Privacy Policy

INTRODUCTION

This website, (http://www.therulesblog.wpengine.com) is operated by /The Rules.

We are committed to protecting your privacy online. We’re members of /The Rules as well, and we treat your privacy as we do our own. We wrote this privacy policy to let you know how we treat your personal information – and to show you all the ways we work hard to keep it safe and private.

YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

/The Rules will send you updates by e-mail. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so by contacting (unsubscribe@therules.org) with the subject heading “unsubscribe.” Please allow 8-10 business days for your information to be removed.

/The Rules may send you information by SMS/mobile phone. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our SMS list, you may do so by responding STOP.

We do not share the information you’ve given us with unaffiliated groups without your explicit permission.

We may share some of your personal information with the following affiliated groups: Affiliated Third Parties – for example, our database administrators – for the sole purpose of helping Us do our work. These groups do not share your personal information or use it for any purpose other than as instructed by Us.

Third Party Administrators, such as organizations we engage to facilitate large distribution of messages. The content of these emails will be from The Rules and these third parties do not have direct access to your personally identifiable information.

In addition, with your explicit permission, we pass along certain of your information to the following groups (as is standard practice): World leaders, news publications and other targets when you choose to use our email tool to send them messages. World leaders, news publications, and the general public when you sign petitions or complete surveys.

When you give /The Rules personal information, we take steps to ensure that your information is treated securely. Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, /The Rules cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems.

Under circumstances where we determine that members may be misusing our systems for malicious purposes (for example, using the numbers we provide to make harassing phone calls), such activities may be reported to law enforcement agencies. In such cases, /The Rules may release personally identifiable information, including name and address, to those agencies.

Please review this privacy policy periodically because we modify it from time to time. This privacy policy was last revised in November 2015. Each time you visit this Site or provide us with information through the Site, by doing so you are accepting practices described in the privacy policy in effect at that time. You are also accepting our specific rules or terms of use, which may be posted on specific sections of the Site, including areas for making donations, signing petitions or sending emails, taking part in our photo campaigns, and using our groups and forums.

This privacy policy applies to transactions and activities in which you engage and data gathered only on the Site. This privacy policy does not apply to pages hosted by other organizations to which we may link, as their privacy policies may differ, nor does it apply to any offline contact between you and /The Rules.

PETITIONS AND SURVEYS

For petitions and surveys you’ve signed or completed, we treat your name, city, state, and comments as public information—for example, we may provide compilations of petitions, with your comments, to world leaders and other targets, or to the press. We will not make your street address publicly available, but we may transmit it to the designated target as part of a petition. This is a standard industry practice in such situations. In no such case will we disclose your email address or phone number, without your permission. We may also make your comments, along with your first name, city and state available to the press and public online. /The Rules is not responsible for the content of use of your email address by campaign targets.

RESEARCH INSIGHTS

We may analyze aggregated information from /The Rules members and their actions for research related to improving our impact on anti-poverty issues. We may disclose such data and research findings to third parties, but will do so strictly in a non-personally identifiable manner.

SENDING EMAILS VIA /The Rules

In certain cases, we enable you to send individual emails to world leaders as well as Letters-to-the-Editor to various news publications, through our website. These messages are sent in your name, with your email address as the return address and your full name and contact information is provided as part of the submission. These messages will only be sent out under your name as you approve them on an individual basis using our email tool. You are solely responsible for the specific message(s) you send using our email tool. /The Rules takes no responsibility for the content of use of your email address by campaign targets.

PHONE CAMPAIGNS

From time to time, /The Rules staff members or volunteers may contact you by telephone about urgent campaigns. If you have provided your telephone number to us through our website then you may be contacted by one of our volunteers or staff members (each of whom are bound by the terms of the /The Rules privacy policy and will not use your personal information for any other purpose). If you would like to be removed permanently from our phone list, please send an email to (unsubscribe@therules.org) with the subject “Unsubscribe phone number”. Please allow 8-10 business days for your information to be removed.

CHILDREN

/The Rules does not solicit personally identifying information from children. Visitors who are under 13 years of age should ask their parent or legal guardian for assistance when using the Site and should not submit any personally identifying information to the Site. For example, visitors under 13 years of age should not make financial transactions or use our email tool.

COOKIES

Some parts of the Site are password-protected. We will use a cookie (cookies reside on your computer and are under the control of your browser) to enable you to return to password-protected areas of the website without having to re-enter your password. If you wish to disable these cookies, the help portion of the tool bar on most browsers will tell you how do that. If you set your browser to disable cookies, however, you may not be able to access certain parts of this Site.

DATA TRACKING

In order to better serve our members, we use cookies and periodically analyze web logs. We may collect IP addresses to better understand where our traffic is coming from, and to provide customized services to members. We may also use third-party services such as Google Analytics. This helps us understand traffic patterns and know if there are problems with our website. We may also use embedded images in emails to track open rates for our mailings, so that we can tell which mailings appeal most to /The Rules members.

URLs contained in emails may contain an ID that enables us to correctly identify the person who takes an action using a web page. We use these URLs to simplify the process of signing petitions and filling out surveys. We may occasionally present a shortened URL that references a longer URL that contains an id – we do this to simplify the display, to prevent links from becoming broken when copied, and to ensure compatibility with email programs that do not handle long URLs. When a shortened URL is displayed in an email, you will see the full URL in the browser’s address bar when you access the page.

LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES

/The Rules may provide links to third party websites, and other web sites may provide links to the Site. Third party websites operate according to their own terms of use and privacy policies. /The Rules has no control over such third party web sites, and by using this Site, you acknowledge and agree that /The Rules is not responsible for the availability of such third party sites, and does not endorse and is not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products or other materials on or available from such sites. You further acknowledge and agree that The Rules will not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with use of or reliance on any content, advertising, products, or other materials on or available from such sites.

CHANGES TO THE PRIVACY POLICY

/The Rules may revise or amend this policy at any time at our sole discretion. If we make any substantive changes in the way we collect or use personally identifying information provided by users, we will post a prominent announcement on our web site home page and post the changes on this page. We will never change our policies and practices to make them less protective of user information collected prior to the effective date of any changes without the consent of affected users. We encourage users to visit this page periodically to review our current policy.

CONTACT

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, your personal information, or the practices of this Site, you can contact contact@therules.org.

EMAIL FROM /THE RULES

/The Rules will send you updates on this and other important campaigns by email. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so by emailing unsubscribe@therules.org with “unsubscribe” in the subject heading. Please allow 8-10 business days for your information to be removed.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Use of this site is provided by /The Rules subject to the following Terms and Conditions. 1. Your use constitutes acceptance of these Terms and Conditions as at the date of your first use of the site. 2. /The Rules reserves the rights to change these Terms and Conditions at any time by posting changes online. Your continued use of this site after changes are posted constitutes your acceptance of this agreement as modified. 3. You agree to use this site only for lawful purposes, and in a manner which does not infringe the rights, or restrict, or inhibit the use and enjoyment of the site by any third party. 4. This site and the information, names, images, pictures, logos regarding or relating to /The Rules are provided “as is” without any representation or endorsement made and without warranty of any kind whether express or implied. In no event will /The Rules be liable for any damages including, without limitation, indirect or consequential damages, or any damages whatsoever arising from the use or in connection with such use or loss of use of the site, whether in contract or in negligence. 5. /The Rules does not warrant that the functions contained in the material contained in this site will be uninterrupted or error free, that defects will be corrected, or that this site or the server that makes it available are free of viruses or bugs or represents the full functionality, accuracy and reliability of the materials. 6. Copyright restrictions: Commercial use or publication of all or any item displayed is strictly prohibited without prior authorization from /The Rules. If you require further information about the use of content please contact us at contact@therules.org . 7. /The Rules takes no responsibility for the content of external Internet Sites. 8. Any communication or material that you transmit to, or post on, any public area of the site including any data, questions, comments, suggestions, or the like, is, and will be treated as, non-confidential and non-proprietary information. 9. If there is any conflict between these Terms and Conditions and rules and/or specific terms of use appearing on this site relating to specific material then the latter shall prevail. 10. These terms and conditions shall be governed and construed in accordance with the laws of the United States of America. Any disputes shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Courts of the United States of America. 11. If these Terms and Conditions are not accepted in full, the use of this site must be terminated immediately. 12. The views of contributors to this website are not necessarily the views of the /The Rules.

For information on the terms for submitting articles to the Site please visit: http://therulesblog.wpengine.com/terms-and-conditions/