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Understanding TF-IDF and BM-25

Introduction

This article is for search practitioners who want to achieve a deep understanding of the ranking functions TF-IDF and BM25 (also called “similarities” in Lucene). If you’re like many practitioners, you’re already familiar with TF-IDF, but when you first saw the complicated BM25 formula, you thought “maybe later.” Now is the time to finally understand it! You’ve probably heard that BM25 is similar to TF-IDF but works better in practice. This article will show you precisely how BM25 builds upon TF-IDF, what its parameters do, and why it is so effective. If you’d rather skip over the math and work with practical examples that demonstrate BM25’s behaviors, check out our companion article on Understanding Scoring Through Examples.

Reviewing TF-IDF

Let’s review TF-IDF by trying to develop it from scratch. Imagine we’re building a search engine. Assume we’ve already got a way to find the documents that match a user’s search. What we need now is a ranking function that will tell us how to order those documents. The higher a document’s score according to this function, the higher up we’ll place it in the list of results that we return to the user.

The goal of TF-IDF and similar ranking functions is to reward relevance. Say a user searches for the term “dogs.” If Document 1 is more relevant to the subject of dogs than Document 2, then we want the score of Document 1 to be higher than the score of Document 2, so we’ll show the better result first and the user will be happy. How much higher does Document 1’s score have to be? It doesn’t really matter, as long as the score order matches the relevance order.

You might feel a little shocked by the audacity of what we’re attempting to do: we’re going to try to judge the relevance of millions or billions of documents using a mathematical function, without knowing anything about the person who’s doing the search, and without actually reading the documents and understanding what they’re about! How is this possible?

We’ll make a simple but profoundly helpful assumption. We’ll assume that the more times a document contains a term, the more likely it is to be about that term. That’s to say, we’ll use term frequency (TF), the number of occurrences of a term in a document, as a proxy for relevance. This one assumption creates a path for us to solve a seemingly impossible problem using simple math. Our assumption isn’t perfect, and it goes very wrong sometimes, but it works often enough to be useful. So from here on, we’ll view term frequency as a good thing — a thing we want to reward.

TF-IDF: Attempt 1

As a starting point for our ranking function, let’s do the simplest, easiest thing possible. We’ll set the score of a document equal to its term frequency. If we’re searching for a term T and evaluating the relevance of a document D, then:

score(D, T) = termFrequency(D, T)

When a query has multiple terms, like “dogs and cats,” how should we handle that? Should we try to analyze the relationships between the various terms and then blend the per-term scores together in a complex way? Not so fast! The simplest approach is to just add the scores for each term together. So we’ll do that, and hope for the best. If we have a multi-term query Q, then we’ll set:

score(D, Q) = sum over all terms T in Q of score(D, T)

How well does our simple ranking function work? Unfortunately, it’s got some problems:

1) Longer documents are given an unfair advantage over shorter ones because they have more space to include more occurrences of a term, even though they might not be more relevant to the term. Let’s ignore this problem for now.

2) All terms in a query are treated equally, with no consideration for which ones are more meaningful or important. When we sum the scores for each term together, insignificant terms like “and” and “the” which happen to be very frequent will dominate the combined score. Say you search for “elephants and cows.” Perhaps there’s a single document in the index that includes all three terms (“elephants”, “and”, “cows”), but instead of seeing this ideal result first, you see the document that has the most occurrences of “and” — maybe it has 10,000 of them. This preference for filler words is clearly not what we want.

TF-IDF: Attempt 2

To prevent filler words from dominating, we need some way of judging the importance of the terms in a query. Since we can’t encode an understanding of natural language into our scoring function, we’ll try to find a proxy for importance. Our best bet is rarity. If a term doesn’t occur in most documents in the corpus, then whenever it does occur, we’ll guess that this occurrence is significant. On the other hand, if a term occurs in most of the documents in our corpus, then the presence of that term in any particular document will lose its value as an indicator of relevance.

So high term frequency is a good thing, but its goodness is offset by high document frequency (DF) — the number of documents that contain the term — which we’ll think of as a bad thing.

To update our function in a way that rewards term frequency but penalizes document frequency, we could try dividing TF by DF:

score(D, T) = termFrequency(D, T) / docFrequency(T)

What’s wrong with this? Unfortunately, DF by itself tells us nothing. If DF for the term “elephant” is 100, then is “elephant” a rare term or a common term? It depends on the size of the corpus. If the corpus contains 100 documents, “elephant” is common, if it contains 100,000 documents, “elephant” is rare.

TF-IDF: Attempt 3

Instead of looking at DF by itself, let’s look at N/DF, where N is the size of the search index or corpus. Notice how N/DF is low for common terms (100 occurrences of “elephant” in a corpus of size 100 would give N/DF = 1), and high for rare ones (100 occurrences of “elephant in a corpus of size 100,000 would give N/DF = 1000). That’s exactly what we want: matches for common terms should get low scores, matches for rare terms should get high ones. Our improved formula might go like this:

score(D, T) = termFrequency(D, T) * (N / docFrequency(T))

We’re doing better, but let’s take a closer look at how N/DF behaves. Say we have 100 documents and “elephant” occurs in 1 of them while “giraffe” occurs in 2 of them. Both terms are similarly rare, but elephant’s N/DF value would come out to 100 and giraffe’s would be half that, at 50. Should a match for giraffe get half the score of match for elephant just because giraffe’s document frequency is one higher then elephant’s? The penalty for one additional occurrence of the word in the corpus seems too high. Arguably, if we have 100 documents, it shouldn’t make much of a difference whether a term’s DF is 1, 2, 3, or 4 .

TF-IDF: Attempt 4

As we’ve seen, when DF is in a very low range, small differences in DF can have a dramatic impact on N/DF and hence on the score. We might like to smooth out the decline of N/DF when DF is in the lowest end of its range. One way to do this is to take the log of N/DF. If we wanted, we could try to use a different smoothing function here, but log is straightforward and it does what we want. This chart compares N/DF and log(N/DF) assuming N=100:

Let’s call log(N/DF) the inverse document frequency (IDF) of a term. Our ranking function can now be expressed as TF * IDF or:

score(D, T) = termFrequency(D, T) * log(N / docFrequency(T))

We’ve arrived at the traditional definition of TF-IDF and even though we made some bold assumptions to get here, the function works pretty well in practice: it has gathered a long track record of successful application in search engines. Are we done or could we do even better?

Developing BM25

As you might have guessed, we’re not ready to stop at TF-IDF. In this section, we’ll build the BM25 function, which can be seen as an improvement on TF-IDF. We’re going to keep the same structure of the TF * IDF formula, but we’ll replace the TF and IDF components with refinements of those values.

Step 1: Term Saturation

We’ve been saying that TF is a good thing, and indeed our TF-IDF formula rewards it. But if a document contains 200 occurrences of “elephant,” is it really twice as relevant as a document that contains 100 occurrences? We could argue that if “elephant” occurs a large enough number of times, say 100, the document is almost certainly relevant, and any further mentions don’t really increase the likelihood of relevance. To put it a different way, once a document is saturated with occurrences of a term, more occurrences shouldn’t a have a significant impact on the score. So we’d like a way to control the contribution of TF to our score. We’d like this contribution to increase fast when TF is small and then increase more slowly, approaching a limit, as TF gets very big.

One common way to tame TF is to take the square root of it, but that’s still an unbounded quantity. We’d like to do something more sophisticated. We’d like to put a bound on TF’s contribution to the score, and we’d like to be able to control how rapidly the contribution approaches that bound. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a parameter k that could control the shape of this saturation curve? That way, we’d be able to experiment with different values of k and see what works best for a particular corpus.

To achieve this, we’ll pull out a trick. Instead of using raw TF in our ranking formula, we’ll use the value:

TF / (TF + k)

If k is set to 1, this would generate the sequence 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6 as TF increases 1, 2, 3, etc. Notice how this sequence grows fast in the beginning and then more slowly, approaching 1 in smaller and smaller increments. That’s what we want. Now if we change k to 2, we’d get 1/3, 2/4, 3/5, 4/6 which grows a little more slowly. Here’s a graph of the formula TF/(TF + k) for k = 1, 2, 3, 4:

This TF/(TF + k) trick is really the backbone of BM25. It lets us control the contribution of TF to the score in a tunable way.

Aside: Term Saturation and Multi-Term Queries

A fortunate side-effect of using TF/(TF + k) to account for term saturation is that we end up rewarding complete matches over partial ones. That’s to say, we reward documents that match more of the terms in a multi-term query over documents that have lots of matches for just one of the terms.

Let’s say that “cat” and “dog” have the same IDF values. If we search for “cat dog” we’d like a document that contains one instance of each term to do better than a document that has two instances of “cat” and none of “dog.” If we were using raw TF they’d both get the same score. But let’s do our improved calculation assuming k=1. In our “cat dog” document, “cat” and “dog” each have TF=1, so each are going to contribute TF/(TF+1) = 1/2 to the score, for a total of 1. In our “cat cat” document, “cat” has a TF of 2, so it’s going to contribute TF/(TF+1) = 2/3 to the score. The “cat dog” document wins, because “cat” and “dog” contribute more when each occurs once than “cat” contributes when it occurs twice.

Assuming the IDF of two terms is the same, it’s always better to have one instance of each term than to have two instances of one of them.

Step 2: Document Length

Now let’s go back to the problem we skipped over when we were first building TF-IDF: document length. If a document happens to be really short and it contains “elephant” once, that’s a good indicator that “elephant” is important to the content. But if the document is really, really long and it mentions elephant only once, the document is probably not about elephants. So we’d like to reward matches in short documents, while penalizing matches in long documents. How can we achieve this?

First, we’ve got to decide what it means for a document to be short or long. We need a frame of reference, so we’ll use the corpus itself as our frame of reference. A short document is simply one that is shorter than average for the corpus.

Let’s go back to our TF/(TF + k) trick. Of course as k increases, the value of TF/(TF + k) decreases. To penalize long documents, we can adjust k up if the document is longer than average, and adjust it down if the document is shorter than average. We’ll achieve this by multiplying k by the ratio dl/adl. Here, dl is the document’s length, and adl is the average document length across the corpus.

When a document is of average length, dl/adl =1, and our multiplier doesn’t affect k at all. For a document that’s shorter than average, we’ll be multiplying k by a value between 0 and 1, thereby reducing it, and increasing TF/(TF+k). For a document that’s longer than average, we’ll be multiplying k by a value greater than 1, thereby increasing it, and reducing TF/(TF+k). The multiplier also puts us on a different TF saturation curve. Shorter documents will approach a TF saturation point more quickly while longer documents will approach it more gradually.

Step 3: Parameterizing Document Length

In the last section, we updated our ranking function to account for document length, but is this always a good idea? Just how much importance should we place on document length in any particular corpus? Might there be some collections of documents where length matters a lot and some where it doesn’t? We might like to treat the importance of document length as a second parameter that we can experiment with.

We’re going to achieve this tunability with another trick. We’ll add a new parameter b into the mix (it must be between 0 and 1). Instead of multiplying k by dl/adl as we were doing before, we’ll multiply k by the following value based on dl/adl and b:

1 – b + b*dl/adl

What does this do for us? You can see if b is 1, we get (1 – 1 + 1*dl/adl) and this reduces to the multiplier we had before, dl/adl. On the other hand, if b is 0, the whole thing becomes 1 and document length isn’t considered at all. As b is cranked up from 0 towards 1, the multiplier responds more quickly to changes in dl/adl. The chart below shows how our multiplier behaves as dl/adl grows, when b=.2 versus when b=.8.

Recap: Fancy TF

To recap, we’ve been working modifying the TF term in TF * IDF so that it’s responsive to term saturation and document length. To account for term saturation, we introduced the TF/(TF + k) trick. To account for document length, we added the (1 – b + b*dl/adl) multiplier. Now, instead of using raw TF in our ranking function, we’re using this “fancy” version of TF:

TF/(TF + k*(1 - b + b*dl/adl)) 

Recall that k is the knob that control the term saturation curve, and b is the knob that controls the importance of document length.

Indeed, this is the version of TF that’s used in BM25. And congratulations: if you’ve followed this far, you now understand all the really interesting stuff about BM25.

Step 4: Fancy or Not-So-Fancy IDF

We’re not done just yet though, we have to return to the way BM25 handles document frequency. Earlier, we had defined IDF as log(N/DF), but BM25 defines it as:

log((N - DF + .5)/(DF + .5)) 

Why the difference?

As you may have observed, we’ve been developing our scoring function through a set of heuristics. Researchers in the field of Information Retrieval have wanted to put ranking functions on a more rigorous theoretical footing so they can actually prove things about their behavior rather than just experimenting and hoping for the best. To derive a theoretically sound version of IDF, researchers took something called the Robertson-Spärck Jones weight, made a simplifying assumption, and came up with log (N-DF+.5)/(DF+.5). We’re not going to go into the details, but we’ll just focus on the practical significance of this flavor of IDF. The .5’s don’t really do much here, so let’s just consider log (N-DF)/DF, which is sometimes referred to as “probabilistic IDF.” Here we compare our vanilla IDF with probabilistic IDF where N=10.

You can see that probabilistic IDF takes a sharp drop for terms that are in most of the documents. This might be desirable because if a term really exists in 98% of the documents, it’s probably a stopword like “and” or “or” and it should get much, much less weight than a term that’s very common, like in 70% of the documents, but still not utterly ubiquitous.

The catch is that log (N-DF)/DF is negative for terms that are in more than half of the corpus. (Remember that the log function goes negative on values between 0 and 1.) We don’t want negative values coming out of our ranking function because the presence of a query term in a document should never count against retrieval — it should never cause a lower score than if the term was simply absent. In order to prevent negative values, Lucene’s implementation of BM25 adds a 1 like this:

IDF = log (1 + (N - DF + .5)/(DF + .5))

This 1 might seem like an innocent modification but it totally changes the behavior of the formula! If we forget again about those pesky .5’s, and we note that adding 1 is the same as adding DF/DF, you can see that the formula reduces to the vanilla version of IDF that we used before: log (N/DF).

log (1 + (N - DF + .5)/(DF + .5)) ≈
log (1 + (N - DF)/DF ) =
log (DF/DF + (N - DF)/DF) = 
log ((DF + N - DF)/DF) = 
log (N/DF)

So although it looks like BM25 is using a fancy version of IDF, in practice (as implemented in Lucene) it’s basically using the same old version of IDF that’s used in traditional TF/IDF, without the accelerated decline for high DF values.

Cashing In

We’re ready to cash in on our new understanding by looking at the explain output from a Lucene query. You’ll see something like this:

“score(freq=3.0), product of:”

“idf, computed as log(1 + (N — n + 0.5) / (n + 0.5)) from:”

“tf, computed as freq / (freq + k1 * (1 — b + b * dl / avgdl)) from:”

We’re finally prepared to understand this gobbledygook. You can see that Lucene is using a TF*IDF product where TF and IDF have their special BM25 definitions. Lowercase n means DF here. The IDF term is the supposedly fancy version that turns out to be the same as traditional IDF, N/n.

The TF term is based on our saturation trick: freq/(freq + k). The use of k1 instead of k in the explain output it historical — it comes from a time when there was more than one k in the formula. What we’ve been calling raw TF is denoted as freq here.

We can see that k1 is multiplied by a factor that penalizes above-average document length while rewarding below-average document length: (1-b + b *dl/avgdl). What we’ve been calling adl is denoted as avgdl here.

And of course we can see that there are parameters, which are set to k=1.2 and b = .75 in Lucene by default. You probably won’t need to tweak these, but you can if you want.

In summary, simple TF-IDF rewards term frequency and penalizes document frequency. BM25 goes beyond this to account for document length and term frequency saturation. 

It’s worth noting that before Lucene introduced BM25 as the default ranking function as of version 6, it implemented TF-IDF through something called the Practical Scoring Function, which was a set of enhancements (including “coord” and field length normalization) that made TF-IDF more like BM25. So the behavior difference one might have observed when Lucene made the switch to BM25 was probably less dramatic than it would have been if Lucene had been using pure TF-IDF all along. In any case, the consensus is that BM25 is an improvement, and now you can see why.

If you’re a search engineer, the Lucene explain output is the most likely place where you’ll encounter the details of the BM25 formula. However, if you delve into theoretical papers or check out the Wikipedia article on BM25, you’ll see it written out as an equation like this:

Hopefully this tour has made you more comfortable with how the two most popular search ranking functions work. Thanks for following along!

Further Reading

This article follows in the footsteps of some other great tours of BM25 that are out there. These two are highly recommended:

BM25 The Next Generation of Lucene Relevance by Doug Turnbull

Practical BM25 – Part 2: The BM25 Algorithm and its Variables by Shane Connelly

There are many theoretical treatments of ranking out there. A good starting place is “The Probabilistic Relevance Framework: BM25 and Beyond” by Robertson and Zaragosa

See also the paper “Okapi at TREC-3” where BM25 was first introduced.

Comments (2)

thanks for the complete discussion on two algorithms and comparing them … it helped me a lot 🙂

In practise, it works surprinsingly well. BM25 goes beyond this to account for document length and term frequency saturation. Understanding TF-IDF and BM25 : kmwllc Blog post.

Comments are closed.

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  • To provide You with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about unless You have opted not to receive such information.
  • To manage Your requests: To attend and manage Your requests to Us.
  • For business transfers: We may use Your information to evaluate or conduct a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of Our assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, in which Personal Data held by Us about our Service users is among the assets transferred.
  • For other purposes: We may use Your information for other purposes, such as data analysis, identifying usage trends, determining the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns and to evaluate and improve our Service, products, services, marketing and your experience.

We may share Your personal information in the following situations:

  • With Service Providers: We may share Your personal information with Service Providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service, to contact You.
  • For business transfers: We may share or transfer Your personal information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of Company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of Our business to another company.
  • With Affiliates: We may share Your information with Our affiliates, in which case we will require those affiliates to honor this Privacy Policy. Affiliates include Our parent company and any other subsidiaries, joint venture partners or other companies that We control or that are under common control with Us.
  • With business partners: We may share Your information with Our business partners to offer You certain products, services or promotions.
  • With other users: when You share personal information or otherwise interact in the public areas with other users, such information may be viewed by all users and may be publicly distributed outside.
  • With Your consent: We may disclose Your personal information for any other purpose with Your consent.

RETENTION OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

The Company will retain Your Personal Data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use Your Personal Data to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.

The Company will also retain Usage Data for internal analysis purposes. Usage Data is generally retained for a shorter period of time, except when this data is used to strengthen the security or to improve the functionality of Our Service, or We are legally obligated to retain this data for longer time periods.

TRANSFER OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

Your information, including Personal Data, is processed at the Company’s operating offices and in any other places where the parties involved in the processing are located. It means that this information may be transferred to — and maintained on — computers located outside of Your state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the data protection laws may differ than those from Your jurisdiction.

Your consent to this Privacy Policy followed by Your submission of such information represents Your agreement to that transfer.

The Company will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that Your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and no transfer of Your Personal Data will take place to an organization or a country unless there are adequate controls in place including the security of Your data and other personal information.

DELETE YOUR PERSONAL DATA

You have the right to delete or request that We assist in deleting the Personal Data that We have collected about You.

Our Service may give You the ability to delete certain information about You from within the Service.

You may update, amend, or delete Your information at any time by signing in to Your Account, if you have one, and visiting the account settings section that allows you to manage Your personal information. You may also contact Us to request access to, correct, or delete any personal information that You have provided to Us.

Please note, however, that We may need to retain certain information when we have a legal obligation or lawful basis to do so.

DISCLOSURE OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS

If the Company is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, Your Personal Data may be transferred. We will provide notice before Your Personal Data is transferred and becomes subject to a different Privacy Policy.

LAW ENFORCEMENT

Under certain circumstances, the Company may be required to disclose Your Personal Data if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (e.g. a court or a government agency).

OTHER LEGAL REQUIREMENTS

The Company may disclose Your Personal Data in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to:

  • Comply with a legal obligation
  • Protect and defend the rights or property of the Company
  • Prevent or investigate possible wrongdoing in connection with the Service
  • Protect the personal safety of Users of the Service or the public
  • Protect against legal liability

SECURITY OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

The security of Your Personal Data is important to Us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While We strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect Your Personal Data, We cannot guarantee its absolute security.

DETAILED INFORMATION ON THE PROCESSING OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

The Service Providers We use may have access to Your Personal Data. These third-party vendors collect, store, use, process and transfer information about Your activity on Our Service in accordance with their Privacy Policies.

ANALYTICS

We may use third-party Service providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service.

  • Google Analytics
    Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our Service. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network.
    You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visits activity.
    For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: https://policies.google.com/privacy

GDPR PRIVACY

LEGAL BASIS FOR PROCESSING PERSONAL DATA UNDER GDPR

We may process Personal Data under the following conditions:

  • Consent: You have given Your consent for processing Personal Data for one or more specific purposes.
  • Performance of a contract: Provision of Personal Data is necessary for the performance of an agreement with You and/or for any pre-contractual obligations thereof.
  • Legal obligations: Processing Personal Data is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the Company is subject.
  • Vital interests: Processing Personal Data is necessary in order to protect Your vital interests or of another natural person.
  • Public interests: Processing Personal Data is related to a task that is carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the Company.
  • Legitimate interests: Processing Personal Data is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the Company.

In any case, the Company will gladly help to clarify the specific legal basis that applies to the processing, and in particular whether the provision of Personal Data is a statutory or contractual requirement, or a requirement necessary to enter into a contract.

YOUR RIGHTS UNDER THE GDPR

The Company undertakes to respect the confidentiality of Your Personal Data and to guarantee You can exercise Your rights.

You have the right under this Privacy Policy, and by law if You are within the EU, to:

  • Request access to Your Personal Data. The right to access, update or delete the information We have on You. Whenever made possible, you can access, update or request deletion of Your Personal Data directly within Your account settings section. If you are unable to perform these actions yourself, please contact Us to assist You. This also enables You to receive a copy of the Personal Data We hold about You.
  • Request correction of the Personal Data that We hold about You. You have the right to have any incomplete or inaccurate information We hold about You corrected.
  • Object to processing of Your Personal Data. This right exists where We are relying on a legitimate interest as the legal basis for Our processing and there is something about Your particular situation, which makes You want to object to our processing of Your Personal Data on this ground. You also have the right to object where We are processing Your Personal Data for direct marketing purposes.
  • Request erasure of Your Personal Data. You have the right to ask Us to delete or remove Personal Data when there is no good reason for Us to continue processing it.
  • Request the transfer of Your Personal Data. We will provide to You, or to a third-party You have chosen, Your Personal Data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Please note that this right only applies to automated information which You initially provided consent for Us to use or where We used the information to perform a contract with You.
  • Withdraw Your consent. You have the right to withdraw Your consent on using your Personal Data. If You withdraw Your consent, We may not be able to provide You with access to certain specific functionalities of the Service.

EXERCISING OF YOUR GDPR DATA PROTECTION RIGHTS

You may exercise Your rights of access, rectification, cancellation and opposition by contacting Us. Please note that we may ask You to verify Your identity before responding to such requests. If You make a request, We will try our best to respond to You as soon as possible.

You have the right to complain to a Data Protection Authority about Our collection and use of Your Personal Data. For more information, if You are in the European Economic Area (EEA), please contact Your local data protection authority in the EEA.

CCPA PRIVACY

This privacy notice section for California residents supplements the information contained in Our Privacy Policy and it applies solely to all visitors, users, and others who reside in the State of California.

CATEGORIES OF PERSONAL INFORMATION COLLECTED

We collect information that identifies, relates to, describes, references, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with a particular Consumer or Device. The following is a list of categories of personal information which we may collect or may have been collected from California residents within the last twelve (12) months.

Please note that the categories and examples provided in the list below are those defined in the CCPA. This does not mean that all examples of that category of personal information were in fact collected by Us, but reflects our good faith belief to the best of our knowledge that some of that information from the applicable category may be and may have been collected. For example, certain categories of personal information would only be collected if You provided such personal information directly to Us.

  • Category A: Identifiers.
    Examples: A real name, alias, postal address, unique personal identifier, online identifier, Internet Protocol address, email address, account name, driver’s license number, passport number, or other similar identifiers.
    Collected: Yes.
  • Category B: Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e)).
    Examples: A name, signature, Social Security number, physical characteristics or description, address, telephone number, passport number, driver’s license or state identification card number, insurance policy number, education, employment, employment history, bank account number, credit card number, debit card number, or any other financial information, medical information, or health insurance information. Some personal information included in this category may overlap with other categories.
    Collected: Yes.
  • Category C: Protected classification characteristics under California or federal law.
    Examples: Age (40 years or older), race, color, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, religion or creed, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, sex (including gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy or childbirth and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, veteran or military status, genetic information (including familial genetic information).
    Collected: No.
  • Category D: Commercial information.
    Examples: Records and history of products or services purchased or considered.
    Collected: No.
  • Category E: Biometric information.
    Examples: Genetic, physiological, behavioral, and biological characteristics, or activity patterns used to extract a template or other identifier or identifying information, such as, fingerprints, faceprints, and voiceprints, iris or retina scans, keystroke, gait, or other physical patterns, and sleep, health, or exercise data.
    Collected: No.
  • Category F: Internet or other similar network activity.
    Examples: Interaction with our Service or advertisement.
    Collected: Yes.
  • Category G: Geolocation data.
    Examples: Approximate physical location.
    Collected: No.
  • Category H: Sensory data.
    Examples: Audio, electronic, visual, thermal, olfactory, or similar information.
    Collected: No.
  • Category I: Professional or employment-related information.
    Examples: Current or past job history or performance evaluations.
    Collected: No.
  • Category J: Non-public education information (per the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (20 U.S.C. Section 1232g, 34 C.F.R. Part 99)).
    Examples: Education records directly related to a student maintained by an educational institution or party acting on its behalf, such as grades, transcripts, class lists, student schedules, student identification codes, student financial information, or student disciplinary records.
    Collected: No.
  • Category K: Inferences drawn from other personal information.
    Examples: Profile reflecting a person’s preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.
    Collected: No.

Under CCPA, personal information does not include:

  • Publicly available information from government records
  • Deidentified or aggregated consumer information
  • Information excluded from the CCPA’s scope, such as:
    • Health or medical information covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA) or clinical trial data
    • Personal Information covered by certain sector-specific privacy laws, including the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) or California Financial Information Privacy Act (FIPA), and the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994

SOURCES OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

We obtain the categories of personal information listed above from the following categories of sources:

  • Directly from You. For example, from the forms You complete on our Service, preferences You express or provide through our Service.
  • Indirectly from You. For example, from observing Your activity on our Service.
  • Automatically from You. For example, through cookies We or our Service Providers set on Your Device as You navigate through our Service.
  • From Service Providers. For example, third-party vendors to monitor and analyze the use of our Service, or other third-party vendors that We use to provide the Service to You.

USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES OR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES

We may use or disclose personal information We collect for “business purposes” or “commercial purposes” (as defined under the CCPA), which may include the following examples:

  • To operate our Service and provide You with our Service.
  • To provide You with support and to respond to Your inquiries, including to investigate and address Your concerns and monitor and improve our Service.
  • To fulfill or meet the reason You provided the information. For example, if You share Your contact information to ask a question about our Service, We will use that personal information to respond to Your inquiry.
  • To respond to law enforcement requests and as required by applicable law, court order, or governmental regulations.
  • As described to You when collecting Your personal information or as otherwise set forth in the CCPA.
  • For internal administrative and auditing purposes.
  • To detect security incidents and protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent or illegal activity, including, when necessary, to prosecute those responsible for such activities.

Please note that the examples provided above are illustrative and not intended to be exhaustive. For more details on how we use this information, please refer to the “Use of Your Personal Data” section.

If We decide to collect additional categories of personal information or use the personal information We collected for materially different, unrelated, or incompatible purposes We will update this Privacy Policy.

DISCLOSURE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION FOR BUSINESS PURPOSES OR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES

We may use or disclose and may have used or disclosed in the last twelve (12) months the following categories of personal information for business or commercial purposes:

  • Category A: Identifiers
  • Category B: Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e))
  • Category F: Internet or other similar network activity

Please note that the categories listed above are those defined in the CCPA. This does not mean that all examples of that category of personal information were in fact disclosed, but reflects our good faith belief to the best of our knowledge that some of that information from the applicable category may be and may have been disclosed.

When We disclose personal information for a business purpose or a commercial purpose, We enter a contract that describes the purpose and requires the recipient to both keep that personal information confidential and not use it for any purpose except performing the contract.

SALE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

As defined in the CCPA, “sell” and “sale” mean selling, renting, releasing, disclosing, disseminating, making available, transferring, or otherwise communicating orally, in writing, or by electronic or other means, a consumer’s personal information by the business to a third party for valuable consideration. This means that We may have received some kind of benefit in return for sharing personal information, but not necessarily a monetary benefit.

Please note that the categories listed below are those defined in the CCPA. This does not mean that all examples of that category of personal information were in fact sold, but reflects our good faith belief to the best of our knowledge that some of that information from the applicable category may be and may have been shared for value in return.

We may sell and may have sold in the last twelve (12) months the following categories of personal information:

  • Category A: Identifiers
  • Category B: Personal information categories listed in the California Customer Records statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e))
  • Category F: Internet or other similar network activity

SHARE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

We may share Your personal information identified in the above categories with the following categories of third parties:

  • Service Providers
  • Our affiliates
  • Our business partners
  • Third party vendors to whom You or Your agents authorize Us to disclose Your personal information in connection with products or services We provide to You

SALE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION OF MINORS UNDER 16 YEARS OF AGE

We do not sell the personal information of Consumers We actually know are less than 16 years of age, unless We receive affirmative authorization (the “right to opt-in”) from either the Consumer who is between 13 and 16 years of age, or the parent or guardian of a Consumer less than 13 years of age. Consumers who opt-in to the sale of personal information may opt-out of future sales at any time. To exercise the right to opt-out, You (or Your authorized representative) may submit a request to Us by contacting Us.

If You have reason to believe that a child under the age of 13 (or 16) has provided Us with personal information, please contact Us with sufficient detail to enable Us to delete that information.

YOUR RIGHTS UNDER THE CCPA

The CCPA provides California residents with specific rights regarding their personal information. If You are a resident of California, You have the following rights:

  • The right to notice. You have the right to be notified which categories of Personal Data are being collected and the purposes for which the Personal Data is being used.
  • The right to request. Under CCPA, You have the right to request that We disclose information to You about Our collection, use, sale, disclosure for business purposes and share of personal information. Once We receive and confirm Your request, We will disclose to You:
    • The categories of personal information We collected about You
    • The categories of sources for the personal information We collected about You
    • Our business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling that personal information
    • The categories of third parties with whom We share that personal information
    • The specific pieces of personal information We collected about You
    • If we sold Your personal information or disclosed Your personal information for a business purpose, We will disclose to You:
      • The categories of personal information categories sold
      • The categories of personal information categories disclosed
  • The right to say no to the sale of Personal Data (opt-out). You have the right to direct Us to not sell Your personal information. To submit an opt-out request please contact Us.
  • The right to delete Personal Data. You have the right to request the deletion of Your Personal Data, subject to certain exceptions. Once We receive and confirm Your request, We will delete (and direct Our Service Providers to delete) Your personal information from our records, unless an exception applies. We may deny Your deletion request if retaining the information is necessary for Us or Our Service Providers to:
    • Complete the transaction for which We collected the personal information, provide a good or service that You requested, take actions reasonably anticipated within the context of our ongoing business relationship with You, or otherwise perform our contract with You.
    • Detect security incidents, protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, or prosecute those responsible for such activities.
    • Debug products to identify and repair errors that impair existing intended functionality.
    • Exercise free speech, ensure the right of another consumer to exercise their free speech rights, or exercise another right provided for by law.
    • Comply with the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (Cal. Penal Code § 1546 et. seq.).
    • Engage in public or peer-reviewed scientific, historical, or statistical research in the public interest that adheres to all other applicable ethics and privacy laws, when the information’s deletion may likely render impossible or seriously impair the research’s achievement, if You previously provided informed consent.
    • Enable solely internal uses that are reasonably aligned with consumer expectations based on Your relationship with Us.
    • Comply with a legal obligation.
    • Make other internal and lawful uses of that information that are compatible with the context in which You provided it.
  • The right not to be discriminated against. You have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising any of Your consumer’s rights, including by:
    • Denying goods or services to You
    • Charging different prices or rates for goods or services, including the use of discounts or other benefits or imposing penalties
    • Providing a different level or quality of goods or services to You
    • Suggesting that You will receive a different price or rate for goods or services or a different level or quality of goods or services

EXERCISING YOUR CCPA DATA PROTECTION RIGHTS

In order to exercise any of Your rights under the CCPA, and if You are a California resident, You can contact Us:

  • By email: info@kmwllc.com

Only You, or a person registered with the California Secretary of State that You authorize to act on Your behalf, may make a verifiable request related to Your personal information.

Your request to Us must:

  • Provide sufficient information that allows Us to reasonably verify You are the person about whom We collected personal information or an authorized representative
  • Describe Your request with sufficient detail that allows Us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it

We cannot respond to Your request or provide You with the required information if We cannot:

  • Verify Your identity or authority to make the request
  • And confirm that the personal information relates to You

We will disclose and deliver the required information free of charge within 45 days of receiving Your verifiable request. The time period to provide the required information may be extended once by an additional 45 days when reasonably necessary and with prior notice.

Any disclosures We provide will only cover the 12-month period preceding the verifiable request’s receipt.

For data portability requests, We will select a format to provide Your personal information that is readily usable and should allow You to transmit the information from one entity to another entity without hindrance.

DO NOT SELL MY PERSONAL INFORMATION

You have the right to opt-out of the sale of Your personal information. Once We receive and confirm a verifiable consumer request from You, we will stop selling Your personal information. To exercise Your right to opt-out, please contact Us.

The Service Providers we partner with (for example, our analytics or advertising partners) may use technology on the Service that sells personal information as defined by the CCPA law. If you wish to opt out of the use of Your personal information for interest-based advertising purposes and these potential sales as defined under CCPA law, you may do so by following the instructions below.

Please note that any opt out is specific to the browser You use. You may need to opt out on every browser that You use.

WEBSITE

You can opt out of receiving ads that are personalized as served by our Service Providers by following our instructions presented on the Service:

The opt out will place a cookie on Your computer that is unique to the browser You use to opt out. If you change browsers or delete the cookies saved by your browser, You will need to opt out again.

MOBILE DEVICES

Your mobile device may give You the ability to opt out of the use of information about the apps You use in order to serve You ads that are targeted to Your interests:

  • “Opt out of Interest-Based Ads” or “Opt out of Ads Personalization” on Android devices
  • “Limit Ad Tracking” on iOS devices

You can also stop the collection of location information from Your mobile device by changing the preferences on Your mobile device.

“DO NOT TRACK” POLICY AS REQUIRED BY CALIFORNIA ONLINE PRIVACY PROTECTION ACT (CALOPPA)

Our Service does not respond to Do Not Track signals.

However, some third party websites do keep track of Your browsing activities. If You are visiting such websites, You can set Your preferences in Your web browser to inform websites that You do not want to be tracked. You can enable or disable DNT by visiting the preferences or settings page of Your web browser.

CHILDREN’S PRIVACY

The Service may contain content appropriate for children under the age of 13. As a parent, you should know that through the Service children under the age of 13 may participate in activities that involve the collection or use of personal information. We use reasonable efforts to ensure that before we collect any personal information from a child, the child’s parent receives notice of and consents to our personal information practices.

We also may limit how We collect, use, and store some of the information of Users between 13 and 18 years old. In some cases, this means We will be unable to provide certain functionality of the Service to these Users. If We need to rely on consent as a legal basis for processing Your information and Your country requires consent from a parent, We may require Your parent’s consent before We collect and use that information.

We may ask a User to verify its date of birth before collecting any personal information from them. If the User is under the age of 13, the Service will be either blocked or redirected to a parental consent process.

INFORMATION COLLECTED FROM CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF 13

The Company may collect and store persistent identifiers such as cookies or IP addresses from Children without parental consent for the purpose of supporting the internal operation of the Service.

We may collect and store other personal information about children if this information is submitted by a child with prior parent consent or by the parent or guardian of the child.

The Company may collect and store the following types of personal information about a child when submitted by a child with prior parental consent or by the parent or guardian of the child:

  • First and/or last name
  • Date of birth
  • Gender
  • Grade level
  • Email address
  • Telephone number
  • Parent’s or guardian’s name
  • Parent’s or guardian’s email address

For further details on the information We might collect, You can refer to the “Types of Data Collected” section of this Privacy Policy. We follow our standard Privacy Policy for the disclosure of personal information collected from and about children.

PARENTAL ACCESS

A parent who has already given the Company permission to collect and use his child personal information can, at any time:

  • Review, correct or delete the child’s personal information
  • Discontinue further collection or use of the child’s personal information

To make such a request, You can write to Us using the contact information provided in this Privacy Policy.

YOUR CALIFORNIA PRIVACY RIGHTS (CALIFORNIA’S SHINE THE LIGHT LAW)

Under California Civil Code Section 1798 (California’s Shine the Light law), California residents with an established business relationship with us can request information once a year about sharing their Personal Data with third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes.

If you’d like to request more information under the California Shine the Light law, and if You are a California resident, You can contact Us using the contact information provided below.

CALIFORNIA PRIVACY RIGHTS FOR MINOR USERS (CALIFORNIA BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONS CODE SECTION 22581)

California Business and Professions Code Section 22581 allows California residents under the age of 18 who are registered users of online sites, services or applications to request and obtain removal of content or information they have publicly posted.

To request removal of such data, and if You are a California resident, You can contact Us using the contact information provided below, and include the email address associated with Your account.

Be aware that Your request does not guarantee complete or comprehensive removal of content or information posted online and that the law may not permit or require removal in certain circumstances.

LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES

Our Service may contain links to other websites that are not operated by Us. If You click on a third party link, You will be directed to that third party’s site. We strongly advise You to review the Privacy Policy of every site You visit.

We have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.

CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

We may update Our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify You of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page.

We will let You know via email and/or a prominent notice on Our Service, prior to the change becoming effective and update the “Last updated” date at the top of this Privacy Policy.

You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.

CONTACT US

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, You can contact us:

  • By email: info@kmwllc.com