The majority of great products and services on our sites are offered without our collecting any personally identifiable information from you. You can surf SNI's web sites and view much of our terrific content anonymously.

There are a few activities on our sites where the collection of personally identifiable information is necessary. Those activities include but are not limited to: making a purchase, listing personal data on the site directly, or directly contacting us. When personally identifiable information is collected, you will know because you will have to fill out a form or otherwise directly submit the information. For most activities, we collect only your name and e-mail address.

Any email sent to SNI becomes the property of SNI to use as it wishes unless the email specifically states otherwise.

SNI may, in rare cases, collect information about you using technology, so it may not be readily apparent to you that it is being collected. For instance, when you come to our site your IP address may be collected. An IP address is often associated with the place from which you enter the Internet like your ISP (Internet service provider), your company, or your university. This information is not personally identifiable. SNI will combine this information with personally identifiable information to identify a visitor in order to enforce compliance with our house rules or terms of service or to protect our service, site, Guests, or others.

Cookies are pieces of information that a Web site sends to your computer while you are viewing the Web site. These pieces of information allow the Web site to remember important information that will make your use of that site more useful. SNI does not utilize cookies.

One of the most valuable assets of our business is you. We may share information about you to sponsors and other entities if we feel they have goods or a service that may have benefit to you. We do not make a habit of selling information about our webguests to random groups and we pledge not to do so. Additionally, we will share information about a guest for security reasons to government or other agencies if need be.

Sometimes we hire companies to help us deliver products or services (like our involvement with Paypal, for example). In those instances, we may need to share your information with them. These companies are basically "standing in the shoes" of SNI, and they are allowed to use the information only to deliver the product or service.

On occasion, we offer promotions -- like sweepstakes or give aways -- in conjunction with a sponsor. We will share your information with the sponsors if they need it to send you a product, such as a magazine subscription. We may share your information with those sponsors so that they can send you other special promotions they offer.

To help increase privacy protections for our Guests, SNI allows advertising on our sites from only those companies that have their own privacy policy. Once you've clicked on an advertisement and have left SNI sites, our privacy policy no longer applies. You must read the privacy policy of the advertiser to see how your personal information will be handled on their site.

In addition, business advertisements are managed and placed on our site by third-party companies. These companies are called "network advertisers." Network advertisers collect non-personally identifiable information when you click on or scan one of their banner advertisements. The information is collected using technology, so you may not realize it's being collected. The network advertisers collect this information so that they can show you ads that are more relevant and interesting to you.

The SNI website is changing and evolving rapidly. As SNI continually looks for ways to improve our business, we may buy or sell a company. If we buy or sell a business, the names collected will likely be transferred as a part of the sale. Information about registrants will be used in the aggregate. However, if we buy a business, we will honor the requests that customers made of that business regarding e-mail communications. In the event that we sell a business, we will do everything in our power to ensure that the e-mail communications requests you made of us are honored.

We will give out personal information as required by law, for example, to comply with a court order or subpoena; to enforce our Terms of Service, or site or game rules; or to protect the safety and security of Guests and our sites.

It is possible for you to use much of our site without giving us any personally identifiable information. When you do register with us or give us personally identifiable information, you will have an opportunity at the time we collect your information -- to limit e-mail communications from SNI and from our third-party partners. You can request at any time that SNI not send future e-mail to you either by unsubscribing from the communication or by contacting SNI. Also, as mentioned above, there are ways to limit the information collected through technology -- though some of our features won't work if you decide to do this.

The importance of security for all personally identifiable information associated with our Guests is of utmost concern to us. SNI takes technical, contractual, administrative, and physical security steps to protect all visitors' information.