Benetech Website Privacy Policy

September, 2007

Privacy is an important consideration for Benetech. We are, therefore, committed to protecting the privacy of all visitors to this site. Our Privacy Policy is designed to let you know what we do with the information we collect.

No Personal Information Required

To access the base content on our site, you will not be required to provide us with personal information. We do use Google Analytics to measure website traffic and improve our website design, and Google does use a cookie to collect anonymous traffic tracking data. We do not collect personally identifiable data from users based on visits to our web pages. However, if a visitor chooses to opt-in for more information through signing up with our My Benetech service, registers for a Benetech listserv or sends us an email, we will have access to additional information and discuss such opt-in collection in more detail below.

General Information for Casual Benetech.org Visitors

When you request information from a website, such as ours, the web server uses your IP address to communicate with you, and this minimal information is always retained for a period of time on our server. Your computer can be identified from the IP address while you are connected to the Internet, although it normally would not identify you individually as the user. As a matter of course, our site will automatically gather certain general information such as the number of visitors on the site and the most frequently visited areas. However, this information will used in aggregate and cannot be used to identify you personally. We use this aggregate information to try to improve the site, making it more useful and usable.

Information for Benetech.org Visitors Who Opt-In

Email Activities

If you choose to send us email messages, we will use the messages only to respond to them and will not share them with anyone, unless you give us explicit permission to do so or by order of an appropriate court of law directing us to do so. If you wish to join the Beneblog listserv, we will keep only the minimum information necessary to operate the mailing lists. Benetech projects often work with listserv systems operated by third parties, such as Freelists, and these listservs are governed by those third party operators’ privacy policies.

My Benetech.org

We have contracted with Papilia to provide the My Benetech.org functionality, a stakeholder communications tool designed for permission-based communications. We use Papilia to send email newsletters and information to Benetech’s supporters, and to create a personally customized section of Benetech web content. We and Papilia have agreed to not use this service for transmission of unsolicited bulk or commercial email. The full Privacy Policy for My Benetech.org is at My Benetech Privacy Policy, but we can summarize the key points:

• We’re opt-in.
• We’re against spam. You can unsubscribe at any time, and all of our email communications that come through the Papilia system have unsubscribe links
• We only collect personally identifiable information that you knowingly and willingly provide us.
• We use cookies to provide much of the customization features of My Benetech.org.

No Disclosure of Information to Third Parties

We don’t sell or provide our supporter (or donor) lists to third parties, other than those we use for specific support of Benetech efforts (such as Google Analytics and Papilia) and who have agreed to not provide such information to other third parties. As a general requirement of law, we will respond to documents in a legal proceeding, such as court orders or subpoenas, if we receive any.

Other Sites

We have no control over the privacy of web sites that are not our own, which might be linked to from this web site. We reference other web sites that you may wish to visit, but be aware that this Privacy Policy does not apply beyond this site.

Privacy Policy Changes

We may decide to change the Privacy Policy but, if we choose to do so, we will post the changes here. You will always have access to the Privacy Policy in order to determine:

• whether or not we gather personal information about you;
• whether or not we use information about you; and
• whether or not we disclose your information to anyone else.

If you have any questions about the Privacy Policy, or about any other aspect of operation of the site, please contact us at [email protected] and we will respond confidentially.