Privacy Policy
The United States Internet Preservation Society ("USIPS" or "the Society") is committed to protecting the privacy of visitors to our website, as well as our members and volunteers. The Society has established this Privacy Policy to explain what information we collect through our websites and how it is used, as well as protections for our members's and donors's personal information.
In this policy, "USIPS" refers to USIPS staff, board members, cooperating attorneys, interns, volunteers, and consultants, all of whom are bound by law or contract to keep confidential information they receive as part of their assistance to USIPS.
USIPS does not sell or rent member, donor or website visitor information under any circumstances, and we do not share member, donor or visitor information without prior consent except as compelled by law. This restriction applies to member and donors who join or donate both online and offline.
USIPS is located within the United States, and therefore will transfer, process, and store your information in the United States, which may not provide as much protection as your home country.
Information Gathered by the Site
Logging: For visitors to our website, we generally log only timestamps, URLs, and HTTP requests and do internal analytical logging, including additional technical information such as IP addresses, until manually purged.
Circumstances in which USIPS may need to log and retain technical information for longer than seven days include when we believe it is reasonably necessary for USIPS's mission and functionality, including situations such as:
- site testing,
- diagnosis of technical problems,
- defending against attacks to the site,
- handling a spike in traffic or other abnormal, short-term circumstances, or
- research projects (in anonymized form) that serve our overall mission to defend freedom online.
In those and similar situations we will delete the information as soon as it is apparent that the information is no longer needed for the purpose for which it was retained.
Analytics: USIPS does not currently collect analytical information.
Cookies: USIPS does not issue any cookies.
Voluntarily Submitted Information: In addition, the Society collects and retains information you voluntarily submit to us. It is up to you whether to submit information to us, and how much information to provide. If you choose to become a USIPS member, use the USIPS Shop, otherwise donate to USIPS, we may ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, mailing address and phone number and will retain that information. For online donors and shoppers, we also ask for your credit card number or other payment information. If you use the USIPS Shop, you are asked to provide personal information, such as a shipping address, necessary to complete your transaction.
We may ask for additional personal information when you provide feedback or comments, or otherwise communicate with us. We are pleased to receive anonymous donations in the mail or in-person, but please note that your personal information may be required if you choose to donate using our online form, or if you choose to use a mobile payment processor for in-person donations (and the mobile payment processor will also receive your payment information, subject to their privacy policy.)
From time to time, we may ask for personal information on other portions of the site, such as asking you to sign a petition, participate in a contest, or provide prior art for a patent busting project.
Mailing Lists: If you choose to subscribe our free electronic newsletter or any of our other mailing lists, we collect your email address, and, if you choose to provide it, a zip or postal code.
USIPS's Use of Information
In general, USIPS uses the information provided by you to further its mission, including to protect privacy, defend freedom and innovation, and to protect your rights in the digital world.
Member and Donor Information: We use member and donor information for our legitimate interest in processing and managing your membership or contribution, including fundraising reminders and renewals. If you agree, we will use your email address to send you updates and alerts on protecting your rights in the digital world, so you may take action, such as contacting your representative in Congress or attending an event.
Publication by USIPS: If you provide information for publication we may use your name and contact information you have provided to us to provide you with attribution.
Other activities: We may run surveys, contests, or similar activities through this site. Such information will be used for the purposes for which it was collected. We use the information provided through our online shop to fulfill your order, and address any problems that might arise. We also look at technical information to diagnose problems with or consider improvements to our servers or related technologies and to administer eff.org and other websites we host or provide.
Third-Party Service Providers to USIPS
Portions of the usips.org site, including some of our individual action alert webpages, are operated by third-parties, such as grassroots campaign service providers. When necessary and appropriate, USIPS uses the following categories of third party services:
- content delivery networks and cloud hosting providers (for example, hosting and handling traffic to our site).
- financial services and payment processors (for example, your credit card and online payments)
- cloud email providers (for example, sending you email, like the newsletter)
- shipping and fulfillment services (for example, shipping any merchandise you purchase)
Where possible, we take steps to limit the ability of third parties to retain data about our users. These service providers may place session cookies on your computer. USIPS's service providers may also log standard technical information, such as the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer you are using; the browser software you use and your operating system; the date and time you access our site; and the Internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site. Our service providers may also store and organize the personal information collected through this site on our behalf. USIPS's third party providers primarily process information in the United States, but may process data in other jurisdictions.
In addition, for all of USIPS's service providers, hosting providers and credit card processors and any other providers we may use in the future, the information collected from USIPS users remains protected by the terms of our agreements with those providers and we will ensure that the information to be kept confidential and disclosed only to employees who require such access in the course of their assigned duties.
USIPS may change the specific third-party providers from time to time, and will transfer stored information to any new provider subject to similar restrictions and agreements. From time to time, USIPS may work with third-party consultants or other service providers who may have access to personally identifiable information. In such cases, we will restrict their use of personally identifiable information in accordance with their assigned tasks.
Third-Party Services and APIs
USIPS's site also provides links to or interacts with a wide variety of third-party websites, including interactive links to sites like social media, telephone calling services, mapping services, or video hosting websites, often via application programming interfaces (APIs). USIPS is not responsible for, and does not have any control over, the privacy practices or the content of such third parties.
We encourage users to read the privacy policies of any website visited via links from or interactions with the USIPS Site. Where appropriate, we will provide specific notice of these third-party services at the point of interaction.
Disclosure of Your Information
While USIPS endeavors to provide the highest level of protection for your information, we may disclose personally identifiable information about you to third parties in limited circumstances, including: (1) with your consent; or (2) when we have a good faith belief it is required by law, such as pursuant to a subpoena or other judicial or administrative order.
If we are required by law to disclose the information that you have submitted, we will attempt to provide you with prior notice (unless we are prohibited or it would be futile) that a request for your information has been made in order to give you an opportunity to object to the disclosure. We will attempt to provide this notice by email, if you have given us an email address, or by postal mail if you have entered a postal address. If you do not challenge the disclosure request, we may be legally required to turn over your information.
In addition, we will independently object to requests for access to information about users of our site that we believe to be improper and we have done so.
Updating or Removing Your Information
Your consent to our use of your information is very important to us. If you would like to withdraw your consent to receive the EFFector newsletter, Action Alerts and other bulk emails, you may use this subscription management page to unsubscribe. If you would like to otherwise withdraw your consent, restrict or object to EFF’s processing of your data, please email privacy@usips.org.
Data Storage and Retention
USIPS's server logs are stored and retained as explained above in the section on logging.
Email subscriptions information is retained until you unsubscribe from the mailing list(s).
If you communicate with USIPS, such as through info@usips.org, we keep records of those communications indefinitely, pursuant to our document retention policy (described below).
Financial records of donations and other transactions are retained indefinitely, pursuant to our document retention policy. Paper records of donations, such as event donation forms and signup sheets, are typically destroyed soon after entry. Check copies and payment distribution details are normally kept up to seven years. Accompanying donor information is kept indefinitely unless the individual requests that it be removed.
Our document retention policy provides that USIPS generally retains documents for the period of their immediate or current use, unless longer retention is necessary to comply with contractual or legal requirements. However, data storage periods are based on USIPS's assessment of its needs and might include retaining some documents for historical reference and retaining some documents because EFF has insufficient organizational resources available to dedicate to their review and destruction, and/or other pertinent factors.
If we inadvertently collect more personal information than intended, we endeavor to delete the extraneous information. When we no longer need to retain information or when deleting information on request, we endeavor to remove all copies. However, please understand that deleted information may continue to persist on backup media.
Security
USIPS employs industry standard security measures to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control, including appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, such as the pseudonymization and encryption of personal data, data backup systems, and engaging security professionals to evaluate our systems effectiveness. USIPS has turned on HTTPS by default.
Although we make good faith efforts to store information collected by USIPS in a secure operating environment, we cannot guarantee complete security.
Changes to Our Policies
USIPS's Privacy Policy may change from time to time. However, any revised privacy policy will be consistent with USIPS's mission. If we make any substantive changes to our policies, we will post notice of changes on this page.
1750 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20038
Phone: (423) 973-9793
privacy@usips.org