ACLU Foundation Website Privacy Policy
Effective as of September 1, 2019.
This Online Privacy Statement describes how we treat user data collected during your visit to the ACLU Foundation site. The ACLU Foundation site is aclufoundation.org. This is not the online privacy statement for aclu.org, action.aclu.org, or other ACLU websites that don’t contain an aclu.org domain name – for example, peoplepower.org. Neither is it the online privacy statement for other websites (e.g. blogs or social networking sites) where ACLU Foundation has a presence, such as any ACLU Foundation pages on Facebook. Finally, this is not the online privacy statement for the websites of any ACLU affiliate organizations. In all of those cases, site-specific privacy terms apply, and are posted accordingly.
Privacy and the Internet
The Internet, generally speaking, is not currently a private place. As you visit websites, use search engines, and conduct business on the Internet, many different companies and organizations are gathering information about your online behavior by tracking your searches, visits, and transactions, and then by matching that data with other information about you.There are some things you can do to prevent your information from being collected. We encourage you to read our Easy Steps Everyone Can Take to Protect Their Digital Privacy to help protect your privacy online.
The ACLU Foundation takes many steps to protect your privacy when you visit the ACLU Foundation website. In order to advance our programs, and to provide you with a better experience while you are on the ACLU Foundation Site, we do allow some tracking to take place.How and when we do so is explained below.
Our Collection and Use of Information About You
Passively Collected Data
Like most websites, we may automatically receive and record information in our server logs from your browser when you visit aclufoundation.org. The information that we collect with these automated methods may include your IP address, cookie information, browser type, system type, and the referring URL.
We use this type of information to measure and improve the performance of our site. On occasion we also access this type of information to investigate or maintain the stability and security of our site.
Voluntarily Submitted Data
Certain pages on the ACLU Foundation site may invite you to share personally identifying information, such as your name, address, email address, or telephone number. Sharing that information will allow you to make a donation, join our email list, sign a petition, or participate in other similar online activities.
We may use that voluntarily submitted data to:
- Fulfill your orders or transactions.
- Contact you about other ACLU Foundation activities or news, or about opportunities to support the ACLU Foundation.
- In the case of petitions, we may display on our website your first name, last initial, city and state, and deliver your first and last name, city and state, zip code, or congressional district to the advocacy target. Where required for federal agencies to accept public comments, we may also submit your email address and other required information.
- Deliver content to you on platforms such as social media, other websites, search results pages and mobile apps.
When We May Share Your Information With Other Organizations
When we give you an opportunity to voluntarily submit information about yourself, we may give you the option of indicating that you permit us to share that data with other unaffiliated parties such as coalition partners. We will not share your data with such parties unless you have indicated that you permit us to do so. We sometimes allow other nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations to contact individuals who have chosen to share their information with the ACLU Foundation.Working with other organizations in this way, either on a rental basis or in an exchange, is critical to maintaining a strong supporter base by allowing us to lower costs while reaching the widest possible audience.In order to protect your privacy, we do this through secure arrangements in which the external organization does not directly receive information about you. All such communications are done on a one-time use basis and are carried out by a third-party vendor, which keeps your information confidential. The external organization learns information about you only if you choose to respond to that third-party communication. If you don’t wish us to make information about you available for this type of communication, please let us know by emailing aclupreferences@aclufoundation.org and submitting a request to opt out. We will be sure to honor your request.
In addition to those ways of sharing information with unrelated organizations, we may also share information with ACLU and with ACLU and ACLU Foundation affiliates around the country. ACLU and ACLU and ACLU Foundation affiliates are bound to use that information only as allowed under this Online Privacy Statement, and with regard to their own operations.
How We Work With Third-Party Vendors
We work with a variety of vendors who help us process data, facilitate the operation of the ACLU Foundation site and deliver messages to you on other platforms. For example, outside vendors may help us analyze traffic on our site, process credit card transactions, or facilitate activities such as the collection and delivery of petition signatures. To the extent that any vendor has access to personally identifiable data about you, by virtue of the fact that it participates in the operation of the ACLU Foundation site or programs, we require that vendor to promise that it will keep that data confidential and use it only for the purpose of carrying out the functions we have engaged it to perform. That is true both as to passively collected data and as to voluntarily submitted data, and also as to data from any cookie or other tracking device. There is an exception to this rule: we do allow some vendors to use certain aggregated data for other purposes, as described immediately below.
In some instances, we may agree to allow a vendor to take aggregated and anonymized data about activity on the ACLU Foundation site, and use that data for other purposes such as improvement of the vendor’s products or benchmarking for the vendor’s other clients. But we won’t agree to that unless we believe, in each instance, that the data won’t be recombined with other information to create any record about you as an identifiable individual.
Our Use of Cookies
We use cookies to improve website performance, to remember user preferences and settings, and to collect analytic data. By “cookies” we mean small text files placed on to your computer by websites you visit. “Cookies” may also refer to local storage, which is a mechanism similar to cookies where the information is stored within your web browser. In some instances we place these cookies ourselves. In other instances we allow outside service providers to place these cookies, but only if those providers agree to the terms described above under “How We Work with Third-Party Vendors.” We use cookies as follows:
Website Performance
Website performance cookies allow us to make the website easier and more pleasant to use. For example, they may enable us to:
- Determine how often and where you see our “breaking news” alerts or promotions.
- Save you time when filling out a form by populating it with information you provided in previous visits.
Registration
If you are visiting our website as a registered user — for example, when you manage your subscriptions for our email lists — we place cookies in your browser that allow our website to recognize that you are logged in.
Analytics
We use analytics tools that place cookies, in order to give us a better understanding of how people engage with our website. That in turn allows us to gauge the current performance of Website features, and to develop better content. Analytics cookies provide us with information like:
- How many individual visitors we have
- How many visitors are new or returning
- How often visitors come to the website
- What content they’ve visited
- How visitors interact with particular pages or content
In addition, if you click on a link in an email we send to you — for example, to sign a petition — a cookie may be generated that enables us to identify that you have signed the petition.
How Certain Content Hosts May Place Cookies and Gather Information About You
Our site may be connected in a variety of ways to content residing on other platforms. We provide links to content on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and to content on other sites, such as articles posted on the sites of news organizations. Our site also features embedded media, such as videos, that are hosted on other platforms (such as YouTube) but viewable directly through the buttons we provide. When you click on links or buttons for any of these types of external content, the providers of that content may place their own cookies on your computer, access existing cookies that were set when you previously visited other websites, or otherwise gather information about you as you access their content.
To learn about how those content hosts treat the data they collect through cookies and otherwise, see their respective online privacy policies and other posted guidance.
To learn how you can minimize the information about you collected by these types of content hosts, please see our Easy Steps Everyone Can Take to Protect Their Digital Privacy.
Security Measures and Data Transmission
We have taken physical, electronic, and managerial measures to safeguard the information we collect. We work to ensure data accuracy and protect against unauthorized access to, and improper use of, information we collect online.
Information that can be readily linked to you personally, such as your name and address, is stored on secure servers and is not publicly accessible (unless, as discussed above, you have chosen to have us disclose information about you when you have signed a petition or submitted a blog comment). Additionally, all data transmitted to and from our website, including credit card numbers, are encrypted using industry standard measures to provide an additional level of security.
Procedure When We Update This Statement
Our privacy statement may change from time to time. We will post privacy statement changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice on our website, aclufoundation.org. We will also keep prior versions of the Online Privacy Statement available for your review in this section.
Procedure for Updating Your Personal Information or Preferences
If you wish to withdraw or change personal information you shared with us previously or adjust personal preferences — such as your preferences regarding email lists — you may contact us to update our records. You have the following options to do this:
- Click on the link in the footer of any email you receive from the ACLU or ACLU Foundation and use our preference center
- Send e-mail to: aclupreferences@aclufoundation.org
- Send mail to our address: ACLU Foundation, c/o ACLU Membership Department, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004.
To send us any other feedback, please email us at aclupreferences@aclufoundation.org
