CCIL: Info: Policy: Web site Privacy

Chester County InterLink is an independent, Non-Profit 501(c)(3) corporation. Our mission is "to ensure that Chester County residents and organizations have easy and equitable electronic access to information while encouraging interaction among them as part of an electronic community." We wish to respect your privacy and feel you have a right to know what information we acquire from our web site users and how that information is used. This document provides a disclosure of those policies.

Information Collection and Use

All information on Chester County InterLink are owned by their respective owners. Articles, personal web pages, and comments are owned by the author. The CCIL logo, CCIL informational pages, and administrative features are owned by Chester County InterLink. Chester County InterLink, nor its users, will sell, share, or rent information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement. Chester County InterLink does collect information from our users at several different places on our web site.

Registration

In order to utilize the custom features of this web site, a user must first complete the registration form. During the registration a user is required to give their contact information (such as name, address, and phone number) as well as their age as laws regarding minors differ from adults. This information is used to contact the user about the services for which they have expressed interest. It is also used to send out once a year requests for support and donations. We do not sell this information to any third parties. It is optional for the user to provide demographic information (such as gender, ethnicity, and level of education), we encourage users to provide this information. Demographic information about a single user will not be disclosed, however, this information may be used for statistical purposes for grant writing. In the future this information may also be used to provide our users with a personalized web experience.

Order

Currently, CCIL does not require users to provide credit card, shipping address, or other ordering information. As an organization we currently provide our services at no cost to the end user. We do ask, however, that our users support us through donations and volunteer hours. Any request on a CCIL hosted site for ordering information should be regarded with suspect and should be reported to the CCIL web-master immediately as it is a direct violation of our policies.

A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's hard drive containing a string that uniquely identifies that user. Usage of a cookie is only linked to a users information after they have logged into one of our sites. Prior to login it simply provides a fluid experience while on our web site. After a user closes their browser, the cookie simply terminates. After login either to our main web site or WebMail the cookie is identified with a single CCIL user. No personal information is ever stored in the cookie on the users machine, this information remains in a secured location on CCIL's servers. By using the cookie the user would not have to log in to a particular service more than once as long as their browser remains open, thereby saving time while on our site. If a user rejects the cookie, they may still use our site. Some areas of our web site, however, are known to not operate correctly without the use of cookies.

Log Files

We use IP address to analyze trends, troubleshoot problems, track user's movement to improve our web site structure, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information in our log files. The IP address, however, is appended to the headers of emails sent with our online email service WebMail. This is done so that reports of fraud and Internet spam can be tracked to the originator of that message. This is standard practice for most Internet based email services. We also collect information such as web browser types to best match our content to the platforms our visitors use.

Sharing

We will share aggregated demographic and usage information with our supporters, granting institutions, and for media support. This information is not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person.

The US Postal Service also has access to the address information on the outside of mailings sent by Chester County InterLink to make sure they get to the targeted recipient.

Information we provide to these parties are not allowed to use personally identifiable information except for the purpose of providing these services.

Links

This web site contains a number of links to external sites. Please be aware that Chester County InterLink is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this Web site.

Mailing Lists

If a user wishes to subscribe to CCIL sponsored email lists, we collect email addresses of the subscribers. Disclosure of this information is up to the maintainer of the list. After being subscribed to the list you may change your personal settings to opt-out of any form of public disclosure. Information on changing your settings will be mailed to you once you register as a user of the list. List maintainers are encouraged not to make disclosure a default property of mailing lists.

Community Event Postings

We encourage area organizations to post their events to our web site. We require that a user first log in, before providing this information. Any posts of community information, therefore, will be internally linked to the user. Visitors of our web site, however, will only see information that you provide on the request form. We encourage that you use a business phone number and provide little to no private information. The post remains the property of the Poster and any incorrect information or misuse of that information is the responsibility of the Poster not Chester County InterLink.

Security

Chester County InterLink takes precautions to protect our users' information. Most of our services allow for both secured and standard submission. Look for the [closed lock]

icon and click it to switch to the secured version of a particular form or service. This will provide either 40-bit export grade security or 128-bit SSL encryption if your browser supports it. In order to support the widest range of available web browsers we allow our users to chose the level of security they are comfortable with and are able to use.

While we provide the option to use SSL encryption to protect sensitive information while online, we also protect user-information off-line. All of our users' information, not just the sensitive information, is restricted. CCIL users have access while using CCIL services, such as InterLink and WebMail, to lookup services Finger and LDAP respectively to make member-member communication easier. The maximum information users have access to using these services are: Username, Full name, user home directory, last system login time, email address, and information you place in your .plan and .project files. CCIL volunteers and staff who need access to contact information (for example, our registration team or help desk) are granted access to personally identifiable information. Our volunteers and staff are asked to respect users privacy by using this information solely for customer service needs. Our staff also is asked to use secure connections to our administrative functions when accessing the system remotely. Finally, the servers that we store personally identifiable information in are behind two locked doors and inside a secure environment, behind a locked cage.

If you have any questions about the security at our web site or have suggestions on improving our security, you can send an email to webmaster@ccil.org.

Site and Service Updates

We send all new members a welcoming letter and request for donations. Established members will receive an annual request for donations and emails from the board notifying users of any major system changes. We ask that users pay attention to these notices as they could effect your ability to access our system in the future. It is not possible to un-subscribe from service announcements, welcome letters, and donation requests. These items are necessary for our service to continue. We communicate with our users primarily through email or telephone.

Correction/Updating Personal Information

If a user's personally identifiable information changes (such as your zip code or phone number), or if you no longer desire our service, we will endeavor to provide a way to correct, update or remove that user's personal data provided to us. This can be done by logging into our web site and going to the personal user page and clicking on the "Update Personal Information" link or by contacting the CCIL help desk help@ccil.org.

Choice/Opt-out

We cannot provide our users individual choice to opt-out from all user mailings as we do not have a large enough staff to fulfill these requests and for the reasons stated above.

A user, however, may unsubscribe from any CCIL sponsored mailing list by sending an email to listname-request@lists.ccil.org with unsubscribe(eg. helpdesk-request@lists.ccil.org subject: unsubscribe sIeva). More details can be found by simply sending email to listname-request@lists.ccil.org, with the subject "help" without the quotes. Information about CCIL mailing lists will be available on the CCIL mailing list information site.

Notification of Changes

If we decided to change our privacy policy, we will post a news article on our Home page so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We will likely also notify all users by email as well. If at any point we decide to use personally identifiable information about a particular user(s), we will notify those users by way of an email. Users will have the choice whether or not we use their personally identifiable information in the way we describe in the email.

Legal Disclosure

We want to respect your privacy, but we reserve the right to examine and act on *any* piece of data deposited on our property in situations including (but not limited to) potentially criminal or tortuous actions. Upon receipt of a search warrant by a legal agent, as a public organization we will comply with the request.

In general, we will protect your information to the maximum extent we are able. Our volunteers and staff respect your privacy and will not share that information unless legal action requires it.