Privacy Policy - Commonwealth Club – World Affairs of California
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Privacy Policy

Last Updated: August 22, 2018

The World Affairs Council of Northern California (“World Affairs,” “we,” “us”) is concerned about privacy issues and wants you to be familiar with how we collect, use and disclose information. We are pleased to provide this Privacy Policy to inform you of our practices as information that we collect. If you have any questions or comments about the Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, please contact us at communications@worldaffairs.org.

By accessing or using this website, you agree to all the terms of this Privacy Policy.

We may change this Privacy Policy at any time. Please take a look at the “Updated” legend at the top of this page to see when this Privacy Policy was last revised. Any changes to this Privacy Policy will become effective when posted to this website. By accessing or using the website after any such changes, you accept the revised Privacy Policy.

Personal Information We May Collect We collect two types of information through this website: Personal Information and Other Information. “Personal Information” is information that identifies you or relates to you as an individual. “Other Information” is any information that does not reveal your specific identity or does not directly relate to an individual. Other Information is addressed below, under the heading “Other Information”.

We may collect Personal Information such as:

  • Name
  • Email address
  • Mailing Address
  • Preferences for electronic or physical delivery of newsletters

We may use Personal Information:

  • to respond to your inquiries and fulfill your requests, such as to send you information, to register you for events, and to provide you services.
  • to keep a record of your contact information and correspondence, if you contact us through this website and to respond to you.
  • to send you administrative information, including information regarding the websites and changes to our terms, conditions and policies.
  • to facilitate social sharing functionality.
  • for our internal business purposes, such as improving or modifying this website and operating and expanding our services.
  • as we believe to be necessary or appropriate: (a) under applicable law, including laws outside your country of residence; (b) to comply with legal process; (c) to respond to requests from public or government authorities, including public or government authorities outside your country of residence; d) to enforce our terms and conditions; (e) to protect our operations or those of any of our affiliates; (f) to protect our rights, privacy, safety or property, or yours or others’; or (g) to pursue available remedies or limit the damages that we may sustain.

How Personal Information May Be Disclosed:

  • to third-parties providing us services such as website hosting, data analysis, IT services and infrastructure, customer service, email delivery, auditing and the like.
  • to a third party (whether affiliated or unaffiliated with us) upon any reorganization of World Affairs or transfer or some of all of its services to another entity.
  • by you, on message boards, blogs and other services to which you are able to post information. Please note that any information you post or disclose through these services will become public information, and may be available to visitors to this website and to the general public. We urge you to be thoughtful when disclosing your Personal Information, or any other information, on this site.
  • to your friends associated with your social media account, to other website users as well as to your social media account provider, in connection with your social sharing activity, such as if you connect your social media account to your use of this website. By connecting your use of this website to your social media account, you authorize us to share information with your social media account provider and you understand that the use of the information we share will be governed by the social media site’s privacy policy. If you do not want your Personal Information shared with other users or with your social media account provider, please do not connect your social media account with your use of this website and do not participate in social sharing on this website
  • as we believe to be necessary or appropriate: (a) under applicable law, including laws outside your country of residence; (b) to comply with legal process; (c) to respond to requests from public or government authorities, including public or government authorities outside your country of residence; d) to enforce our terms and conditions; (e) to protect our operations; (f) to protect our rights, privacy, safety or property, or yours or others’; or (g) to allow us to pursue available remedies or limit the damages that we may sustain.

Other Information We May Collect:

“Other Information” is any information that does not reveal your identity or relate to an individual, such as:

  • Browser information
  • Information collected through cookies, pixel tags and other technologies
  • Demographic information and Other Information you provide
  • Aggregated information
  • Zip codes

How We May Collect Other Information:

We and our third-party service providers may collect Other Information in a variety of ways, including:

  • Through your browser: Most Internet browsers transmit certain information to websites that you visit, such as your computer’s type (Windows or Macintosh) and its Media Access Control (MAC) address and screen resolution, and the type and version of your computer’s Operating System and browser. We use this information to ensure this website functions properly.
  • Using cookies: Cookies are text files, containing small amounts of information, which are downloaded to your computer, or smartphone or other device by which you visit a website. Cookies allow us to recognize your browsing device to assist with your use of this website. This can include helping us understand how this website is used, letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improving your browsing experience. Cookies can also help ensure marketing you see online is more relevant to you and your interests, although we do not intentionally use them for that purpose, our service providers may.
  • If you do not want information to be collected through the use of cookies on your computer, most browsers allow you to automatically decline the transfer of cookies to your computer or other device, or to be given the choice of declining or accepting a particular cookie (or cookies) from a particular website. If cookies are disabled, however, some features of this website may not operate as intended. Information about procedures to disable cookies can be found on your Internet browser provider’s website.
  • Using applications: We may use applications, including mobile applications or widgets, to collect information from you.
  • Using pixel tags and other similar technologies: Pixel tags (also known as web beacons and clear GIFs) may be used in connection with some website pages and HTML-formatted email messages to, among other things, track the actions of users of this website and email recipients, measure the success of marketing campaigns and compile statistics about use of this website and response rates.
  • IP Address: Your “IP Address” is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer or other web-browsing device by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). An IP Address is identified and logged automatically in our server log files whenever a user visits this website, along with the time of visit and the page(s) visited. Collecting IP Addresses is standard practice on the Internet and many websites do it automatically. We use IP Addresses for purposes such as measuring use of this website, helping diagnose server problems and administering this website.
  • From you: We collect information when you provide it voluntarily, such as your company, title, interests and preferred means of communication. Unless combined with Personal Information, such information does not personally identify you or any other user of this website.
  • By aggregating information: Aggregated Personal Information does not personally identify you or any other user of this website. For example, we may aggregate Personal Information to calculate the percentage of our users who have a particular zip code.

How We May Use and Disclose Other Information:

We may use and disclose Other Information for any purpose, except when applicable law requires to treat Other Information as Personal Information. In those situations, we may use and disclose Other Information for the purposes for which we use and disclose Personal Information.

In some instances, we may combine Other Information with Personal Information (such as combining your name with your company and title). If we combine any Other Information with Personal Information, we will treat the combined information as Personal Information as long as it is so combined.

Third Party Sites: This Privacy Policy does not address, and we are not responsible for, the privacy, information or other practices of any third parties, including any third party operating any site to which this website contains a link. Please read the terms, conditions and policies of third-party sites before accessing or using them. The inclusion of a link on the Sites does not imply our endorsement of the linked site.

Security: We use reasonable organizational, technical and administrative measures to protect Personal Information under our control. Unfortunately, no data storage system or method of Internet data transmission is perfectly secure. Please do not send sensitive or confidential information to us by email or by any other means in connection with this website. If you have reason to believe that your communications with us have been compromised in any way, please immediately notify us of the problem by contacting us as provided in the “Contact Us” page of this website.

Choices and Access: Your choices regarding our use of your Personal Information for informational purposes: You may opt-out of receiving emails by following the unsubscribe instructions in any message we send you, or by emailing us at communications@worldaffairs.org. We strive to honor such request(s) as soon as reasonably practicable.

How you can access, change or suppress your Personal Information:

You may request to review, correct, update, suppress or otherwise modify any Personal Information that you have previously provided to us, or object to our use of such Personal Information by emailing us at communications@worldaffairs.org or by other means as noted on the “Contact Us” portion of this website. You may also oppose the processing or transferring of Personal Information to the extent the laws of your country require, if you have a legitimate reason to do so.

In your request, please state what information you would like us to change, and whether you would like to have your Personal Information removed from our database or otherwise let us know what imitations you would like to place on our use of your Personal Information. For your protection, we will only implement requests with respect to the Personal Information associated with the particular email address that you use to send us your request, and we may need to verify your identity before doing so. We strive to comply with requests as soon as reasonably practicable.

We may need to retain certain information for record-keeping purposes, and there may also be residual information that will remain in our databases and other records. Such information will not be removed. We may, from time to time, re-contact former users of this website. Finally, we are not responsible for removing information from the databases of third parties (such as service providers) with whom we have shared your Personal Information.

Retention Period: We will retain your Personal Information as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy unless a longer retention period is required or allowed by law.

Use of Site by Minors: The Site is not directed to children under the age of 13 and we request they not provide Personal Information through this website.

Cross-Border Transfer: Your Personal Information may be stored and processed in any country in which we engage service providers, and by using our Site you consent to the transfer of information to countries outside of your country of residence, including the United States, which may have different data protection rules than those in your country.

Sensitive Information: We ask that you not send us, and you not disclose, any sensitive Personal Information (e.g., Social Security numbers, credit card or other payment card information, information related to racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religion or other beliefs, health, criminal background or trade union membership) on or through this website or otherwise except as necessary to pay for programs or services.

Contacting Us: If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us by email at communications@worldaffairs.org or by other means as noted on the “Contact Us” portion of this website.

Please note that email communications are not secure; accordingly, please do not include credit card information or other sensitive or confidential information in your emails to us.