DEFENDERS OF WILDLIFE PRIVACY POLICY FOR WWW.YOUWILD.ORG WEBSITE

We at Defenders of Wildlife (Defenders) want this Website, YouWild.org, to be a safe place for users. Defenders will do its part by not requiring you to register or provide any information at all to create a YouWild morph. You can do your part by reading this policy, making your own informed decisions about what information you wish to provide, 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. saving and sharing your YouWild morph(s)
  2. submitting your morph to our YouWild Hall of Fame
  3. signing our petitions
  4. making a donation.

This privacy policy does not apply when you use this Website as a portal to click through to other Websites including Defenders of Wildlife's main website, www.defenders.org . Please review the new site's privacy policy to determine the treatment and collection of your information if you leave this site.

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 Defenders of Wildlife 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 myprivacy@defenders.org or through the address at the end of this privacy policy below.



Personal Information You May Choose to Provide:
In order to utilize certain features of this site or receive information from Defenders, 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 Defenders 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 registering to receive email updates from Defenders, we will have a record of your email address and all other information you choose to provide. We will send you Wildlife eNews and also may contact you with action alerts to save wildlife, fundraising campaigns, and other Defenders activities.
  2. If you make an online donation to Defenders, your information will be added to our donor list and database, and you may be contacted about other Defenders activities, news, action alerts, and/or fundraising campaigns. Defenders 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 memberservices@defenders.org. Defenders 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 Defenders 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. Defenders will not rent mail addresses of our activist list to other organizations.
  4. We will receive any other information you choose to provide. For example, we may manage a YouWild Hall of Fame gallery, blogs or otherwise allow you to post stories or photos from time to time. By submitting morphs, photos, or other 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.

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, Defenders will not give or sell the personal information you provide online.

Financial Information You May Choose to Provide:
If you choose to make an online donation to Defenders, 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 Web site 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 Websites you enter, we may 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 may use both persistent cookies and session cookies on this Website.

Session Cookies: We may use session cookies to make it easier for you to navigate certain sections of our Website. If you choose to provide personal information by using an interactive application on our site, such as saving and sharing your morph, signing our petition, or making an online donation to Defenders, we may 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 other Websites, the cookie may maintain the information you entered when you filled out the donation page (except it will NOT contain your credit card number or any financial information). As you move through the site, any fields requiring information about you that has already been captured may automatically appear. However, after 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 may 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 Defenders' Wildlife Action Center (http://action.defenders.org) or in other places on Defenders' other sites.

Defenders 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. Defenders 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 "Ways to Protect Your Privacy Online" section below for more information on protecting your information.

Defenders of Wildlife and our sister organization, Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, share cookies across our sites. In other words, if you navigate between sites owned and operated by Defenders of Wildlife and Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund during one session, session cookies will be used as described above. Likewise, if you choose to opt-in to Remember Me persistent cookies on this site or any other site owned and operated by Defenders of Wildlife, these cookies will make the same features and functionality available on sites owned and operated by Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund. The converse is also true. If you opt-in to Remember Me cookies via a Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund site, the uses above will persist on Defenders of Wildlife sites.

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.

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.

Ways to Protect Your Privacy Online:

Although Defenders 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, 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 forward our email messages to others through the "Tell A Friend" buttons or links provided within the email or on this site. 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.
  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 and operating system. See Use of Cookies . Disabling Cookies above.



How to Unsubscribe or Contact Defenders of Wildlife About Your Information:
If you do not want to receive any email from us in the future, click on the "Click here to update your information or unsubscribe" link at the bottom of most emails from Defenders. Note that your donation and action history may remain in Defenders' databases, but we will not send you email. Alternatively, send an email to us at memberservices@defenders.org indicating that you wish to Unsubscribe.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this website, or your dealings with this website, you can contact us per below:

You can send an email to myprivacy@defenders.org

You also can contact us via mail at


Online Communications

Defenders of Wildlife
National Headquarters
1130 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036