How We Share Your Information
We share the information we collect within The Kroger Co., and also with our affiliates, service providers, marketing partners and other third parties.
We may share data with third parties for the following business purposes:
- Within Kroger and with our Affiliates: We may share your information within our company and our subsidiaries and affiliated companies for the purposes of decision making, reporting, management, analysis, administering programs, promoting service offerings and other business purposes.
- Service Providers: We may share your information with our service providers who provide us support services such as hosting our websites, postal delivery and electronic mail, mobile messages, product and service delivery, conducting analysis to improve our products, websites and store experiences, fulfilling orders you place, managing payments and answering your questions. Service providers only use the information they receive from us for the purposes we hired them for, we don’t allow them to retain, use, disclose or otherwise handle the data for their own purposes.
- Marketing Partners: We may share your information to display online, mobile or other advertising based on your purchases, activity on websites and mobile apps, and preferences you share with us so we can provide you with promotions and special offers that may interest you. We may also share information with marketing partners to help us analyze data and provide more relevant, personalized communications to you, sometimes combined with other sources.
- Third-Party Sites and Services: We may share your information to develop and provide special services or offers that may interest you. When we share with third parties, we require those third parties to handle the information in accordance with relevant laws. We may also share your information in an aggregated way that does not directly identify you but can be used for statistical analysis and other business purposes. We may also share your information where you intentionally interact with a third-party, such as where you click on a link to a third-party website, product or service from Kroger websites, products, applications, or services. We may also help you establish your own direct relationship with another party. For example, if you order grocery delivery, and select a third-party delivery service, you authorize Kroger to exchange the information you provide during the order process to that third-party to carry out that service. In these cases, we may help you transfer some of your information needed for that service, just so you don’t need to manually retype it. In these cases, we will continue to comply with this privacy policy for the data we hold, but it is important for you to remember that you have established a separate relationship with that third-party and will be subject to their privacy policies. Kroger is not responsible for the privacy practices of third parties.
- With Third Parties, including Governmental Authorities, for Lawful Purposes: We may share your information where we believe the disclosure is required by law, or otherwise necessary to comply with the law, regulatory requirements, requests from public authorities, or to enforce our agreements or policies, to protect the rights and property of our customers, the company, our partners or the public (including for fraud prevention purposes). Additionally, your information may be shared if The Kroger Co. or a business unit or any of its assets are sold to another company, such as in a merger, acquisition or other corporate reorganization, in which case we will maintain our current Privacy Policy until data is transferred to that new company and data is covered by their privacy policy.
About Advertising
Purchase-Based Advertising
We may use your purchase history to help The Kroger Co. and other third-party brands present advertisements that are more relevant to you on The Kroger Co. and third-party websites, mobile apps and other digital media channels. We will not increase the number of ads you see, but instead will help deliver more personalized advertisements and offerings to you (e.g. the relevant ads that you receive from participating in our Loyalty program).
Interest-Based Advertising
We create a customized and engaging customer experience on our website and mobile applications by displaying advertisements that are personalized. Interest-based ads (also sometimes called “personalized or targeted ads”) are displayed to you based on information collected from your online interactions across multiple websites that you visit, or across multiple devices you may use, in order to predict your preferences and show you ads that are most likely to be of interest to you. In an effort to provide you with relevant content and offers that may be useful to you, we may partner with third-party companies to display content, offers or advertising that is tailored to your interests based on how you browse and shop on both Kroger-owned and operated sites and off our sites. These third-party companies use information and technologies such as browser type, hardware or software information, cookies, session ID, time or date, click-stream information or static IP addresses. We may provide information to third-party companies that display purchase-based or interest-based ads. In addition, others (advertisers and ad networks, ad serving companies, or other service providers) may infer user interests or purchase history based on interactions with, or clicks on, personalized ads or content. You can learn more about interest-based advertising, and navigate to options that will allow you to exercise your rights to opt-out of online behavioral advertising, by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative’s Learn More Page or the Digital Advertising Alliance.