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Advertising and Privacy

AOL’s ability to provide the AOL Web services such as its websites, products, and services are supported in large part by advertising provided by our advertising services offered by AOL affiliates, like AOL Advertising and Tacoda (the "AOL Advertising Network"). The AOL Advertising Network spans AOL owned and operated pages as well as many other websites across the Internet.

• AOL displays a variety of advertisements including banner ads, rich media ads, and sponsored links, and these adverts may appear on the sites you visit for a variety of reasons. In the same way that we use various information about you (see "Personal Information") to customise or personalise the content or services we provide, we may also use both your Personal Information and other aggregated information to make the adverts you see more relevant for you, and more effective for advertisers. We may do this in the following ways: By customising the advert based on the content of the site. For example, in such contextual ads, you may see sports-related adverts on a sports site.
• By selecting an ad based on our knowledge of the audience we think may be looking at that page. This is often done with publicly available and/or aggregated demographic information, or it may be done with analysis of the aggregated traffic on a particular website, or by using the registration data or other household data you have provided or that we have acquired from other companies (your "Personal Information" as defined in the Privacy Policy). For example, we may use information about your visits to the AOL Motoring channel to personalise the advertisements you see. We may do this based on the details you have submitted, your expressed preferences and your online activity, how often you use the service, or the type of computer system you use, together with the activities and experiences of other AOL users who we believe may have similar interests and preferences to you. We may supplement this data with publicly available consumer data, including demographic information to help us decide how to make your experience more relevant.
• By using navigational information about where you go on the AOL Network to better understand how the AOL Web Services are used, and what content and advertisements are enjoyed. This is often called behavioural advertising, behavioural targeting, interest-based advertising, or customised ads. When you visit sites on the AOL Advertising Network, and unless you have opted out, you may receive a "cookie" or other technology that helps us note, in an anonymised way, that you visited that site. This information goes into ad logs that are kept for a limited duration. From the ad logs, AOL Advertising may use information about your activity on the AOL Advertising Network to help us display adverts that are more relevant. Note that the information shared with advertising networks is always with a unique identifier, but not personally identifiable information such as your name, email address, etc.
• We may also provide you with content and advertisements around the AOL Network which may be customised using information such as the search terms you use on the AOL Web Services – for example, if you search for "football" you might see more content and advertisements relating to "sports" and related subject matter areas.

Please note, we do not use any navigational data about where you as an individual, go, or what products or services you use on the wider internet outside of the AOL Network, save where such sites provide for such use in their respective privacy policies.