REA Privacy Policy

Effective Date: 20 March 2019

This Privacy Policy explains the collection, use, processing, transferring and disclosure of personal information by the Religious Education Association  (“REA,” “REA-APPRRE,” “we,” “our,” or “us”), a United States charitable organization.

This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and made part of the REA Terms of Use.

Unless otherwise noted on a particular website or service hosted by REA, this Privacy Policy applies to your use of all websites that REA operates. These include https://religiouseducation.net and all the meeting sites found at that URL (collectively, the “Websites”). This Privacy Policy also applies to all products, information, and services provided through the Websites, including without limitation the registration for meetings, submission of papers, and other activities of REA (together with the Websites, the “Services”).

By accessing any of the Websites or using any of the Services, you are accepting and agreeing to the practices described in this Privacy Policy.

Our Principles

REA has designed this policy to be consistent with the following principles:

  • Privacy policies should be human readable and easy to find.
  • Data collection, storage, and processing should be simplified as much as possible to enhance security, ensure consistency, and make the practices easy for users to understand.
  • Data practices should always meet the reasonable expectations of users.

Personal Information REA Collects and How it is Used

As used in this policy, “personal information” means information that would allow someone to identify you, including your name, email address, or other information from which someone could deduce your identity.

REA collects and uses personal information in the following ways:

Website and Fundraising Analytics: When you visit our Websites and use our Services, we collect some information about your activities through tools such as Google and WordPress Analytics. The type of information that we collect focuses on general information such as country or city where you are located, pages visited, time spent on pages, heat-map of visitors’ activity on the site, information about the browser you are using, etc. We collect and uses this information pursuant to our legitimate interest in enhancing the security and utility of our Services. The information we gather and process is used in the aggregate to spot trends without deliberately identifying individuals, except in cases where you engage in a transaction with REA by donating money, registering for a meeting, submitting a paper for a meeting, and so on. In those cases, REA retains certain information about your visit to the Services pursuant to its legitimate interest in understanding its community of supporters for networking and fundraising purposes, and this information is stored in connection with other personal information you provide to REA.

Note that you can learn about Google’s practices in connection with its analytics services and how to opt out of it by downloading the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, available at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. If you would like to opt out of CC’s fundraising analytics, please contact legal [at] creativecommons [dot] org with your request.

Information from Cookies: We and our service providers (for example, those providing analytics as described above) may collect information using cookies or similar technologies for the purposes described above and below. Cookies are pieces of information that are stored by your browser on the hard drive or memory of your computer, phone, or other Internet access device. Cookies may enable us to personalize your experience on the Services, maintain a persistent session, passively collect demographic information about your computer, provide personal details on forms, and other activities. The Websites may use different kinds of cookies and other types of local storage (such as browser-based or plugin-based local storage).

Log-In Services: When you register to obtain a user account on any of the Services (any such person, a “Member”), including but not limited to becoming a member of REA, you will be asked to provide personal information to create your account and establish a password and profile. REA collects and uses this personal information pursuant to its legitimate interest in establishing and maintaining your account providing you with the features we provide Members. We may use your email address to contact you regarding changes to this policy or other applicable policies. The name or nickname you provide in connection with your account may be used to attribute you in connection with any content you submit to any Service. In addition, whenever you use an REA Login Service to log into a Website or use the Services, our servers keep a plain text log of the Websites you visit and when you visit them.

Events: When you sign up or register for an event hosted or supported by REA, you will be asked to provide some personal information, including your name, email address, and other information as needed. We collect and use this personal information pursuant to our legitimate interest in organizing and running the relevant event and networking among participants. We may share your personal information with vendors, third party contractors, partner organizations, and volunteers for the purpose of organizing and running the event and related activities.

Emails and Newsletters: When you sign up to receive updates from REA or otherwise subscribe to one of our mailing lists, you will be asked to provide some personal information. We collect and use this personal information pursuant to our legitimate interest in providing news and updates to, and collaborating with, our supporters, members, and volunteers.

Email Analytics: When you receive communications from REA after signing up for our newsletter, meetings, or other ongoing email communications from us, we share certain contact information with MailChimp to send messages to you and use MailChimp analytics to track whether you open the mail, click on the links, and otherwise interact with what we send. You may opt out of this tracking by choosing to get plain-text emails from REA. We collect and use this personal information pursuant to our legitimate interest in understanding the interests of our community of supporters and members in order to provide more relevant news and updates.

Note that you can learn about MailChimp’s practices in connection with its analytics services at https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/. If you would like to opt out of these emails altogether, you can click the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of any message.

We also use Mailgun for reminder messages letting you know when your membership is due for renewal or a meeting you have registered will be starting. You can review Mailman’s privacy policy at https://www.mailgun.com/legal/privacy-policy/.

Memberships and Donations: When you join REA, donate money to REA, register for an event, or participation in our activities, you will be asked to provide personal information, including payment information. REA collects and uses this personal information pursuant to its legitimate interest in raising funds to ensure the sustainability of our nonprofit organization and, where applicable, to provide you with the membership benefits, event access , or other material you purchased.

If you become a member of REA, you will be given a profile page, editable by you, which will be pre-populated with certain information you provide with your membership request. Your name, faith,institutional affiliation, images, and other content you upload will be publicly displayed to anyone who visits the site while logged in with their own membership credentials. All other personal information that you submit to your profile page, including your contact information, demographic information, email address, related account information or URL details will be displayed only to REA staff and volunteers and other members. Your information will be transferred to and from the various fora that further REA’s mission and enable the association, including the board and working groups, for purposes of governance participation, activity interaction, networking, and other purposes related to the mission, vision, and activities of REA.

Funding and Participation Opportunities: When you apply for a scholarship, grant, or fellowship from REA, or when you apply to be selected to participate in one of our other programs, we will collect certain personal information from you in order to evaluate your application and process your funding as necessary. REA collects and uses this personal information pursuant to its legitimate interest in providing funding and participation opportunities to its members and supporters and in order to comply with its legal obligations under applicable law. We will share that information with the people who are designated to select participants in, and help manage, those programs, which may include people not employed by REA.

Other Voluntarily Provided Information: When you provide feedback to REA, sign a petition distributed by REA, or otherwise submit personal information to REA, we collect and use this personal information pursuant to our legitimate interest in better understanding our community of members and supporters and in furtherance of the particular program or activity to which you provided feedback or other input.

Comments: When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media: If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Embedded content from other websites: Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Retention of Personal Information

The majority of the personal information collected and used as explained in the section above is aggregated and stored in a central database hosted on the REA website. REA aggregates this data pursuant to its legitimate interest in having information stored in a single location to minimize complexity, increase consistency in internal practices, better understand its community of members and supporters, and enhance the security of the data.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Access to Your Personal Information

You are generally entitled to access personal information that REA holds and to have inaccurate data corrected or removed to the extent REA still maintains it. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes. In certain circumstances, you also may have the right to object for legitimate reasons to the processing or transfer of personal information. If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please write to secretary [at] religiouseducation [dot] net explaining your request.

Disclosure of Your Personal Information

REA does not disclose personal information to third parties except as specified elsewhere in this policy and in the following instances:

REA may share personal information with our contractors and service providers in order to undertake the activities described above.

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

We may disclose your personal information to third parties in a good faith belief that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) take action regarding suspected illegal activities; (b) enforce or apply our Terms of Use and this Privacy Policy; (c) enforce our Constitution, Bylaws,  and policies contained and incorporated therein, or (d) comply with legal process, such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order.

Security of Your Personal Information

REA has implemented reasonable physical, technical, and organizational security measures for personal information that we process against accidental or unlawful destruction, or accidental loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure or access, in compliance with applicable law. However, no website can fully eliminate security risks. Third parties may circumvent our security measures to unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. If any data breach occurs, we will post a reasonably prominent notice to the Websites and comply with all other applicable data privacy requirements including, when required, personal notice to you if you have provided and we have maintained an email address for you.

Children

The Services are not directed at children under the age of 13. Consistent with the U.S. federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), we will never knowingly request personal information from anyone under the age of 13 without requiring parental consent. Our Terms of Use specifically prohibit anyone using our Services from submitting any personally identifiable information about persons under 13 years of age. Any person who provides their personal information to REA through the Services represents that they are 13 years of age or older.

Third Party Service Providers

REA uses third party service providers in connection with the Services, including website hosting services, database management, credit card processing, and others. Some of these service providers may place session cookies on your computer, and they may collect and store your personal information on our behalf in accordance with the data practices and purposes explained above.

Third Party Sites

The Services may provide links to a wide variety of third party websites. You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party websites. This Privacy Policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other websites.

Transferring Data to Other Countries

If you are accessing or using the Services in regions with laws governing data collection, processing, transfer and use, please note that when we use and share your data as specified in this policy, we may transfer your information to recipients in countries other than the country in which the information was originally collected. Those countries may not have the same data protection laws as the country in which you initially provided the information.

The Services are currently hosted in the United States, which means your personal information will be located on servers in the United States. The majority of contractors that Creative Commons is using as of the effective date of this Privacy Policy are located in the United States, but this may change from time to time.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may occasionally update this Privacy Policy. When we do, we will provide you with notice of such update through (at a minimum) a reasonably prominent notice on the Websites and Services, and will revise the Effective Date below. We encourage you to periodically review this Privacy Policy to stay informed about how we are protecting, using, processing and transferring the personal information we collect.

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