Introduction: This privacy notice is intended to comprehensively explain our online information practices clearly and directly. Readers should be able to make an informed decision about entrusting your membership's contact information with Together Auction.
This policy became effective as of January 1, 2006
This privacy notice accurately reflects our information practices that we promise faithful adherence to.
- Policy Highlights
- Any information collected by this site will be used soley and exclusively for it's primary operation, which is to facilitate your auction event and in some cases connect your buyers and donors with each other.
- Your membership information will never be sold or used for marketing purposes by us or anyone else. (The only exception is messages that you create and send to your own members).
- Your site visitors will not see any ads or marketing messages unless you put them there yourself. The purpose of this site is to help you manage your auction - your initial setup cost and yearly usage fees cover the cost of keeping it running without additional advertising revenue.
- Access to bulk membership information is limited to the primary admin-user of the system, and even then only for purposes necessary to the central function of the system (such as generating the catalog).
- The system does include a feature that allows you to send emails to your own membership list. Theoretically, you could use this feature to send unwanted emails to your members - the system leaves this powerful feature up to your own discretion. For this reason, we do not send emails via our own mail servers, but instead ask each client to setup their own email account. In this way, the risk of being 'shut down for spamming' is limited by design - so if I am duped into selling my system to an unscrupulous spammer pretending to be a UU church, their behavior should not put any other client's email sending privileges at risk. (At least that is the idea - I hope we never need to test that feature).
- Despite these strict limits to accessing information in bulk, access to information for any given member is relatively less secure. A simple password (PIN) protects access to each member's statement (from which they can view, modify, or add new donated items). Users are notorious for choosing passwords that are relatively easy to guess, so the potential for 'online vandalism' does exist. We mitigate this risk primarily by keeping good backups. But in order to keep the system as easy to use as possible, we have intentionally NOT introduced more intrusive features (CAPTCHA) ... although at some point in the future we may be forced to tighten up end user access, we will strive to maintain ease of use as a top priority.
- The system passively collects sign-in information in the form of a cookie. This is used soley to provide a 'remember me' feature to facilitate repetitive use of the system from the same computer, and NOT for adware or any other form of tracking/spying.
- Some pages of the sytem collect anonymous usage information (IP, user-agent...etc), used soley for website traffic analysis - no personally identifiable information is collected in conjunction with this feature.
- Privacy Notice Table Of Contents:
- Our Commitment To Privacy
- The Information We Collect
- How We Use Information
- Our Commitment To Data Security
- How To Access Or Correct Your Information
- How To Contact Us
Privacy of your membership data is very important to us. When your memebers donate or purchase items from other members, they can expect to be connected with each other. They can also expect to receive email notices about your auction that you choose to send from time to time, and automatic reminder emails of events they are hosting or attending a few days in advance of these events. No other use of the auction database information is permitted.
The types of personal information we collect about your members are:
- Name
- Address
- Email address
- Phone number
We use the information about your members as follows:
- Name - appears in public catalog (only members that have donated items).
- Address - only appears as a map-link on member statements who have actually purchased items from an event host. Also appears at the top of each member's own statement (and thus you may choose to use it to send a statement via 'snail mail'.)
- Email address - never visible to the public. As above, only visible as an email-link on member statements who have actually purchased items from an event host. Similarly, guests will have an email-link on their statement exposing the host's email to them. The system does permit the sending of mass emails (manually) by the system administrator. These emails may contain customized information such as a link to each person's statement. There is not currently any way to selectively 'opt out' of some of these features (Although members may blank out their email to disable all of these features).
- Phone number - never visible to the public. Same exposure as address/email as described above.
Our Commitment To Data Security
To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online. A critical piece of this security is the admin password you received when your site was set up - please keep this private or call me to have it changed. If you are an outgoing chair, please call me to change the password before you move on - obviously I won't do this for someone I don't recognize.
How You Can Access Or Correct Your Information
You can access all your members information via the "check in" feature to search for a given member. Click on the name to bring up the member's statement. You can modify any personal information (not just the address) for that member using the big "Edit" link near to the top of the statement next to the address.
Should you have other questions or concerns about these privacy policies, please call us at 614 471-3786 or send us an email at sales@togetherauction.com.
Copyright (c) 2006 Together Software Ltd., all rights reserved.