Cookies and Other Technologies
HQ's websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use "cookies" and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons. These technologies help us better understand user behavior, tell us which parts of our websites people have visited, and facilitate and measure the effectiveness of advertisements and web searches. We treat information collected by cookies and other technologies as non‑personal information. However, to the extent that Internet Protocol (IP) addresses or similar identifiers are considered personal information by local law, we also treat these identifiers as personal information. Similarly, to the extent that non-personal information is combined with personal information, we treat the combined information as personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.
Ads that are delivered by HQ's advertising platform may appear in HQ's News. If you do not wish to receive ads targeted to your interests from HQ's advertising platform, you can contact us and will will comply, You may still see ads or News based on context like your search query or the channel you are reading. In third-party apps, you may see ads based on other information.
HQ and our partners also use cookies and other technologies to remember personal information when you use our website, online services, and applications. Our goal in these cases is to make your experience with HQ more convenient and personal. For example, knowing your first name lets us welcome you the next time you visit our website. Knowing your country and language − this helps us provide a customized and more useful shopping experience. Knowing someone using your computer or device has shopped for a certain product or used a particular service helps us make our advertising and email communications more relevant to your interests. And knowing your contact information, hardware identifiers, and information about your computer or device helps us personalize your operating system, and provide you with better customer service.
If you want to disable cookies, go to your web browser preferences to manage your preferences and check with your provider to find out how to disable cookies. Please note that certain features of the HQ website will not be available once cookies are disabled.
As is true of most internet services, we gather some information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, browser type and language, Internet service provider (ISP), referring and exit websites and applications, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data.
We use this information to understand and analyze trends, to administer the site, to learn about user behavior on the site, to improve our product and services, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. HQ may use this information in our marketing and advertising services.
In some of our email messages, we use a “click-through URL” linked to content on the HQ website. When customers click one of these URLs, they pass through a separate web server before arriving at the destination page on our website. We track this click-through data to help us determine interest in particular topics and measure the effectiveness of our customer communications. If you prefer not to be tracked in this way, you should not click text or graphic links in the email messages.
Pixel tags enable us to send email messages in a format customers can read, and they tell us whether mail has been opened. We may use this information to reduce or eliminate messages sent to customers.