Columbia House Privacy Policy

Your privacy is very important to The Columbia House Company. This privacy policy spells out Columbia House’s commitment to respecting the privacy of the members of Columbia House’s various music, video, and DVD Clubs and visitors to our websites. Columbia House reserves the right to change this policy, which we’ll do through club mailings or online posting.

Whether you enroll online or offline, or are just a visitor, we are very careful with what we do with your information. Collection of information is usually grouped into two categories: personal, which is information identifiable to a specific member, and aggregate, which is general demographic information that does not identify any individual member. Columbia House may use or disclose aggregate information for any purpose.

How we use our members’ personal information

Club offers and special promotions
Columbia House first uses your personal information to process and review your application for enrollment. We will use the information you provide to keep you informed of application and order status. If your application is not completed, we require additional information, or if we want to provide you with alternative offers, we may contact you based on what you already have provided. Once you have joined, we use your information to process your orders, personalize Columbia House mailings and the Columbiahouse.com website based on your interests, including making you aware of special offers, newsletters, and commercial offerings that may be of interest. Columbia House mostly does this by the periodic mailings sent to your postal address or to your email address. As a Club member you agreed to receive these mailings, and it is how your membership works. In order to provide services that better meet your needs, we also may supplement the information that you provide to us with other information that we receive from third parties.

We maintain a list of member-provided email addresses, for the purpose of sending order confirmations and status reports, reminders, promotional information about Club news, products and special offers. If you provide Columbia House with your email address through one of our online sites, by phone or by mail you will receive our free electronic newsletters. All Club members also have the option of signing up for this and other Club newsletters too. If you wish to have your name removed from our promotional email list, or you want to sign up for additional Club newsletters, please visit the Email Preferences section of the Account Info area of our site. If you change your mind about receiving email or a particular newsletter, simply go back to edit your preferences. We also provide email opt-out information in our emails. We also may call you with special offers, for example, to join one of our other Clubs. If you do not wish to receive such phone calls please write to us, including any and all Club account numbers you have, at: Columbia House, 1400 North Fruitridge Avenue, Terre Haute, IN 47811 or give us a call at the number provided in your Membership Agreement.

From time to time, we may make Club lists available to other reputable companies whose products or services we think you will enjoy. Columbia House also may send approved email communications to members on behalf of these outside parties. If you do not want your name, address, email address or other personal information to be provided for such purposes, please write to us, including any and all Club account numbers you have, at: Columbia House, 1400 North Fruitridge Avenue, Terre Haute, IN 47811 or give us a call at the number provided in your Membership Agreement.

Sweepstakes
In our periodic mailings to our members, whether by email or postal mail, we may include sweepstakes and contest entry opportunities. While we believe these are exciting opportunities to win great prizes without any further obligation on your part, we also understand that you may not want to hear about all the details. If you do not want to receive details about sweepstakes or contests by email (you will still get sweepstakes postal mail), please email us from the email address you want excluded at one of the following email addresses, as is appropriate to your Club: musicnosweeps@columbiahouse.com, videonosweeps@columbiahouse.com, or dvdnosweeps@columbiahouse.com. This is only for our members to opt out of sweepstakes email. Members who wish to opt out of receiving sweepstakes entry opportunities via postal mail (you will still get sweepstakes email) should write to us, and include any and all Club account numbers you have, at: Columbia House, P.O. Box 1182, 1400 North Fruitridge Avenue, Terre Haute, IN 47811-1182. Please contact us via both methods to opt out of receiving sweepstakes offers through both email and postal mail. For both our members and visitors, we may use information you provide us when registering for these sweepstakes to administer prize awards, or to make offers about our services. Please check the official rules for each sweepstakes for more privacy information.

Other uses of your information
In the daily course of business, we may use your information to assist you if you have questions or problems, or to perform normal business operations, such as billing, collection, and accounting. If you provide personal information in an application that is eventually rejected, we retain that information in case you apply again.

Columbia House uses strict procedures and safeguards designed to protect the privacy of all personal information. All Columbia House employees with access to personal information are required to follow specific practices concerning its proper handling. Our vendors and their employees who may need access to member information, such as customer service and fulfillment vendors, are held to strict confidentiality requirements. At times we may retain third parties to analyze data we collect on our Clubs and web sites, solely to help us improve our products, services, and web sites. These suppliers and other third parties are not authorized by us to use your personal information in any other way. We may have to use personal information to investigate complaints and protect Columbia House and its members, in compliance with the law, your Membership Agreements, and Columbia House policies. Columbia House may release your information if required to do so by law, including inquiries that are subject to a subpoena, court order or warrant.

Our online technology
Columbiahouse.com is a safe and secure environment for making purchases online. When you make a purchase or join one of our Clubs using your credit card, the transactional information, including your credit card number, is stored on our server for archival purposes only. That information is encoded within industrial-strength 64-bit encryption. Your credit card information is encrypted and protected during transmission using Secure Sockets Layering (“SSL”) technology. We use this SSL technology to prevent such information from being intercepted and read as it is transmitted over the Internet. The encrypted data goes to a secure site where your information is stored on restricted-access computers located at restricted-access sites. For your shopping convenience, once you have entered your member ID and password and you check out, the site displays the last four digits of your credit card number so you always know which card you used. We also offer SSL encryption on new member applications.

We use “cookie” technology on a limited basis. Cookies are pieces of information that an Internet site transfers to your hard drive for record-keeping purposes. The use of cookies is an industry standard — you’ll find them almost everywhere on the Internet. Columbia House uses cookies to recognize members when they return to our sites. Once we know it’s you, we can customize your online visit. We can show you hot new releases based on your preferences, alert you to new website features, or tell you what your featured Selection is. We may also evaluate our content and services and tailor our websites, for members and visitors, based on other information we collect such as IP addresses, which are numbers assigned to your computer whenever you use the Internet, pixel tags (or clear gifs), and the type of Internet browser or operating system you are using. This information is collected in the aggregate, but we may tie it to your personal information through cookie use as described above.

If a member enters our pages from the site of one of Columbia House’s partners, our system will recognize the path the visitor has taken. Columbia House advertises on such partners’ sites or we’ve entered into a promotional partnership with them. We track the number of visitors to see the success of our online marketing or promotional campaign. These partners will not know your personal information, unless you are notified in advance, if you have given it to them separately or consented to give it to them through us. In cases where such partners have access to your information, we contractually bind them to keep your information confidential or to handle it in accordance with their posted privacy statements.

Our company contracts under the confidentiality restrictions mentioned above, with Coremetrics, a service partner, to provide data collection and reports regarding our customers’ activities on our site. Coremetrics may use cookies on our behalf and may receive information about your browsing and buying activity. Coremetrics may store member ID, city, state, zip code, and email address on our behalf. If you would like to opt out of these particular services, please click here.

Access to Your Membership Information
For members who have registered online, please visit the “My Account” section at Columbiahouse.com. If you’re not an online member, if you wish to change information offline, or if there are circumstances in which you wish to have your spouse, relative, or other trusted friend have access to your information, please write to us at Columbia House, 1400 North Fruitridge Avenue, Terre Haute, IN 47811 or give us a call at the number provided in your Membership Agreement.

What if you’re not a Club member, but you’ve heard from Columbia House?
If you’re not a member, but you’ve been contacted by Columbia House, we may have received your information in a few different ways. First, another member may have referred you under our “Get A Friend” or “Sign Up A Friend” programs. For the online program, members will give us your name and email address in order for them to customize an invitation for you to join one or more of our Clubs. You also may receive similarly customized, email reminders from your friend about this invitation. If your friend has submitted your information offline, you will hear from us offline as well. Either way, if you apply for membership, your information will be used in accordance with the rest of this privacy policy. If you choose not to apply online, your email address will not be retained. Similarly, a member may have shipped a gift or other merchandise to you through us and provided your personal information for that purpose.

You may have received an offer from us, whether through postal mail, by phone or by email. If you were a prior member of one of our Clubs, we may have invited you back. (We may also invite you to join another one of our Clubs if you’re already a member of another Club. Please read above for how we handle that information.) Columbia House may also have received your information from one of our partners or from the mailing, opt-in emailing, or phone lists of a reputable company. If you do not want to be included in these lists in the future, please visit the consumer assistance page of the Direct Marketing Association website (http://www.the-dma.org). There you will find information on how to choose your mail, email, and telemarketing preferences. Unless we are using an opt-in only list in our marketing efforts, Columbia House will screen our lists with the DMA preference lists before we send such offers. Columbia House is a proud member of the Direct Marketing Association.

Parental guidance
Joining a Columbia House Club can be a fun and enjoyable family experience. Columbia House believes that parents should supervise their children’s participation in our Clubs, and in their online activities. We provide parental guides such as explicit content advisories and the studios’ and television ratings. We also reserve the right not to send mature content to younger consumers. Please review our Club offers with your kids and tell them only to sign up for our services with your permission and assistance.

Columbia House has made available product that is of a mature nature. We have measures in place that permit our members to select if and how they receive offers for such products. Our members may edit their preferences by contacting us online, by phone, or by mail. For members who choose to purchase this mature-content product, we have screening measures in place to help adult members ensure that only they can purchase this product. As always, our members should be mindful of password-entry requirements online and disclose account numbers or passwords to others. If you wish to share account privileges with another adult, please first use the processes available to you as described in the “Access to Your Membership Information” paragraph above. Further information on mature-content offerings and choosing your preferences for them can be found in the Club Help section of our members’ web site under “What are Mature DVD’s?”

If The Columbia House Company changes
Columbia House has been a leading service provider in the home entertainment industry for almost 5 decades and we hope to be around for a long time to come. In the event all or part of the company is sold or dissolved, we will transfer information we have about you to one or more third parties with a requirement that such third parties treat your personal information in accordance with our privacy policy as it exists at the time of the transfer. If we close down one of our services or shut down a website, we will keep your information secure and will only use it, again, in accordance with the terms of our then current privacy policy.

If you still have questions
Please contact Customer Service by writing to Columbia House, 1400 North Fruitridge Avenue, Terre Haute, IN 47811 or calling the phone number provided in your Membership Agreement.