data is not tied to personal information, so this information cannot be used to identify who you are. For our legitimate business interests, we use the data provided by Google Analytics Demographics and Interest reports to develop our services and content around our user demographics, interests, and behavior on our Services. You can opt-out of this Google Analytics Advertiser feature using the Ads Settings located at . In addition, you can use the Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-on to disable tracking by Google Analytics. To delete these cookies, please see your browser’s privacy settings or follow the above instructions
Advertising and interest-based, behavioral advertising
Our free (non-subscription) Merriam-Webster Online Service and Merriam-Webster's Games & Quizzes are affiliated with CMI Marketing, Inc., d/b/a Raptive (“Raptive”) for the purposes of placing advertising on these Services, and Raptive will collect and use certain data for advertising purposes. To learn more about Raptive’s data usage, click here: https://raptive.com/creator-advertising-privacy-statement. Raptive's CMP is LiveRamp with the CMP identification number 3.
We also may rely on third-party service providers to do things like: take user-level information, anonymize it through hashing (a hashed email address might look something like this: e820bb4aba5ad74c5a6ff1aca16641f6) and match it against other anonymized, people-based identifiers – doing this helps us serve you personalized, relevant advertisements. Specifically, when you use our ad-supported Services, we may share information that we may collect from you, including your email (in hashed form), IP address or information about your browser or operating system, with our third-party service providers, Index Exchange (IX) and LiveRamp Inc. and its group companies (‘LiveRamp’). IX and LiveRamp may use our first-party cookie on your browser to match your shared information to their marketing databases to provide back a pseudonymous privacy-centric identifier for our use in real time bidding in digital advertising. These third parties may in turn link further demographic or interest-based information to your browser. You have the choice to opt-out of the use of your data by third-party service providers for this purpose at any time. Please find more information about opting out below.
We have a legitimate business interest in monetizing the delivery of our premium content to you in connection with our free (non-subscription) Merriam-Webster Online Service and our premium Games & Quizzes as an add-on to all of our Services through the display of advertising. To the extent required by applicable law or contractual obligations, we obtain your consent before using your information for interest-based, behavioral advertising – please see our Cookie Policy.
Merriam-Webster does not provide any personal information to third-party advertising service providers, such as Raptive, advertisers or advertising networks about visitors to the Services, however these third parties may use automated means, such as cookies, to collect information, which may include your IP address, directly from you when you use our Services. Our Privacy Policy does not cover the use of information that they may have collected from you on the Services or other websites or the use of data that you provide directly to such third-parties; that usage is governed by each third party's privacy policy. For information about opting out of interest-based, behavioral advertising, please see our Cookie Policy and Your Rights and Choices below.
Mobile device identifiers
When you use a mobile device like a tablet or cell phone to access our Services, we may access and monitor one or more "device identifiers," which are small data files associated with your mobile device that uniquely identify your mobile device. A device identifier may deliver information to a third-party partner or us about how you browse and use the Services. Some features of the services may not function properly if use or availability of device identifiers is impaired or disabled. For more information, please see our Cookie Policy and Your Rights and Choices below
Anonymous aggregated data
We may provide anonymous aggregated data may to other companies we do business with for statistical purposes.
