Privacy Policy
At Smarter Story, we respect and protect the privacy of our constituents and those who use our website. The following Privacy Statement provides details about how your personal information is collected and used. This privacy statement applies to the Smarter Story website and services that are located in, but not limited to the smarterstory.com domain.
Information Collection and Use
Smarter Story is the sole owner of information collected on this site. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement. Smarter Story collects information from our site visitors at several different points on our website.
Our websites offers several opportunities for visitors to register for informational mailings. These registration forms are often linked to Smarter Story mailing lists and require users to give contact information (such as name and email address). We use this contact information to send users information about Smarter Story events, news updates and new initiatives. Users may opt-out of receiving future mailings at any time.
Opting Out and Modifying Information
Subscribers to our e-mail list may terminate their subscriptions via a link at the bottom of each email sent from Smarter Story.
Sharing and Usage
We will never share, sell, or rent your personal information with commercial third parties for their promotional use. We may disclose or report personal information in limited circumstances where we believe in good faith that disclosure is required under the law. For example, we may be required to disclose personal information to cooperate with regulators or law enforcement authorities, to comply with a legal process such as court order, subpoena, search warrant, or law enforcement request.
Use of Web Technologies
We use a variety of technologies on our site. Among these are cookies; a piece of information that our websites provide to your browser when you visit our sites, or that our advertising vendors use for targeting online ad delivery. Cookies allow us to verify the login status of customers using services linked directly with our website, track point of entry to point of registration for those users participating in our email signup programs, and to track and measure the success of a particular email mailing. Cookies also allow us to track overall site usage and determine areas users prefer, enabling us to make your visit to our website easier by recognizing you when you return and helping to provide you with a customized experience. Usage of a cookie is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information while on our site. If you choose to disable cookies, you may still use our site; however, you may have limited access to some areas within our websites.
We also keep track of activity on our website via log files stored on our web servers. We collect information such as IP address, browser type and version, and pages you view. We also keep track of how you got to our site and any links you click on to leave our site. Once you leave our site, we do not track you. We use your website activity to assist us in offering you a personalized Web experience, assist you with technical support, diagnose problems with our server, administer our websites and to tailor our informational offerings to you.
Privacy of Our Email Lists
As noted above, we maintain e-mail lists to keep interested, eligible individuals informed about important topics, and individuals must affirmatively request to join them. We configure our list server software to refuse to divulge the email addresses of our list subscribers to anyone other than those whom we authorize. However, we are not the author of this software, and are not responsible for any failures in the software to preserve subscriber anonymity.
Children’s Privacy
Because we care about the safety and privacy of children online, we comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). COPPA and its accompanying FTC regulation establish United States federal law that protects the privacy of children using the Internet. We do not knowingly contact or collect personal information from children under 13. Our site is not intended to solicit information of any kind from children under 13.
It is possible that by fraud or deception we may receive information pertaining to children under 13. If we are notified of this, as soon as we verify the information, we will immediately obtain parental consent or otherwise delete the information from our servers. If you want to notify us of our receipt of information by children under 13, please do so by emailing us at .
Security
We take every precaution to protect the confidentiality and security of your personal information by using industry-recognized security safeguards such as firewalls, coupled with carefully developed security procedures to protect your information from loss, misuse or unauthorized alteration. When we ask for sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, we protect it through the use of encryption during transmission, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol.
Smarter Story takes care to reinforce the importance of our website visitors’ security and privacy among our employees. Our employees are trained and required to safeguard your information and, using physical, electronic and procedural safeguards, we restrict access to personal information to those employees and agents for business purposes only.
Notification of Changes
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on the Smarter Story Website, so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.