privacy policy

Last updated: July 11, 2006

UniteFamilies.org respects your privacy and is committed to protecting it.  We provide this privacy policy statement to describe what personal information is collected from you, how we store and use that information, who has access to that information, and what information we store on your computer.

We may change the privacy policy when necessary.   When we do so, we will post our revised policy on this web site.  The revised privacy policy will be effective upon posting.

information we collect

personal information

We collect information you choose to enter in the Contact Us form.  We store the contact information but do not use it for any purpose other than contacting you in response to your feedback and collecting demographic information.

We collect personal information that you send along with your financial contribution.  We use this information to process your contribution and to send you a receipt.  This information is kept secure and is accessible only to those who have a need to know.

We collect contact information that you supply while signing the online or the paper petition.  This information will be submitted to legislators along with the petitions.  We may use this information to contact you regarding your signature.

We collect contact information when you request subscription to our discussion forum.  This information is used to subscribe you to the discussion group.  We may use this information to contact you regarding your participation in the group.

We will not disclose contact information to anyone unless required by law, regulation, or court order.

non-personal information

We collect information what normal web servers typically log, including browser types, IP addresses and pages visited within our website.  We may use this information in a statistical manner to evalutate how visitors use the website. 

third party sites

USPS, House of Representatives, etc.: We may refer you to third party sites such as the U.S. Postal Service (for zip+4 lookup) and the House of Representatives web site (for Congressperson lookup).  Data collected in those sites are governed by their respective privacy policies.  Data collected by those sites is not seen by us and we do not have any affiliation with those sites.

Donations: Personal data is collected by PayPal if you choose to make a financial contribution to us via PayPal.  PayPal's privacy policy applies to data they collect.  For contributions by check, various financial institutions that process these instruments may collect and store personal information in order to process the instruments.  Their respective privacy policies will apply to data they collect.

Online petition: Email addresses collected when signing the online petition are made available to us only if you indicate that you wish to share them with the petition author or make them public.  If you make your email address publicly visible, we cannot guarantee its privacy.  We strongly recommend against choosing to make your email address public while signing the online petition.  Providing your address while signing the petition is optional.  However, the address you provide will be publicly visible and we cannot guarantee its privacy thereafter.  We ask for your zip code while signing the online petition if you are in the U.S.  Legislators will need this information to determine whether you belong in their constituency or not.  This information will be publicly visible and we cannot guarantee its privacy. 

Discussion group: Our discussion group is hosted by Yahoo.  Their privacy policy governs data they collect and store in order to host our discussion group.

access to personal information

Contact information supplied in the feedback form, petitions, discussion group subscription request, and along with financial contributions is stored on computers that have physical, programmatic, and procedural safeguards. We employ many different security techniques to protect your contact information from unauthorized access.

what we store in your computer

Many web sites often store small files in your computer called cookies.  These cookies enable those web sites to personalize their content for you and track your navigation through their site.  We do not store any cookies on your computer.  Other than updating our visitor counters on our web pages, we do not track your navigation through our site or any other site.