This Privacy Statement describes the types of information that we collect through our website and what we do with that information.
Our site is designed to permit you to access our content without registering or providing personally identifying information. However, as described in more detail below, if you wish to post comments to our site, you’ll need to register with Facebook, which provides our commenting tool.
This Privacy Statement applies only to information collected online through the ars1910.org websites and does not apply to any information you may provide to us, or that we may collect, offline or through other means (for example, via telephone or through the mail).
If you have any questions about this Privacy Statement, please contact us.
PROTECTING THE PRIVACY OF CHILDREN
Children should always get permission from their parents before sending any information about themselves (such as their names, email addresses, and phone numbers) over the Internet, to us or to anyone else. Our website is not directed at children under the age of 13 and we won’t knowingly allow anyone under the age of 13 to provide us any personally identifying information. If you’re under 13, please don’t provide any information about yourself on this website.
TYPES OF INFORMATION WE COLLECT
The information we gather falls into two categories: (1) information voluntarily supplied by visitors to the site, for example, when they subscribe to our email newsletter, make a donation online to support the Armenian Relief Society, or use the “Contact Us” function on the site to communicate with us; and (2) tracking information gathered as visitors navigate through our website, review our email newsletters and other email messages, and “like” or share content through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ (“Social Media Services”), or our “newsletter sign-up” function. This information may be collected directly by us or it may be collected by third-party service providers on our behalf. Third parties featured on or linked to by our website, such as advertisers (“Advertisers”) and others involved in displaying advertisements or promotional messages on our site or offering products and services through our site (“Ad Services Providers”), and Social Media Services may be gathering information as well, through processes we don’t control.
Information You Voluntarily Supply
We may collect and store information that you voluntarily supply to us while on our site. This may include personally identifying information if you choose to provide it. In accessing and using the ars1910.org website, you may have the opportunity to voluntarily submit some or all the following types of information:
You are not required to provide information about yourself to access our site. However, if you wish to post comments on our site, you will have to register with Facebook, which provides our commenting tool. To register with Facebook, you must provide Facebook personal information and create a username and a password. We encourage you to review Facebook’s privacy policy before you register.
You’ll find the Facebook “comment” box on pages throughout our site. If you use the Facebook comment tool to post a comment about a story on ars1910.org, Facebook will provide us your Facebook username, which allows us to view the information you’ve included in your public Facebook profile. Facebook also provides us copies of all comments that have been posted to our site using Facebook’s comment tool. If you don’t uncheck the box adjacent to the Facebook comment box, any comment you post to our site may also be posted to Facebook.
You may interact with content on our site through social media plugins provided by Facebook, Twitter, Google and LinkedIn. We do not control the information that these companies collect when you use their social media tools, nor do we control how these companies use any information they collect. We encourage you to review their privacy policies before interacting with our site through these social media tools. Facebook’s privacy policy can be found here; Twitter’s privacy policy can be found here; LinkedIn’s privacy policy can be found here; Google’s privacy policy can be found here.
If you wish to receive our email newsletter, you must provide us your email address; we’ll use your email address to send you the email newsletters you have requested.
Information That Is Automatically Collected
We also may collect and store, and our services providers may collect and store, information that doesn’t identify you personally that is generated automatically as you navigate through our site. For example, we and our service providers may collect limited information about the device you use to access our site, including the type of device you’re using (computer, mobile phone, tablet, etc.), the operating system running on that device, the type and version of browser software you’re using, the resolution of your computer monitor or other device display, the screen colors available on your device, the website that referred you, and your IP address. (Your IP address is a numerical address that is used by computers and other devices connected to the Internet to identify your device so that data – such as the web pages you want to view – can be transmitted to you.) We use this information to make our site as useful and visually appealing as we can for as many users as possible. We may also use IP address information for systems administration and troubleshooting purposes and to derive a rough estimate of your geographic location – by country, city or town, and perhaps ZIP code.
We may use “cookies,” a standard feature found in browser software, to enhance your experience on the site. Cookies are small files that your web browser places on your hard drive for record-keeping purposes. We also may use web beacons (sometimes referred to as “clear GIFs” or “pixel tags”) to collect non-personally identifying information about how our visitors use our site and how they interact with our email newsletters and with our stories that appear on other websites. By showing how and when visitors use the site and review our news stories, cookies and web beacons help us deliver more relevant content to users, identify how many unique users visit our site, various pages within our site, and our stories that appear on other news sites, and track user interests, trends and patterns. For example, we may use these technologies to collect information about the time visitors spend on each page of our site, the number of visits made to each page or section of our site, whether they open the email newsletters we send them, and whether they click on links contained in these emails. Providers of web analytics services, such as Google Analytics and Chartbeat, may use cookies and web beacons to gather this sort of information on our behalf. To learn more about Google Analytics, click here. To install a browser add-on (available for most standard browsers) that communicates with Google Analytics to indicate that information about your website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics, click here. To learn more about Chartbeat’s data collection and privacy practices, click here. Advertisers and Ad Services Providers involved in displaying ads or other promotional messages (“Ads”) on our site may use cookies and web beacons to record your web browser’s interaction with particular Ads, which, among other things, may allow the Advertisers and Ad Services Providers to track which Ads are displayed and which are clicked on, and to limit the number of times a given Ad is shown to you. Advertisers and Ad Services Providers may also target Ads to you on our site based on what they perceive to be your interests considering your activity on other sites, a process that we don’t control.
We also may use cookies to determine that a visitor to our site has previously visited the site, to record the type of device that a visitor has used to access to the site, and to limit the number of times a visitor sees the same Ads.
The help function on most web browsers contains information on how to set your browser to notify you before accepting a cookie or to disable cookies entirely. However, if you don’t accept cookies, you won’t receive the benefits that cookies provide to other users of our site, such as limiting the number of times you see the same Ad while on our site.
HOW WE USE COLLECTED INFORMATION
Generally
We use the information we collect from visitors to our site to communicate with our users, to better understand and serve our audience, and to heighten user engagement with our site. For example, we use the information we gather to send you email newsletters (including geographically targeted newsletters) and other communications (such as solicitations for contributions), to deliver our site content to you, to measure site traffic, to measure user interests and traffic patterns, to limit the frequency with which visitors see the same Ads, and to improve the site and the services and features offered via the site.
In addition, we may use your personal information to contact you for customer service purposes, to inform you of important changes or additions to our site or the services offered through our site, to enhance our visitor records with information, such as information on mailing address changes and donor capacity, that we obtain from other sources, and to tell you about other products or services offered by the Armenian Relief Society that we think may be of interest to you. We may send you these types of communications via email or direct mail. And if you have provided us with your telephone number, we may contact you by telephone.
Email Addresses
If you provide us your email address (for example, when you subscribe to our newsletter or when you make a donation to support the Armenian Relief Society), we’ll use your email address to send you the newsletter you requested and/or to acknowledge receipt of your donation for tax purposes. In addition, we may email you with information about our website or other products or services, or events offered by the Armenian Relief Society. From time to time, we may also email you to request your financial support. Although we hope you’ll find these communications informative and useful, if you don’t, you can always unsubscribe from recurring communications (but not from receiving donation receipts) by following the simple instructions included in each email.
We also may use your email address to contact you from time to time for customer service purposes, or to send you administrative notices or other information about our site, as described above in the section titled “Generally.”
Our email newsletters contain a “Share with a Friend Link” through which users may share our newsletters with their friends. If you share a newsletter using this tool, we’ll keep track of which newsletters you shared, but we don’t store information on who you shared it with; we use the email addresses of your friends only to deliver the email newsletters you share.
Information You Provide When Donating
When you donating to the Armenian Relief Society through our site, we collect personal information, such as your name, email address and billing address, and your credit card information. We will use your personal information to acknowledge receipt of your donation for tax purposes and to identify you as a donor on our website and our annual report and other printed materials. If you provide us your email address when you contribute, we’ll send our email newsletter to the email address you provide. We also may use your personal information to contact you from time to time for other purposes, as described above in the section titled “Generally.” The Armenian Relief Society does not store your credit card information; it is sent directly from you to our third-party credit card processor and is secured during transmission over the Internet using industry-standard secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption. Our credit card processor is authorized to use your credit card information only to process your donation and for no other purpose.
Sweepstakes and Contest Entry Information
From time to time, we may offer sweepstakes, contests or other promotions on the ars1910.org website. If you enter a promotion on our site, we’ll ask you to provide information about yourself (such as your name, address, and email address). We’ll need this information to contact you if you win, and we also may use this information to contact you for other purposes, as described above in the section titled “Generally.” We also may share this information with shipping or fulfillment companies or other third-party service providers that help administer our promotions, such as by conducting drawings, and/or delivering prizes to winners. If you don’t want us to collect the information requested on the entry form, please do not enter the promotion.
Data Collected in Connection with Ad Serving and Targeting
Advertisers and Ad Services Providers that are involved in serving the Ads displayed on our site may use cookies and web beacons to record your web browser’s interaction with these Ads, which allows the Advertiser and Ad Services Providers to track which Ads are displayed, and which are clicked on, and to limit the number of times a given Ad is shown to you.
DISCLOSURE TO THIRD PARTIES
To help Advertisers (and their ad agencies) understand our audience and confirm the value of advertising on ars1910.org, we may present them with aggregate information on our audience and how our audience uses our site (for example, information on traffic to various pages within our site). We may provide similar information to foundations, corporate sponsors and others who may help fund our operations. This information does not identify you personally.
We may share the information that is collected through this site with our third-party service providers for purposes related to site administration and operation. In some cases, we may permit our third-party service providers to collect such information directly on our behalf. For example, this website uses third-party web analytics services, such as Google Analytics and Chartbeat, to help analyze how users use the site. These services use cookies and web beacons to collect non-personally identifying tracking data from our site on our behalf, and then use that data to provide us with statistical reports on website activity. If you use a credit or debit card to complete a transaction on our site (for example, to donate to the Armenian Relief Society), your personal information and credit card number will be sent directly to our credit card processing service provider to complete your transaction. When we send you email newsletters and other communications, the content of those communications comes from the Center, but we use a service provider to send the emails, since there are so many recipients. Our service provider uses your name and email address to send these emails but is contractually prohibited from using this information for any purpose other than sending these emails on our behalf. We also may share your email address, and if you have elected to share it, your name, with third-party email service providers that send newsletters and other communications on our behalf, but our contracts with these providers prohibit them for using this information for any purpose other than sending out these emails on our behalf.
We also may occasionally release information about our visitors and registered users if required to do so by law or if, in our judgment, such disclosure is reasonably necessary to comply with legal process, to enforce our Terms of Use, or to protect the rights, property, or personal safety of visitors to our site, our employees, our donors, sponsors or Advertisers, or others. In the unlikely event that we sell some or all of our assets, or our site is acquired by another company, information about our visitors to our site may be among the transferred assets.
Storage of Information
The information that we collect through ars1910.org is stored within databases that we control (or databases hosted on our behalf) on servers maintained in protected environments. Any credit card information you provide on our site is secured for transmission over the Internet using industry-standard secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption. However, no physical or electronic security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our servers or databases, nor can we guarantee that information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us or our third-party service providers over the Internet. Our databases are located within the United States. If you access our site from outside the United States, by providing data to us, you consent to transfer of that data to and storage of that data in the United States.
CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY STATEMENT
The web is an evolving medium. If we need to change this Privacy Statement in the future, we will post the revised Privacy Statement on our site and update the “Effective Date,” above, to reflect the date of the changes. By continuing to use this website after we post such changes, you agree to the terms of this Privacy Statement, as modified.
