Here at the Raving Toy Maniac, our target audience is primarily adult toy collectors. However, we realize that the subject of this site (i.e., toys and action figures) is an extremely popular topic for younger children and adolescents. To be sensitive to the concerns regarding privacy issues within this population, we have adopted a policy to attempt to protect children from deceptive advertising and covert collection of personal information as suggested by the Federal Trade Commission. The Raving Toy Maniac has voluntarily adopted this policy regarding the collection of personal information from children under the age of eighteen.
The Raving Toy Maniac site is supported by sponsorship and commercial advertising. We must continue to accept advertising to maintain the site and will make every effort to be sure that the advertising that appears on the Raving Toy Maniac site itself complies with the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus Guidelines for Advertising to Children. It also should be noted that many of the advertisements found on the Raving Toy Maniac site link to other unrelated web sites. We cannot be held responsible for the content of these linked sites, though we will attempt to be vigilant in monitoring our advertising partners to be sure that the material is not explicitly harmful to children, pornographic, or otherwise illegal.
The Raving Toy Maniac site currently does not employ any "cookies" or other passive tracking software. There may come a time when this technology will have a place on this site, but at present it does not. We will make every effort to make parents and other users aware of the presence of and reason for any future implementation of passive tracking or data collection programs. We do collect aggregate data, but no individually indentifying information is collected. The exception to this rule can be found in our on-line forums and chat rooms. In these instances, programming is in place to allow us to identify individuals for the purposes of moderating these areas.
From time to time, the Raving Toy Maniac site does conduct surveys, contests and other promotions that do ask for or require the disclosure of personal information including (but not limited to) name, postal address, e-mail address, and age. It is our policy to try to be as explicit as possible about the use of the information we collect. We do not resell any information to third parties. However, when collecting marketing data for our participating partners, that information is shared with that partner (and no other organization). We make every attempt to make this explicit in each separate promotion.
Many of our partners do indeed want to collect both postal and electronic mail addresses for the purposes of developing a mailing list. We always inform the user about the intention to compile such a list and try to give ample opportunities for participants to decline to be added to such a list. When there is a contest involved (where some contact information is necessary to contact winners), we do attempt to provide an option where users may still participate in the contest without being added to any mailing list.
The Raving Toy Maniac site itself maintains a separate mailing list for its email newsletter. This list is accessible solely by the Staff of RTM and is not in the control of any third parties. This list will not be shared with, rented out to, or sold to any third parties.
We have also adopted a policy of asking children under the age of 13 to get parental permission before disclosing any personal information. We intend for these notices to be prominent and undertandable by children of all ages. While we realize that this simple admonition is not foolproof, we will continue to investigate other methods and systems for allowing children to participate in the activities of the site while at the same time providing for parental controls when desirable.
As one of the first toy-related sites to voluntarily adopt these policies, we hope to set an ethical standard for this popular area of web interests. We would welcome any input or suggestions regarding these issues. Please feel free to e-mail us.
Thanks!
- Staff of the Raving Toy Maniac
We believe that the most important ingredients in keeping children safe on the Internet are the parents. In that spirit, we offer parents a few links to child safety information that may be helpful and informative.
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