Privacy Policy

At QOLAC, we protect personal data and respect the privacy rights of stakeholders across our operations globally. We want you to understand how we handle your personal information. We also want you to know your rights and choices.

This policy describes how we handle your personal information when you use the following “QOLAC Services”:

• QOLAC Products and Services including inclouding global and regional services.

• Our websites, like qolac.com and its subdomains.

• Our apps, like My QOLAC app

• Our email newsletters

• Our pages or ads on social media networks, like our Facebook and Instagram pages

• Anywhere we gather information from or about you and refer you to this Privacy Policy

How we handle information about you depends on which QOLAC Services you use and how you use them. For example, we use different information about QOLAC Portal users than website visitors.

Be aware that certain QOLAC Services work differently. Some have additional terms that supplement this policy. 

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@qolac.com. You can also review our Privacy F.A.Q.

What Information Do We Gather About You? #

The information we gather about you depends on the context. By and large, it’s information about you that can personally identify you — either on its own or when combined with other information.

The following describes the information we collect and how we obtain it.

Information Collected through QOLAC Services. #

Information You Voluntarily Give Us #

For Registration: #

When you sign up for a QOLAC Service (whether via a subscription or a free account as a registered user), we collect personal identifiers such as your contact information, including your name and email address, and account credentials. We may also ask you to create an account or display name and select a profile picture. Once you’re registered, we assign you a unique ID number. This ID number helps us recognize you when you’re signed in.

For some QOLAC Services, you can instead sign up by linking your Apple, Facebook or Google account. See Information Collected From Other Sources below.

If you enroll in a QOLAC Portal, we will collect the contact information you provide for each subsidiary account holder when you invite them to access the services.

If you register for an event or conference, we might ask for additional information (e.g., your company name, your job title or your dietary restrictions). Some events and conferences may have different or additional privacy policies and terms and we recommend that you review those before you register.

You may voluntarily choose to provide additional personal information in your User Profile.

For Billing: #

To process payments or donations, we collect and use your payment information. This can include your name, your address, your telephone number, your email address, your credit or debit card information and any other relevant information.

For User-Generated Content: #

We offer you the ability to post content that other users can read (e.g., comments or recipe notes). Anyone can read, collect and use any personal information that accompanies your posts. See the Comments F.A.Q., the Cooking FAQ on writing personal or public notes on recipes, and read the User-Generated Content section in our Terms of Service for more information.

We do not have to publish any of your content. If the law requires us to take down, remove or edit your content, we will comply.

In certain apps, you may be able to chat with other users of the QOLAC Services through direct messages or send other users links to web applications. We collect the content of those messages along with your use of any corresponding chat features—e.g., blocking, muting, or reporting another user to us. 

For Contests and Special Offers; Notice of Financial Incentives: #

From time to time, we offer certain opportunities through contests, gift cards, or other special promotions and offers. When you sign up for these, you give us your name, email and any other required information.

Some such opportunities may allow you to earn “rewards” such as discounts (“Incentive Programs”) or gift cards. If this is part of the contest, promotion, survey or offer, we will provide you with a full description of the Incentive Program, including the benefits offered and related legal terms. Because these Incentive Programs involve the collection of personal information, they may be interpreted as “financial incentive” programs under California law (or other similar concept under another law). We use this information for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy including for targeted advertising. We may share your personal information with third parties as described in this Privacy Policy, including data analytics providers, advertising technology vendors, and social media platforms. 

The value of any financial incentive we offer is reasonably related to the value of any personal information you provide to us. We estimate the value of your personal information by considering, without limitation, the expenses we incur from collecting your personal information and/or providing the financial incentive to you, the revenue generated by your use of the financial incentive, and any improvements we can make to our products and QOLAC Services based on information obtained through the financial incentive program. 

Please note that we may provide additional terms that apply to a particular financial incentive. If applicable, those terms will be presented to you at sign up. You may cancel your membership in such Incentive Programs at any time by contacting support@qolac.com.

For Visitor Surveys, Customer Surveys, Research, Panels and Experience Programs: #

We gather personal information through questionnaires, surveys and feedback programs. Some surveys may include gift cards when you participate, which may be financial incentives, as discussed above.

Surveys and Panels: Some of our surveys and feedback programs, including panels, will request your consent to provide on a purely voluntary basis information regarding your interests in various topics, including travel, entertainment and health and wellness, as well as demographic information, some of which may be considered sensitive under applicable laws such as your age, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, family characteristics and income. We use service provider platforms to support these programs and personal information is shared with them as described below with respect to service providers in general. We may also use survey providers that have their own independent relationship with you via third party sites or apps, whose practices we don’t control. We encourage you to review their policies.

We target these surveys based on a number of factors including information we automatically collect about your interests and usage, as described below. These surveys are used for a variety of purposes described throughout this Privacy Policy including research for marketing of QOLAC Services, as well as research for third party advertisers that are interested in targeting ads to particular groups of QOLAC users.

As described in more detail below, we combine information from these surveys and panels with information collected automatically from QOLAC Services and we also apply internal or third party machine learning or artificial intelligence large language models or applications to this information (alone or in combination with other personal information we collect about you). We do this for the purposes of improving QOLAC Services, for marketing research, to personalize marketing of QOLAC Services to you and/or to create audiences for third party advertisers.

Recording Your Feedback: With your consent, we may record interviews with you and ask for your permission to use your voice and likeness for a variety of purposes including marketing, advertising and/or QOLAC events.

During Contact with Our Customer Care teams (including Call Centers (Internal and Offshore), chat (including AI chatbots), and user reports): #

We collect information from you when you place an order over the phone or contact customer service through one of our phone numbers or via chat. This can include your name, contact information, information about your account and any other information you choose to provide. Information you share will be shared with our service providers including call agents and technology platforms.

We may use AI chatbots to provide you with support. When you engage with such a chatbot, by clicking “Begin Chat”, you consent to being connected to an AI chatbot for QOLAC support. This chatbot relies on generative AI to provide you with customer support and answers to common questions. Your chat session will be recorded for quality assurance and training and may be used for training AI models. Please do not provide information in a chat session that you do not want recorded.

We also collect information from you when you submit a report about another user of the QOLAC Services.

Your Contacts and Friends #

Some of our apps allow you to connect with other users to become “friends” across our apps. You may be able to provide us with access to your contacts so that you can find your friends and invite others to join the QOLAC Service. If you consent to our accessing the contacts list from your device, we will collect your contacts’ names and contact information. If you consent to the linking of your account with a third-party service (like a Facebook account) to access your friends list, we will collect your friends’ names. We also allow you to contact your friends on your own to “friend” each other or to set up leaderboards.

Refer-a-Friend: #

With your consent, we comply with your requests to collect data about your friends, family or acquaintances (e.g., Refer-a-Friend campaigns). This functionality is only meant for U.S. residents. By using it, you acknowledge and agree that both you and your contacts are based in the United States — and that you have everyone’s consent for us to use their contact information.

If you’d like to invite your friends to use QOLAC Services, we will store this information for the sole purposes of allowing you to send your friends referral offers, for determining whether your friends use QOLAC Services after a referral is sent, and to remind your friends of the referral sent on your behalf.

A Note about Sensitive Personal Information #

We generally don’t want to gather sensitive personal information about you. This includes:

• Government-issued IDs (such as your driver’s license, passport or social security number)

• Your racial or ethnic origin

• Your religion or other beliefs

• Your health, biometric or genetic characteristics, including physical characteristics or descriptions

• Any trade union membership

• Your sexuality (information about your sex life or sexual orientation)

• Citizenship or immigration status

• Any criminal background

• The content of your private communications (other than messages you may send to us or send using a QOLAC Service)

• Your precise geolocation (street level, GPS or lat/long data or other data that is derived from a device and that locates you within a geographic area that is equal to or less than the area of a circle with a radius of 1,850 feet). We sometimes collect precise geolocation information (which may be considered a sensitive data type) to provide GPS-based location services you choose to enable. 

• Account access information, such as a username and password (we collect that information only for the accounts you create directly with us and not for any other account you may have with a third party in a personal capacity).

However, as explained in detail above in the section on “Visitor Surveys, Research, Panels and Experience Programs,” there are situations when we request certain of the above information (e.g., a vicitor survey asks about your purpose of visit, satisfaction, and suggestions for improvement). You will always have the option to decline to answer or participate in such surveys, panels or other feedback programs. Outside these situations we would prefer you never share sensitive personal information with us.

Information Collected Automatically #

When you use QOLAC Services, we collect some information automatically. The technologies we use to assist with this data collection include cookies, web beacons, tags and scripts and software development kits (or SDKs). We may also use newer technologies, such as clean rooms, matching services described below (such as Unified ID 2.0 and LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution) and Comscore’s Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) 2.0, as many browsers begin to deprecate third party cookies. We use these technologies on our digital properties, including our websites and apps, as well as in our email communications and newsletters. For more information about how to manage tracking methods on QOLAC Services, read our Cookie Policy and the What Are Your Rights and Choices? section below.

The categories of personal information we collect automatically include:

Identifiers and Device Information: #

When you access our QOLAC Services digitally, including our websites, apps, email communications and newsletters, our servers use a variety of technologies in order to automatically receive, record and/or log information about the device you are using, including unique identifiers. If your browser doesn’t accept our cookies or similar technologies, you can’t access certain parts of our websites (e.g., your account on portal.qolac.com). The items we collect include:

• Your IP address

• Cookie identifiers

• Your operating system and browser (e.g., type, version, and configuration)

• Your browser language

• Device identifiers (such as MAC address)

• Advertising identifiers

• The unique ID that we assign to you when you register, as described above

• We combine this data with other information we collect about you. 

Geolocation Information: #

Where applicable, we use location information such as your city, state, zip code, to personalize content provided to you, including, but not limited to, more relevant articles, newsletters, and weather updates. For more information, please read the Personalization F.A.Q. We also use location information such as zip code to show you prices and promotions, as explained in the discussion of Personalization below.

We may also provide you with the opportunity to share your location or other locations of interest to you in your User Profile in Account in order to have a personalized experience when visiting QOALC Services. Please do not provide us with street level or other location information that is more granular than city or zip code, we do not want to collect your precise geolocation information for this purpose, and that kind of information may be sensitive under applicable laws.

When you provide us your billing address as a subscriber, we use that information for compliance and/or payment purposes (e.g., to determine applicable notice requirements or to specify billing currency). We may also use your billing address to personalize content for you (e.g., news about offers for that location) and determine your eligibility for a specific QOLAC Service or feature.

Some of our apps can provide content based on your GPS location if you enable this feature. Your GPS location is your precise geolocation, which (as noted above) is considered a type of sensitive personal information. You choose whether to enable GPS features when you first install the app. You can edit that setting on your device at any time. If you enable these features, your GPS location can be found by satellite, cell phone tower or Wi-Fi and used by the app. If you save a location-based search in your history, that data moves to our service provider’s servers — see below for the definition of service provider.

If you do not enable GPS location-based services, or if a specific app does not have location-based features, we don’t collect your precise GPS location. We do collect your IP address, which can establish your approximate location. Ads on our sites and apps may be targeted based on this approximate location but are never targeted by QOALC based on your GPS location.

Gameplay Data: #

As one example of the kinds of information we collect as described in this section, when you play games on the QOLAC Services, we collect information about your gameplay, including the words you play on a gameboard, your scores and performance, and statistics about the outcome of your matches.

Other Usage Data: #

We collect information about certain internet and network activity on QOLAC Services, including your interactions with our websites and apps, such as the URLs of any pages you visit on our sites and apps, the URL of the website from which you came to our sites, how long you spent on a page, access times, search queries, and other details about your use of and actions on our Services. This also includes your interactions with marketing and advertisements on QOALC Services.

As described elsewhere in this Policy, we may use this usage data to personalize or customize content for you that we think you might like based on your usage patterns or for other similar purposes. We may also use it to improve the QOLAC Services — for example, this data can tell us how often users use a particular feature of QOLAC Services, and we can use that knowledge to make QOLAC Services interesting to as many users as possible. We also use this information to serve surveys or questionnaires based on your usage patterns. We combine this data with other information we collect about you.

Inferences; Information We Create or Generate. #

We infer new information from other data we collect, including using automated means such as machine learning, which may include third party machine learning services or large language models. These inferences include information about your likely preferences or other characteristics. As described below, we use these inferences for purposes of personalization, to improve our services, to market QOLAC Services to you and to create audiences for third party advertisers and for marketing on other sites and services.

Information Collected from Other Sources. #

Other Users: #

Other users of QOLAC Service may provide us with your information — for example as part of a refer-a-friend campaign or as they provide access to their contact list or friend list on a third-party service.

Privately Owned Databases: #

Marketing, data analytic and social media-owned databases give us access to a range of information — like public data, survey data and more. This data sometimes includes your mailing address, your gender, your age, your household income and other demographic data. As described elsewhere in this Policy, including Section 2(G) below, we receive information about you from some of our service providers and third parties who assist us with marketing or promotional services related to how you interact with QOLAC Services, advertisements and communications.

Social Media Platforms and Other Third-Party Services: #

(Social media platforms include services like Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Snap and other platforms. Third-party services include services like Google and Matomo.)

If you provide your social network account credentials to us or otherwise sign in to QOLAC Services through a third-party site or service, you understand some content and/or information in those accounts may be transmitted into your account with us.

You can link your social media or other third-party account to a QOLAC Service. These may include third party-connected devices. By linking that account, you authorize us to collect, store and use any information they may give us (e.g., your email address). You can disconnect your *.qolac.com registration from third-party accounts at any time.

We also receive information from you when you interact with our pages, groups, accounts or posts on social media platforms. This includes aggregate data on our followers (e.g., age, gender and location), engagement data (e.g., “likes,” comments, shares, reposts and clicks), awareness data (e.g., number of impressions and reach) and individual users’ public profiles.

For more information, refer to our social login and Nook F.A.Q.

Workplace and Schools: #

When your employer or school buys an organization-wide subscription to QOLAC Services, they sometimes provide us with your name and organization email address to grant you access as a user.

What Do We Do with the Information We Collect about You? #

We use each of the categories of personal information described above to operate, improve, understand and personalize our Services, and for the following business and commercial purposes. The activities below can involve outside companies, agents or contractors (“service providers”) to whom we disclose your personal information for these purposes (discussed further below in Section 3 of this Privacy Policy).

We Provide the QOLAC Services #

We use your information to help you use and navigate QOLAC Services, such as:

• Making a QOLAC Service available to you or otherwise meeting or fulfilling the purposes for which you provided the information to us, including charging you for QOLAC Services
• Arranging access to your account
• Providing customer service
• Responding to your inquiries, requests, suggestions or complaints
• Completing your payments and transactions
• Sending service-related transactional messages (e.g., a change in our Terms of Service, Terms of Sale, or other terms and conditions) and otherwise communicating with you about QOLAC Services
• Saving your usages log or searches
• Connecting you with “friends” and game opponents
• Determining your eligibility to use a QOLAC Service or feature
• Letting you take part in paid services, polls, promotions, surveys, panels, research and comments
• Creating and managing user profiles and content.

We Personalize Your Experience #

We track your interests (e.g., the specific service page you visit) to personalize and calibrate your experience using technology like algorithmic recommendations and machine learning, which may include third party machine learning services or large language models. This is how we highlight services you might be interested in and de-emphasize services you’ve already used. For more information about content personalization on QOLAC Services. We also show you prices, promotions, products or services we believe you’ll find interesting, based on demographic and usage data, including but not limited to location data such as IP address and zip code.

We Allow You to Share User-Generated Content #

Any information you disclose in your content or otherwise via interactive functionality becomes public — along with your chosen display name or username and uploaded photo, if any. Any information you disclose via direct message is available to the recipient of that chat — along with your chosen display name and selected profile picture, if any. Your direct messages may also be monitored by our moderators and monitoring systems (or those of our vendors, if any) to assess your compliance with our Terms of Service, and any applicable Acceptable Use Policies, and other applicable terms and conditions.

We Develop Products and Services, and Do Analysis #

We analyze data on our users’ subscriptions, purchases, registered account activity and other usage behaviors. This helps us make business and marketing decisions. This allows us to understand how users interact with QOLAC Services and to improve and develop QOLAC Services, including testing new features, research, surveys, analysis, and product development.

For example, our analysis, which includes the use of technology like machine learning and large language models (proprietary or third party), lets us predict preferences and price points for our products and services. It helps us determine whether our marketing is successful. It also shows us characteristics about our visitors, which we share in aggregate with advertisers.

We use our own proprietary analytics services, but we also use third party analytics providers. Google Analytics is one of the analytics providers we use on certain QOLAC Services. You can find out how Google Analytics uses data and how to opt out of Google Analytics.

We Carry Out Administrative or Legal Tasks #

• For auditing, legal or regulatory purposes: We verify that our internal processes work as intended and comply with legal, regulatory and contractual requirements. More broadly, we process information to comply with legal, regulatory and contractual obligations and to respond to law enforcement requests (our sharing for these purposes is described in Section 3 below).

• For upholding our commitments to the QOLAC community: When a user or their content is flagged by our or our vendor’s monitoring systems or reported by another user (e.g., indicating a violation of our Terms of Sale, Terms of Service, or the applicable Acceptable Use Policy), we or those systems assess the report and the relevant content, including direct messages sent and received, and take action against violative users and content. We also use certain information — which may include content reported to us, content that violates our Terms of Sale, Terms of Service, any applicable Acceptable Use Policy and other applicable terms and conditions, and other content available on QOLAC Services — to generate and maintain systems and models that can be automated to promote safety and security of the QOALC Services, including to detect, classify, and take action against prohibited content or conduct.

• For fraud and security monitoring: We detect and prevent cyberattacks or unauthorized robot activities, protect against or deter fraudulent, illegal, or harmful actions, and maintain the safety, security, and integrity of QOLAC Services.

• For customer satisfaction: We assess users’ satisfaction with QOALC Services and our customer care team.

We Offer Sweepstakes, Contests and Other Promotions #

As discussed above, you can take part in our sweepstakes, contests and other promotions. Some might have additional rules about how we use and disclose your personal information.

We Allow for Personalized Advertising on QOLAC Services and Create Audiences for Third-Party Advertisers #

We gather data and work with service providers and third parties to show you and measure the performance of personalized ads on behalf of advertisers. This data comes from ad tracking technologies set by us or the third party (e.g., cookies), the information you provide (e.g., your email address), your use of QOLAC Services (e.g., your purchased services and account activity history), information from advertisers or advertising vendors (e.g., demographic data) and anything inferred from any of this information.

For example, we use Google to serve ads on QOLAC Services. Google uses cookies or unique device identifiers, in combination with their own data, to show you ads based on your visit to *.qolac.com and other sites. You can opt out of the use of certain Google cookies by visiting the related Google privacy policy.

You can find a list of some of the service providers and third parties with whom we work, and opt-out links in some cases, here.

We also identify groups of users to whom to serve personalized ads on behalf of our advertisers. To do this, we combine information we collect through surveys or registration with information we collect automatically using tracking technologies while you browse our sites and apps. This combined information is used to build models. These data models are then used to measure users’ attributes, like their demographic information or their interests. Working with service providers, we use these measurements to group users by common attributes. Each group is associated with a random ID which is then passed to our ad server for use in targeting ad campaigns on our sites and apps.

We may also target third party advertising to users through matching services such as Unified ID 2.0 and LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (“ATS”). In these situations, we use information that directly identifies you, including name, email address, or phone number, to engage in targeted advertising, including by converting email addresses/phone numbers into identifiers used for advertising purposes. We share information that we collect from you, such as your email, IP address or information about your browser or operating system, with our identity partners/service providers, including LiveRamp Inc. LiveRamp returns an online identification code that we may store in our first-party cookie for our use in online, in-app, and cross-channel advertising and it may be shared with advertising companies to enable interest-based and targeted advertising. You can read more about LiveRamp’s privacy practice here. 

We may also collect such information (name, email, IP address, phone number and/or information about your browser or operating system) from third parties for the purposes of personalized marketing to you on QOALC Services and/or to create audiences for third-party advertisers.

For more information about your choices with respect to such processing, please see the What Are Your Rights and Choices? section below.

Another example is our affiliate link vendors, which we use in our guides and product recommendations. Some QOALC Services may include links that will send you to vendor URLs and other services not operated or controlled by us. These vendors use cookies and other technologies to collect information about your navigation from the QOLAC Services to the merchant you are visiting. If you buy a product after following a link to a link vendor’s URL, we may earn a commission.

Additional Notes:

• For more about targeted advertising, and how to opt out with your specific browser and device, go to the DAA Webchoices Browser Check and NAI Opt Out of Interest-Based Advertising. You can download the AppChoices app to opt out in mobile apps. You can also follow the instructions in the What Are Your Rights and Choices? section below.

• We try to limit how our third-party advertising technology vendors use the information they gather from you. Many of these providers require us to enter into contracts that allow them to optimize their own services and products, or that help them create their own. Essentially, these providers combine any information they gather about you through QOLAC Services with information they receive from their other clients. This helps them target ads to you on behalf of their other clients, not just us.

• These third parties sometimes use other services in order to serve ads; check their privacy policies for more details. For further information on tracking technologies and your rights and choices regarding them, see the applicable Cookie Policy. As described in more detail below, residents of certain states have the right to instruct us not to “sell” or “share” their personal information and/or to opt out of “targeted advertising” and “sales” (as defined under applicable law). For more information, please see the What Are Your Rights and Choices? section below.

We Advertise or Market QOLAC Services to You #

We market our QOALC Services to you. Sometimes we use marketing vendors to do this. For example, when you visit QOLAC Services, the Google Dynamic Floodlight tag collects data through redirects of requests from your browser to entities other than QOLAC Services, Google, and the owner or operator of other properties on which The QOLAC may serve marketing using Google.

We serve ads through websites, locations, platforms and services operated and owned by third parties. Often these ads are targeted at people who have visited or registered for a QOLAC Service but have not subscribed to or purchased anything. The ads are also targeted at people with similar traits or behaviors to our subscribers or customers. We use the information described in Section 1 above, including inferences, to build audiences that may be used for purposes of these marketing initiatives. We may also make predictions using machine learning, as described above, based on a combination of different kinds of information, including survey data, to support these marketing initiatives.

We also target our advertising of QOLAC Services to users by uploading a customer list (email addresses) to a third party, or by incorporating a tracking technology from a third party onto our QOLAC Service. The third party then matches individuals who appear in both our data and their data.

We will take steps designed to opt you out of such matched ads if you are a resident of certain states where you have the right to opt out of such processing, as discussed further below. That being said, in order to opt out of receiving these matched ads, you should also contact the applicable third parties. For example, when we use “Custom Audiences” to serve you our ad through Facebook, you should be able to hover over the box in the right corner of that Facebook ad and opt out. We are not responsible for any third party’s failure to comply with opt-out requests. To opt out of Unified ID 2.0 (or UID 2), please visit https://www.transparentadvertising.com/.

We periodically send you targeted email newsletters or promotional emails. For information on opting out of these emails, see What Are Your Rights and Choices? below.

We Aggregate (or De-identify) Personal Information into Larger Findings #

Sometimes we aggregate or de-identify information so that it can no longer identify you, as defined under applicable laws. This helps us better understand and represent our users, such as when we measure ad performance, create audiences for advertising or marketing interest-based segments or compile survey results. We can use and disclose this aggregated or de-identified information for any purpose, unless an applicable law says otherwise. We will maintain and use such information in deidentified form and not attempt to reidentify the information, except where reidentification is allowed by law for particular purposes.