This is the Privacy and Cookies Policy for The Motley Fool Foundation website (“we”,”us” and “our site”). We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.
This Policy and any other documents referred to in it explain:
- Information we collect about you
- Our legal bases for processing your information
- How we use your information
- Promotional updates and communications
- How we store and retain your information
- Cookies and other technologies
- Cookie Removal
- Update or correct your information
- Security and protection of your information
- Users Aged 13 or Under
- European Users
- Changes to this policy
- Contact us
Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it. By using our website and our services, you acknowledge you have read and understood this privacy policy.
In Summary: This Privacy Statement applies to the operations of The Motley Fool Foundation, which is directed at users in the United States of America. It explains how The Motley Fool Foundation collects, use and safeguards your personal data. By using the sites and providing us with personal data you are consenting to our processing data in the United States and under its laws.
Data handling practices and rules may differ from country to country. Each Motley Fool company (e.g., The Motley Fool, LLC, which operates fool.com in the U.S., The Motley Fool Limited, which operates fool.co.uk in the United Kingdom) may have different policies, which will apply to (and be stated on) its sites.
If you are a resident of the European Union and wish to use our site, you can find information on the data policies of foolfoundation.org that pertain to you in this document.
While we do our best to protect your personal information, The Motley Fool Foundation cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. What does all of this mean? Just as in the investing world, you must protect yourself. You are responsible for maintaining the secrecy of any password and/or account information. Please be careful and responsible whenever you are online, especially when using a computer that other people can use also or if you are on an unsecured network.
Many of our affiliated companies, advertisers or partners, such as The Motley Fool, Salesforce, Salsa, Paypal, Qualtrics, brokerages, merchants, or data providers, link from our site to areas on their own sites where they sell their own products and services. If you follow links from our site to others, you should be aware that you are doing business with those other sites, which have their own privacy and data collection practices. The Motley Fool Foundation has no responsibility or liability for these independent policies (and we may not even know what they are). For more information regarding a site and its privacy policies, check that site.
1. Information We Collect About You
We will collect and process the following personal data from you:
1.1 Information you give us
This is information about you that you give us directly when you interact with us.
- Signing Up for Content Delivered via Email: When you sign up to receive updates on the Foundation or other content delivered by email, we will ask for your email address. We may also ask for your name as well as capture your IP address.
- Making a Donation: We encrypt all of this information using Transport Layer Security (TLS), the replacement for the deprecated Secure Socket Layers (SSL) technology.
- Other Services: We may also ask for additional information when providing other services, or facilitating, planning or soliciting donations. If you don’t want to give us the information requested, you certainly don’t have to, but you will not be able to take advantage of such offerings. For example, if we launch a text alert feature, we wouldn’t be able to send you any alerts unless you provide us with your mobile number. On occasion, we may also ask you for other personal information in connection with surveys or other opportunities running on our site, but again, your participation in these features is purely voluntary.
- Information About Others: If you use our recommendation service to email one of our articles to a friend, you will need to provide us with your friend’s email address and your email address as a return address. We will automatically send this person a one-time email, with the recommended article attached, as well as invite your friend to visit and register with our site. We will not use these email addresses for any other purpose.
1.2 Information we collect about you from using our site:
- While on our site, we automatically log certain information about how you’re using our site. This information may include the URL that you just came from, your IP address (or a partially anonymized IP address), details about your browser, device, OS, or probable location, and the pages you visit while on our site.
- When you visit our sites we will assign you a unique identifier so we can recognize you across different portions of our sites. You may have one or more of these, and they may persist between visits to our sites, so we can recognize you when you come back.
- We may place a tracking mechanism, such as a pixel or web beacon, on pages or components of our site. This enables us to record in our server logs that a specific user id has visited a particular page. This data allows us to analyze and determine our audience’s behavioral characteristics, which helps us to optimize our site, advertisement placement, and marketing focus.
1.3 Information we receive from other sources:
- We may place a tracking mechanism on pages or components of some of our partners’ sites so that when you use services from our partners, we can record that a specific user ID visited that service. This helps us analyze our audience in a manner similar to when you visit our own site.
- We may allow our advertisers and partners to collect certain information when you visit our site by allowing them to place a tracking mechanism, such as cookies, pixels, beacons, Google AMP Client IDs, or other technologies to collect and use information about you during your visit to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements they feel you would like.
- By utilizing or permitting these tracking mechanisms, we prevent our partners from fraudulently representing your internet activity, and we ensure that we are trustworthy to our partners and advertisers about accounting for the exchange of your personal information.
- We have also engaged third-party companies to gather and process information about our users on our behalf, to help us improve our sites and find new donors. These companies will combine our data about how you visit our websites with information that they have collected from outside our sites and provide it to us so that we can optimize your experience across our sites, across multiple devices, and based on your interests.
1.4 Business purposes and categories of personal information we collect:
Our business is constantly evolving to create and deliver the most relevant products and services to you. We collect a variety of different personal data for numerous business reasons. For a full listing of those reason, please see Section 3.
1.5 Categories of third parties from which we collect personal information:
We collect information about you from third parties that have information about you or about people that exhibit similarities to the data we have collected about you. For more information, see the How We Use Your Information section of this privacy statement.
We collect personal information about you from the following categories of third parties:
- Advertisers
- Data Enrichment providers
2. Our Legal Bases for Processing Your Information:
We can collect and process your data under one of the following legal bases for our use.
2.1 Consent
We can collect and process your data with your consent.
- For example, if you have given your consent to receiving email material from us at the point we collected your information.
- If you have made a donation on our site, you have consented to us processing that donation.
2.2 Contractual Obligations
We need your personal data to comply with our contractual obligations.
- For example, if you have made a donation, we will use that information (possibly in conjunction with our partners) to deliver a receipt to you.
2.3 Legal Compliance
If the law requires us to, we may need to collect and process your data.
2.4 Legitimate interest
We may use your data as required in the normal course of operating our businesses and services, including to process donations, unless our legitimate interests are overridden by your rights.
3. How We Use Your Information
3.1 Business Purposes for Which We Collect and Use Personal Data:
When we have a legal basis for collecting your personal information, we do so from a variety of sources, including without limitation your explicit input and interaction on our web sites, through our advertisements on other web sites, and through third parties that have information about you or about people that exhibit similarities to the data we have collected about you. We may combine your data with anonymized, aggregated data to draw inferences about you or your interests. We use all this data to make our site and our advertising relevant to you.
Business Purpose & Categories of Personal Data
Operations
To administer our site, site performance, and internal operations, such as to conduct troubleshooting, testing, and projecting usage volume and impact
- Unique personal identifiers, such as online identifiers, usernames, or account names
- Email address
- Browser or device identifiers
- Internet or electronic network activity, such as browsing history, search history, engagement with ads, interaction with web site or mobile app, and email receipt and response
Security
To keep our site safe and secure and to control access to the site and any donation information
- Name
- Physical addresses, both mailing and billing
- Payment methods and numbers, such as a credit or debit card
- Unique personal identifiers, such as online identifiers, usernames, or account names
- Browser or device identifiers
- Physical/geolocation or network location information, such as GPS location or Internet Protocol (IP) address
- Internet or electronic network activity, such as browsing history, search history, engagement with ads, interaction with web site or mobile app, and email receipt and response
Advertising
To deliver relevant advertising to you and to measure and optimize the effectiveness of our advertising
- Browser or device identifiers
- Physical/geolocation or network location information, such as GPS location or Internet Protocol (IP) address
- Characteristics of protected classes, such as age and sex
- Education (e.g., level of education, IDs, dates, attendance, disciplinary actions, disabilities)
- Commercial information, such as records of your purchases or property
- Personal interests
- Inferences about consumer preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes
Marketing
To keep you informed about campaigns, initiatives or other programs – on our site and elsewhere on the internet
- Name
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Physical addresses, both mailing and billing
- Unique personal identifiers, such as online identifiers, usernames, or account names
Donations
To process donations made to the Foundation, provide receipts, correspondence and notify about other opportunities to donate
- Name
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Date of Birth
- Physical addresses, both mailing and billing
- Unique personal identifiers, such as online identifiers, usernames, or account names
- Tax Identification Numbers (where applicable)
- Credit card, banking or other information required by payment processors to complete donations
- Employer Information (where applicable)
- Estate Planning Documents (where applicable)
- Brokerage Account information, including account names, numbers and disclosed holdings (where applicable)
Optimization
To ensure our content, layout, and offerings are presented in the most effective manner for you and devices
- Unique personal identifiers, such as online identifiers, usernames, or account names
- Email address
- Browser or device identifiers
- Internet or electronic network activity, such as browsing history, search history, engagement with ads, interaction with web site or mobile app, and email receipt and response
Fulfillment
To fulfill your transactions and to deliver information you have requested, or that we think you would be interested in
- Name
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Physical addresses
Personalization
To allow you to participate in interactive features of our services, when you choose to do so.
- Email addresses
- Unique personal identifiers, such as online identifiers, usernames, or account names
- Browser or device identifiers
Research
To better understand our community, potential community members, and visitors so we can improve our products and services, and better target how we deliver information about those products and services
- Unique personal identifiers, such as online identifiers, usernames, or account names
- Browser or device identifiers
- Physical/geolocation or network location information, such as GPS location or Internet Protocol (IP) address
- Characteristics of protected classes, such as age and sex
- Education (e.g., level of education, IDs, dates, attendance, disciplinary actions, disabilities)
- Commercial information, such as records of your purchases or property
- Personal interests
- Inferences about consumer preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes
3.2 Categories of Service Providers to Which Personal Data is Disclosed:
We utilize service providers to process personal information for a variety of purposes that would be difficult for our business to conduct on our own. For example, to increase the likelihood of successfully processing your credit card when you make a donation, we may wish to submit a well-formatted address to the credit card company. We may send the address you give us to a service from the U.S. Postal Service to try to verify your address and provide its canonical version of your address with all the fields in the expected locations. In some states, these types of external companies are called service providers. We disclose personal information about you to the following categories of service providers in order to process data for us:
- Data verification providers, like the US Postal Service
- Content delivery providers, like Strongmail or Hubspot
- Traffic monitoring and analytics providers, like Hotjar
In order to maintain relevant and accurate personal information about you, we may share your personal data, browsing habits, or other identifying information to service providers and third parties, and in return they may provide us with additional email addresses, names, physical addresses, other identifiers, browsing habits, and demographic information, which may include education level, income, investment portfolio, race, gender, personal interests you have told them about, and other personal details they infer about you. To read about your options for opting out of this data sharing, please see Section 10.4.
3.3 Categories of Other Third Parties to Which Personal Information May Be Sold; and the Business Purposes for such “Sales”:
If you are a California resident, some of our disclosure of personal information is considered a sale of data even if we don’t receive something of monetary value in exchange. We share personal information in this type of “sale” with the following categories of third parties:
- Companies that serve ads, like Facebook
- Companies that offer header bidding auctions, like Google
- Marketing analytics companies, like Google
- Data enrichment firms, like Infogroup
We share personal information with third parties in this type of “sale” for the following business purposes:
- Advertising: To deliver relevant advertising to you and to measure and optimize the effectiveness of our advertising
- Marketing: To keep you informed about offerings and services similar to the ones you express interest in – on our site and elsewhere on the internet
- Research: To better understand our members, potential members, and visitors so we can improve our products and services, and better target how we deliver information about those products and services.
4. Promotional Updates and Communications
Where permitted by one of the legal bases above, we will use your personal information for marketing analysis and to provide you with promotional update communications (e.g., by email) about our products/services and those of our affiliates and business partners.
To read about your options for opting out of marketing and promotions, please see Section 10.4.
5. How we store and retain your information
We store your data in databases and on storage servers in our own facilities, in colocation data centers, and in those of our contracted service providers. Your data may not be stored in the country in which you reside. We typically store our data in the U.S. If you live in the European Economic Area, please see our section for European Users.
We retain personal data for as long as necessary to fulfill any legal obligations we may have as well as for purposes of processing your information for the delivery of our services (for example, if you continue to subscribe to one of our email-based services, we will need your information to email the service to you). We may also retain aggregate information beyond this time for research purposes and to help us develop and improve our services. You cannot be identified from aggregate information retained or used for these purposes.
6. Cookies and other technologies
Cookies contain bits of data that websites such as ours place on your computer’s hard drive for record keeping purposes. Cookies can make the web more useful by collecting and storing information about your preferences on a particular site and help websites operate more efficiently. Cookies and similar technologies enable you to be remembered when using that computer or device to interact with websites and online services and can be used to manage a range of features and content as well as storing searches and presenting personalized content.
We use our cookies:
(a) With the aim of optimizing our website and improving member experience. Cookies help us estimate our audience size, determine usage patterns and help us better target content and ads based on our users’ interests.
(b) We also use cookies so you can, for example, be recognized by the site as a past visitor.
(c) You have the option of not accepting the cookies we set. However, if you reject our cookies, you will not be able to take advantage of some of the features on our site
Below you’ll find the types of cookies that we set when you visit FoolFoundation.org and their purpose. To help you better understand why we’re setting them, we’ve used the categories and definitions set by the International Chamber of Commerce (“ICC”):
(a) Strictly Necessary: cookies that enable the services that you have specifically asked or paid for;
(b) Performance: cookies that collect information on how visitors use our site including the pages visited and most frequented as well as the sources of our traffic. They are used to help us improve how the site works;
(c) Functionality: cookies that help us remember the choices you have made so we can provide you with a more personalised experience; and
(d) Advertising: cookies used to deliver more relevant ads, and to make sure you don’t see the same adverts over and over again.
In addition to the cookies set directly by our partners, there are also cookies set by third parties to help deliver and monitor their ads. Please note we neither control nor have access to those cookies, and these advertisers’ uses of cookies are subject to their own privacy policies and not our policies.
If you follow links from our site to theirs, you should be aware that these other sites have their own privacy and data processing practices. We have no responsibility or liability for these independent policies. For more information regarding a site and its privacy policies including its use of cookies, check that site.
7. Cookie Removal and More Information
You can always modify your browser so as not to accept cookies or to notify you when cookies are sent to it. For more information about cookies including removing any or all of your cookies, please visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org.
Also, if you would like to remove the Google Analytics and DoubleClick cookies, please go to http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout and http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin/ respectively. You should be aware that this will affect your Google cookies on all sites, and not just ours.
Some of our sites are affiliated with AdThrive, an advertising partner. They, and others, use cookies collected from a variety of sites to gather data about visitors. You can view, delete or add interest categories associated with your browser by visiting: https://adssettings.google.com.
8. Security and Protection of Your Information
We are committed to protecting your personal information. All information that you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. While we do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. What does all this mean? Just as in the investing world, you must protect yourself. You are responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your passwords and/or any account information. If you need to change your password, please follow the steps outlined below.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorized access.
Our site may, from time to time, contain links to external sites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies or the content of such sites.
9. Users Aged 13 or Under
Protecting the safety of children when they use the internet is important to us.
The site is intended for use only by persons who are at least 13 years of age. By using this site, you confirm to us that you meet this requirement. If you are aged 13 or under, please get your parent/guardian’s permission beforehand whenever you provide personal information to our website. Users without this consent are not allowed to provide us with personal information.
If you are under the age of 13 your parent or guardian must consent on your behalf where we ask for consent in relation to the use of your information.
10. European Users
For the purposes of European Economic Area data protection law, (the “Data Protection Law”), the data controller is: The Motley Fool Foundation, 2000 Duke Street, Alexandria, VA 22314, USA (dpo@foolfoundation.org).
10.1 Use of Cookies
Our site places cookies on your device for a variety of purposes described in the Cookies and Other Technologies section of this privacy statement. Please refer to that section for more information about those cookies and how to prevent the use of cookies.
If you have any questions about the cookies we set, please contact our Data Protection Officer at dpo@foolfoundation.org.
10.2 Data Storage
The data that we collect from you is transferred to, and may be stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”) that is not subject to equivalent Data Protection Law. For our purposes, the information we collect is processed and stored in the US.
We may transfer your personal information outside the EEA:
Where your information is transferred outside the EEA, we will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is subject to appropriate safeguards, such as relying on a recognized legal adequacy mechanism, and that it is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy.
10.3 European site users have certain rights under certain circumstances:
- to be provided with a copy of your personal data held by us;
- to request the rectification or erasure of your personal data held by us;
- to request that we restrict the processing of your personal data (while we verify or investigate your concerns with this information, for example);
- to object to the further processing of your personal data, including the right to object to marketing (as mentioned in ‘our promotional updates and communications’ section);
- to request that your provided personal data be moved to a third party.
10.4 Your right to withdraw consent:
Where the processing of your personal information by us is based on consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent without detriment. You can withdraw consent online or by contacting us. For more information on this or other options to manage your privacy rights, please contacting us at dpo@foolfoundation.org
If your request or concern is not satisfactorily resolved by us, you may approach your local data protection authority, (see http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/bodies/authorities/index_en.html).
11. Changes to this Policy
We may amend this Privacy and Cookie Statement from time to time. Please check back regularly to review your rights and to check the Effective date or Last Updated date listed below. If we make any substantive changes to this policy, we’ll announce it on our site and notify you by email.
12. Contact Us
Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy and cookie policy are welcomed and should be addressed to:
Data Protection Officer
The Motley Fool Foundation
2000 Duke Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
Last Updated: July 15, 2021
