Privacy Policy

PREFACE ON USE OF EMAIL ADDRESSES
Please see below for Endangered Species Coalition’s full Privacy Policy and how we protect personal information. This preface concerns requests for your email address, only. There are a number of web pages in which you are required to provide your email address. Here is a brief summary on how your email address is used when you provide it on a Endangered Species Coalition web page:

In addition to the single email you will automatically receive above, Endangered Species Coalition may send you additional emails IF you choose to receive further emails from them.

Endangered Species Coalition will not give, sell or share your email address with other organizations except as specifically required to carry out the given action you requested. For example, if you send a message through our systems to your U.S. Senators, your message will be sent to them from your email address. For a full description of our privacy policy and the protection of your personal information, please see Privacy Policy below.

PRIVACY POLICY
We at Endangered Species Coalition (ESC) want this Website to be a safe and private place for users. ESC will do its part by not requiring you to register or provide any information at all to use most of the basic features of this and our other Websites. We also provide opportunities for greater personalization of content and offerings to enhance your experience if you choose. In turn, you can do your part by reading this policy, making your own informed decisions, and taking the precautions outlined below.

There are certain actions and areas of the site that will require you to provide personal information, such as:

1. taking an action through our Action Center or one of our campaign or other sites
2. registering for our enewsletters or other emails
3. making a donation

This privacy policy does not apply when you use this Website as a portal to click through to other Websites including certain shopping Websites affiliated with Endangered Species Coalition. We will update this privacy policy as we deem necessary, so please be sure to reread it from time to time. By submitting your personal information to us, you are agreeing that Endangered Species Coalition may use the information in accordance with this privacy policy.

If you have questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us by sending an email to esc at endangered.org
Personal Information You May Choose to Provide:
In order to utilize certain features of our site or receive information from ESC, you may choose to provide information. If you do submit information to us, we will use that information for the purposes for which it was submitted. We may also use your information in other ways, such as to contact you about other ESC activities and/or fundraising campaigns or as otherwise disclosed to you at the point of collection. For example:

1. If you join our main email list by taking an online action or completing a form, we will have a record of your email address and all other information you choose to provide. We will send you newsletters and also may contact you with action alerts to save wildlife, fundraising campaigns, and other ESC activities.
2. If you make an online donation, your information will be added to our donor list and database, and you may be contacted about other ESC activities, news, action alerts, and/or fundraising campaigns. ESC may rent our donor list (mail addresses, only) to like-minded organizations. This provides you with the opportunity to learn about related activities of other nonprofit organizations. If you do not wish to have your mail contact information shared in this manner, please contact us at esc at endangered.org. ESC will not share your email address or credit card information with other organizations.
3. If you join or opt-in to our activist network, you will receive informational updates and action alerts on wildlife and related issues. You also may be contacted about other ESC activities, news, action alerts, and/or fundraising campaigns. Our activist network is an electronic network, and therefore we need an e-mail address to contact you. We also need your full postal address in order for our systems to match you to the correct state and federal districts, thereby ensuring that you are primarily sending messages to your designated elected officials. ESC will not rent mail addresses of our activist list to other organizations.
4. When you take an action such as sending a message to your elected representatives, government officials or other targets of ESC advocacy, we will send your message to these recipients, along with the contact information you provide on the input form, typically including your name, address, and email address. ESC is not responsible for what these recipients may do with your information. Please note that officials receiving these emails may choose to contact you. In addition, sometimes government agencies add the names of people who submit comments on government proposals into public documents recording the names of people who’ve commented in favor or opposed to a given proposal. This is often a part of the government process for receiving and recording feedback from the public. Government agencies typically have strict guidelines around not misusing information provided to them by the public for other purposes. However, you should review the policies of the appropriate government body if you are concerned.
5. We will receive any other information you choose to provide. For example, we may manage blogs or allow you to post stories or photos from time to time. By submitting such information to us, you give us permission to post it in the designated area on our Website, edit it, or remove it if we deem that the content is not appropriate, outdated, etc. To protect your privacy, please do not include any identifying information when submitting blog entries or stories.

You should be aware that we use third-party vendors to provide services on this site and in our offline business operations. The information that you submit on this site may be provided to those vendors on a confidential basis so that those vendors can provide services (such as maintaining our database, sending e-mail messages to activists, facilitating our fundraising activities and campaigns, or processing credit card transactions) on our behalf.

Other than as described in this privacy policy, or as may be necessary to protect the rights, property, and safety of our organization or others, or as may be necessary to comply with applicable law, ESC will not give, share or sell the personal information you provide online.

Financial Information You May Choose to Provide:
If you choose to make an online donation to ESC, you will have to provide your credit card billing information. As this information is collected and transferred over the Internet to our secure server, it is encrypted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, the industry standard security technology that is designed to protect sensitive information. Our donation pages display the Verisign Secure Site Seal to assure you that our Website is authentic and that all transactions are secured by SSL encryption. If you are making a donation, the credit card information that you provide at the time of donation is used only to process your donation and will not be used by us for any other purposes. For more information on our security policies, please see the “Security” section below.

Information We Automatically Collect and Store:
As is true of most Web sites you enter, we automatically collect and store some information about your computer and your visit and store it in log files. This information includes information such as your computer’s (or your Internet Service Provider’s) Internet Protocol (IP) address (this is not your e-mail address); the domain from which you access the Internet (e.g., “AOL.com” or “Princeton.edu”); the name, version, and specifications of your computer and your computer’s operating system; the Internet address of the Website, if any, from which you came to our site; the date and time you arrived at our site and how long you spent on the site; and which pages you visited.

We use this information to formulate statistics that show the number of visitors to the different sections of our site and to help us make our site more useful to visitors. For example, we use the browser information to help us design our Website so that as many people as possible will be able to view the pages correctly. These statistics do not reveal personal information.

Use of “Cookies” and Disabling “Cookies”:
Cookies are small text files that are either placed on your computer’s hard drive (“persistent cookies”) or in your computer’s Random Access Memory (“session cookies”). We use both persistent cookies and session cookies on our Websites.

Session Cookies: We use session cookies to make it easier for you to navigate certain sections of our Websites. If you choose to provide personal information by using an interactive application on our site, such as by signing up for ESC Wildlife eNews, or joining our activist network, or making an online donation to ESC, we place a session cookie on your computer so that you will be recognized as you move around the Web pages. This information is only used for fifteen minutes. For example, if you join our activist network and then navigate through different pages of our Websites, the cookie may maintain the information you entered when you filled out the activist registration page. As you move through the site, any fields requiring information about you that have already been captured may automatically appear. However, after approximately fifteen minutes, the session cookie times out. If you return to our Website later, your personal information fields will not be filled automatically.

“Remember Me” Persistent Cookies: We use “Remember Me” persistent cookies—only if you opt-in to them—to enhance your experience while visiting any of our Websites. A Remember Me persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time and may contain a reference to your personal information such as your name and address stored in a secure database. Remember Me and other cookies do NOT contain reference to your credit card number / financial information. Remember Me cookies enable us to perform functions such as:

1. Prefilling your personal information into forms such as registration forms, take action forms, or donation forms. The Remember Me cookies will not time-out after fifteen minutes.
2. Providing a personal greeting to you (e.g., “Hello Sally”) on the homepage of our Wildlife Action Center  on homepages of our sites, or in other places.
3. Displaying information relevant to actions you have taken. For example, in our Wildlife Action Center we can show Recent Actions You’ve Taken through ESC.
4. Providing you with actions, events, or other information that is relevant to you or will enhance your user experience. For example, in our Wildlife Action Center, we may display actions for California activists only to those who have California addresses; for Ohio activists, we can display Ohio-specific actions, but not actions specific to other states; etc.

ESC only will use Remember Me persistent cookies on your computer if you opt-in to their use. No Remember Me cookies will be placed on your computer unless you opt-in. ESC also may use other types of persistent cookies that do not contain a reference to your personal information for limited tasks such as ensuring that a user cannot take a survey more than once from a given computer.

See “Your Help is Needed” section below for more information on protecting your information.

Disabling Cookies: Persistent cookies leave a record on your computer that you have visited our sites. However, you have the ability to remove cookies from your computer. Your Internet browser’s “Help” section will give you information on how to delete cookies. In addition, there are many Websites that provide browser- and operating system-specific information on how to delete cookies. When thinking about whether you want to delete cookies, you should be aware that some sites require cookies to function properly. After you delete cookies, you may have to re-register with some sites or you may notice difficulty in browsing some sites.

Clear Gifs (Web Beacons):
We may choose at some point to employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons) that can help to better manage content on our sites by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

Security:
This Website has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. The security measures used on this site include, but are not limited to, industry-standard Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, Verisign certificates, firewalls, and internal policies to maintain the security of stored data. While we follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

After you take action and opt-in to our activist network through our Wildlife Action Center or sentinel sites or donate, you will have a personal subscription management page, where you will be able to edit your personal information and edit what email lists you wish to subscribe to. Access to your personal subscription management page is controlled to protect the privacy of your data — our Website requires that you log on with your e-mail address and personal password to access your personal subscription management page.

Remember, many breaches of security occur when users are not vigilant in protecting their own information. The next section of our privacy policy suggests some actions you can take to help control the security of your personal information.

Your Help Is Needed:
Although ESC does its best to protect your privacy on this and our other Websites, we need your help. You can help in the following ways:

1. You have control over your own privacy. Think carefully before providing any personal information.
2. Although this site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control, no email or Web transmission is completely secure against interception. If you are worried because your communication is very sensitive, do not send it via email or submit it online. See below for additional ways to contact us.
3. Remember that we cannot protect your privacy once you leave our sites, such as by “hyperlink.” So when you visit other Websites including shopping/e-commerce sites affiliated with ESC but managed by third party organizations, check each site’s privacy policy yourself, and be careful about the information you offer up.
4. We may send you personalized information via email or provide personalized links in emails that allow data fields to be automatically populated with certain personal information. Therefore, you should always keep your email account information secure and not allow others to access your email account.
5. You should only forward our email messages to others through the “Tell A Friend” buttons or links provided within the email. When you use your email system’s forwarding capabilities (i.e., not “Tell a Friend”), others may be able to see your personal information in that email. Likewise, others may be able to take actions in your name and/or access your personal information by clicking on links personalized to you. Note: Your credit card and other financial information will NEVER be visible to others by clicking on links in emails to you.
6. You may be given the option to opt-in to a Remember Me persistent cookie on your computer (see Use of Cookies above). Remember that once you have set a Remember Me persistent cookie that contains a reference to your personal information, anyone can access your personal information by using your computer. Hence, you should not opt-in to Remember Me persistent cookies on a public computer.
7. In addition to the records left on your computer by cookies, your browser and operating system contain other records of your Web browsing and other actions (e.g., browser history). As with cookies, you can find information about how to clear these history trails in your browser’s “Help” section or through other Web sites that provide detailed information for each browser. If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this website, or your dealings with this website, you can contact: [email protected].