Privacy Policy

General Information Collection

When you come browsing to our site, we collect and store various information about you, including, for example, the name of the domain and host from which you access the Internet (for example, yahoo.com or northwestern.edu); the Internet protocol (IP) address of the computer you are using; the browser software you use and your operating system; the date and time you access our site; and the Internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site. We also may use "cookies," "web beacons," or other techniques that may leave some data on your computer.

We use all of this information, and these techniques, to measure the number of visitors to the different sections of our site, to determine how visitors travel around our site, and to help us make our site more useful.

All of the above information is considered "General Information." We haven't figured out a way to sell the General Information, but if someone is willing to pay us, we would probably do it in a heartbeat.

Personally Identifying Information Collection

If you choose to identify yourself by sending us an email or when using our online forms:

We will use personally-identifying information only for the purpose that you provide it and to maintain a general mailing list of interested customers and others. For instance, if you submit a customer service request, we'll use your information to respond to your request and/or to contact you for further information. We may also send you e-mails or regular mailings about future promotions or news about Crown. If you'd like to be taken off our list, just follow the instructions in any message about how to "unsubscribe."

We will not sell or provide your personally-identifying information to any third parties, with the following exceptions:

While we have extremely talented information technology professionals, we keep them very busy helping us do stuff like make gasoline and run retail stores. Thus, we do need to use contractors and other third parties to help us from time-to-time, such as designing and hosting this web site. We will impress upon them the fact that they have no right to use your information for anything other than helping us out.

We are not in the advertising and promotion business. We use ad agencies, promotion companies, spin doctors, and others of that ilk to assist with projects that may involve your personally-identifying information. Like the IT crew, we will let them know that they have no right to use your information for anything other than helping us out.

It has come to our attention that a few other companies in our industry have been merging to form humongous goliaths. It is possible that we will merge, form a joint venture, get bought out by, or otherwise join forces, with another company. Your personally-identifying information may get swept up in the festivities.

Although we shudder to even think about it, some companies in our line of business have filed petitions for bankruptcy and come under the control of a bankruptcy trustee, debtor-in-possession, or some similar villain. In that hideous worst-case scenario, those folks may decide to sell your personally-identifying information along with our other assets.

Kids

We really like kids. In fact we have a few of our own. Nevertheless, we have no interest in having kids provide us with personally-identifying information. We will not gear any information-gathering on-line promotions to kids and we will actively discourage anyone under age 16 from entering any contest or promotion. Nevertheless, if you believe that information on one of your kids has snuck into our system, just e-mail us at customerservice@crowncentral.com and we'll get it off of our mailing and marketing database.

Our Overriding Philosophy

We want lots of happy customers. It stands to reason that if we go around selling your name to every TomDick&Harry.com, you're not going to be happy. So our goal is to use your personally-identifying information only for the purpose you provided it or to make you even happier – by offering you special deals at Crown, etc. So, if you're not happy, just click here to send an e-mail to customerservice@crowncentral.com. We'll do our best to correct the problem.

Because technology is growing by orders of magnitude and legal theories about privacy policies are not far behind, we reserve the right to amend this policy at any time. Come back and visit every so often. This Policy was updated on June 24th , 2001.