Technologies and Principles
Last modified: Feb 18, 2016
At Pod, we pursue ideas and products that often push the limits of existing technology. As a company that acts responsibly, we work hard to make sure any innovation is balanced with the appropriate level of privacy and security for our users. Our Privacy Principles help guide decisions we make at every level of our company, so we can help protect and empower our users while we fulfill our ongoing mission to organize the information.
Privacy Principles
Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
“Focus on providing the best user experience” is the first tenet of Pod’s philosophy. When users share information with us, it allows us to build services and products that are valuable to them. We believe that focusing on the user fosters both the products and privacy-enhancing features that have fueled innovation and built a loyal audience of users online.
Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
Our ambition is to be at the leading edge of technology, including the development of tools that help users manage their personal information in a simple, accessible manner without detracting from a valuable user experience. We comply with privacy laws, and additionally work internally and with regulators and industry partners to develop and implement strong privacy standards.
Make the collection of personal information transparent.
We strive to show users the information used to customize our services. Where appropriate, we aim to be transparent about the information we have about individual users and how we use that information to deliver our services.
Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Pod strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information.
Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.
We recognize our responsibility to protect the data that users entrust to us. We take security issues seriously and work together with a large community of users, developers and external security experts to make the Internet safer and more secure.
Advertising
Advertising helps to keep the cost of using Pod and many of its services either free or very low. We work hard to make sure that ads are safe, unobtrusive and as relevant as possible. For example, you won’t see pop-up ads on Pod and we terminate the accounts of hundreds of thousands of publishers and advertisers that violate our policies each year – including ads containing malware, ads for counterfeit goods or those that attempt to misuse your personal information.
How Pod uses cookies in advertising
Cookies help to make advertising more effective. Without cookies, it’s harder for an advertiser to reach its audience, or to know how many ads were shown and how many clicks they received.
Many services partner with Pod to show ads to their visitors. Working with our partners, we may use cookies for a number of purposes, such as to stop you from seeing the same ad over and over again, to detect and stop click fraud, and to show ads that are likely to be more relevant (such as ads based on websites you have visited).
We store a record of the ads we serve in our logs. These server logs typically include your web request, IP address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We store this data for a number of reasons, the most important of which are to improve our services and to maintain the security of our systems. We anonymize this log data by removing part of the IP address (after 9 months) and cookie information (after 18 months).
Technologies used in advertising
Pod’s advertising systems may use other technologies, including Flash and HTML5, for functions like display of interactive ad formats. We may use the IP address, for example, to identify your general location. We may also select advertising based on information about your computer or device, such as your device model, browser type, or sensors in your device like the accelerometer.
Location
Pod’s ad products may receive or infer information about your location from a variety of sources. For example, we may use the IP address to identify your general location; we may receive precise location from your mobile device; we may infer your location from your search queries; and websites or apps that you use may send information about your location to us. Pod uses location information in its ads products to infer demographic information, to improve the relevance of the ads you see, to measure ad performance and to report aggregate statistics to advertisers.
Advertising identifiers on mobile devices
To serve ads in services where cookie technology may not be available (for example, in mobile applications), we may use technologies that perform similar functions to cookies. Sometimes Pod links the identifier used for advertising on mobile applications to an advertising cookie on the same device in order to coordinate ads across your mobile apps and mobile browser. This can happen, for example, when you see an ad within an app that launches a web page in your mobile browser. This also helps us improve the reports we give to our advertisers on the effectiveness of their campaigns.
What determines the ads by Pod that I see?
Many decisions are made to determine which ad you see.
Sometimes the ad you see is based on your current or past location. Your IP address is usually a good indication of your approximate location.
Sometimes the ad you see is based on the context of a page. If you’re looking for an opportunity of a certain type, you might see ads for similar other opportunities that may be of interest to you.
