What information does Big Needle gather about you?

We collect a limited amount of information about our members for two basic reasons:

1. To provide a site that is personalized, more interesting and useful.
2. To ensure the integrity of our online physician community.

We need to ask for your name and email address in order to verify that you are a human being with a functioning email address. We'll email you any time you change your password for added security. We need to verify a working email address in order to prevent evil web bots from making false registration entries. Your email address is kept private.

We need to ask for your CV information because this is a community site that has profiles of members. It is hard to be a member of a community without an identity.

We need to ask for your birthday to verify in accordance with FTC regulations that you are 13 years of age or older. If you forget your password we will ask you your birthday and your "secret question" to get you back into the site. We will also use this information to help verify that you are a physician or medical student.

We may ask for voluntary information at other times, for instance if you enter sweepstakes or other promotions sponsored by Big Needle and/or our partners. Sometimes we conduct surveys, too, although you don't have to respond to them.

Big Needle will not disclose any information about individual users, except as described in this Privacy Statement. 

The information you post in content such as message boards, interviews, as a high scorer of the Bolus trivia game and in Physician Profiles are visible to our online community. But of course, that's really the point of the profiles, boards, high score lists, and interviews.

We may disclose aggregate information in order to describe our services to prospective partners, advertisers, and other third parties, and for other lawful purposes. For example, we would say "250,000 of our members played Bolus last month", however, we would not say "250,000 members played Bolus last month, one of whom is Dr. John Doe."

If we need to disclose personal information in some limited circumstances, such as in sweepstakes or in offering a new service, we will specifically describe this to you at the time we collect the information. For example, if you wish to use a service that involves the transfer of information to a partnering service, we'll tell you that before you sign up for the service, so that you can decide whether or not to continue.

We are not above the law and, therefore, if we are served with a subpoena, search warrant, or court order, we would need to divulge the necessary information.

What does Big Needle tell advertisers?

We do not give, rent, lend, or sell individual information to our advertisers, only anonymous (stripped of individual identity) aggregate information. We don't like unsolicited junk mail and we assume you don't either.

For example, we might tell advertisers that we have 25,000 Physician Members in Utopia, but we won't tell them that Dr. John Doe is one of them, and we won't tell them that Dr. Doe's email address is drjohndoe@bigneedle.com. We may also use this aggregated information to help the advertisers reach the kind of audience they want. Advertisers may give us an ad and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (for example, cardiologists in the 90210 zip code). Big Needle would then take the ad and display it to users who've told us they meet those criteria. In this process, the advertiser never has access to individual account information.

Does Big Needle use "cookies"?

We use cookies in order to allow you to automatically log in (if you check the automatic sign in check box). The only information contained in the cookie is your username in an encrypted format. Please do not enable automatic log in if you are on a public computer accessible to mutiple people (eg hospital computer).

How can you edit the information that Big Needle has about you?

If you want to correct or change the information in your Profile, or any other information we have about you, please go to your Me page. Just click on the appropriate edit button to change your information.

Please note: once an account is created, we'll send you a confirmation email acknowledging your new account to the address that you supplied us.

Please remember that whenever you disclose personal information to any community - for example, on message boards, through email, or in chat areas (if we ever have them) - that information can be collected and used by others.

You are responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your passwords and/or any account information. Please be careful and responsible whenever you're online. If you are, for example, using a computer in the hospital that other also use be sure to sign out or quit the browser when you are done using the Web.

Many of our future advertisers or partners, such as brokerages, merchants, or data providers may link from our site to areas on their own sites where they sell their own goods and services. If you follow these links from our site to their site, you should be aware that these other sites have their own privacy and data collection practices. Big Needle has no responsibility or liability for these independent policies.

This Privacy Statement sets out our privacy policy and explains what we do and do not do with the personal information that we collect from our users. This statement discloses the privacy practices for the entire Web site.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should contact us at privacy@bigneedle.com.