Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
A4AI.org is managed by the World Wide Web Foundation, and the Foundation’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy apply to your use of this site.
Last modified: August 1, 2016
These Terms of Use and Privacy Policy are continually under review to ensure your privacy and security.
This website, https://www.a4ai.org (the “Site”) is operated by World Wide Web Foundation (“We” or “Us”). We’re a US-registered not-for profit under Section 501(c)(3). Our head office is in Washington DC, and we’re bound by the laws of the District of Columbia. We do our best to keep our website up to date, secure and accurate, but we can make no warranties about this. If you choose to use this site, you do so at your own risk.
In this policy, “World Wide Web Foundation” refers to World Wide Web Foundation staff, contractors, board members, cooperating attorneys, interns, volunteers, and consultants, all of whom are bound by law or contract to keep information they receive as part of their assistance to World Wide Web Foundation confidential.
A. Collection of Information
1. Privacy
We work hard to protect your privacy. We developed this privacy policy to let you know how we treat your personal information and the ways we work to keep it safe and private. We also want to clearly flag the risks associated with using our website, as with any website.
We strongly believe that you have the right to control the use of your personal information, and our policies are designed to protect that right.. Our broader policy is to collect as little information as possible in order to achieve our mission. We take industry standard security measures to protect personal information under our control from loss, misuse, and alteration.
2. How We Collect Information
World Wide Web Foundation collects personal information from you in two different ways. The first is to help us understand how well we’re doing. To help us assess this, the World Wide Web Foundation collects non-personally identifiable information regarding website visitors, including IP geolocation data, browser and domain information. We may also track visitor usage patterns on our website, including website hits.
World Wide Web Foundation also collects personal information from you, with your consent, in specific circumstances such as when you subscribe to our newsletters or campaigns, or sign a petition online. By law, if you make a donation online, we are required to collect and retain your full name, but we will never use this information for any other purpose, unless you give us your explicit consent.
When you are on a World Wide Web Foundation website and are asked for personal information, you are sharing that information with the World Wide Web Foundation alone, unless stated otherwise.
3. Use of Information
The World Wide Web Foundation does not sell, rent, or lease your personal data under any circumstances. We do not purchase lists from other sources. We will not use personal information that you provide to us in a manner inconsistent with the purposes for which you provided it to us.
As noted above, the World Wide Web Foundation uses non-personally identifiable information we collect about website visits to help administer and improve our website.
If you opt to receive certain communications from us (such as newsletters or action alerts), we will use the information you provide on the sign-up form to send you these communications.
For World Wide Web Foundation petitions and surveys, we only require an email address, your name and country. Beyond that, it is up to you to decide exactly how much information to submit. We do not provide your full name, email address or other identifiable information to third parties including to the media or decision makers (such as those who are the targets of particular campaigns). We provide compilations of petition numbers to third parties but we will never disclose your personal identity. Occasionally we may publicize user’s general comments, which are connected with a first name and country (e.g.,Vuyokazi, South Africa) but there no other identifiable information will be disclosed.
When you make a donation online, the World Wide Web Foundation collects a variety of information about you including your first name, last name, address, city, state/region/province, billing address, zip/postal code, country, and email address. This data is required by our Third Party Service provider (see below). It is encrypted and will not be shared with or sold to any other party. We do not retain credit card information.
4. Disclosure of Information
Any subpoena or attempts by government agencies or private sector organisations to gain access to any information that you give us will be vigorously challenged.
In the unlikely event that we are required by law to disclose the information that you have submitted, we will attempt to provide you with notice (unless we are prohibited from doing so) that a request for your information has been made, in order to give you an opportunity to object to the disclosure. We will attempt to provide this notice by email, if you have given us an email address or by phone if you have provided us with that information.
In addition, we will independently object to requests for access to information about users of our site that we believe to be improper.
5. Cookies
We use cookies for a limited number of purposes. A “cookie” is a tiny element of data that our site can send to your browser, which may then be stored on your hard drive. If you are concerned about your privacy and the use of cookie technology you may set your web browser to notify you when you receive a cookie. You may also set your browser to refuse the cookies our site attempts to send you. However, if you choose to reject cookies from World Wide Web Foundation, some functions on the website may be limited.
6. Sending Emails Via World Wide Web Foundation
In certain cases, we may enable you to send individual e-mails to friends through our website. These messages are generally sent in your name, with your e-mail address as the return address. Your name and contact information is provided as part of the submission. These messages will only be sent out under your name as you approve them on an individual basis using our email tool. You are solely responsible for the specific message(s) you send using our email tool. If those messages are to be sent out under the World Wide Web Foundation name we will advise you before sending.
7. Third Party Service Providers
The World Wide Web Foundation uses third-party service providers for some services on our web site. We own and have control over the information contained on contracted accounts (including personal information you provide). However, each third-party provider has its own privacy policy that is linked below. Although we have carefully vetted the policies of our service providers and believe that they provide adequate protection for our users, they are not under our control and may change at short notice.
Salesforce (collects information regarding donations) http://www.salesforce.com/company/privacy/
WordPress (for comment management) https://wordpress.org/about/privacy/
Mailchimp (newsletter sign ups and management) http://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/
Google Analytics (non-personally identifiable information about how visitors interact with our site)
http://www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html?l=EN
8. Links to Other Websites
The World Wide Web Foundation may provide links to third-party websites, and other websites may provide links to our Site. Third-party websites operate according to their own terms of use and privacy policies. World Wide Web Foundation has no control over such third-party websites and does not own any data contained therein, and therefore does not endorse and is not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products or other materials on or available from such websites.
9. Social Media
The World Wide Web Foundation uses social media and social networking services to advance our work. These applications require the use of third-party service providers.
For example, the Twitter account we use is administered by Twitter, in accordance with Twitter’s Privacy Policy. We integrated our Twitter account onto our website through the use of a plug-in. This results in our comments, and the comments of others that we redirect, being published temporarily on our website, and links to our feed on Twitter’s site. These posts also include the publishing of links to “URL Shortening” services that convert long URLs into shorter URLs that direct users to other websites.
If you click on a shortened-URL, it will most likely redirect you eventually to a third-party website that contains a file or document relating to the Tweet, and the third-party website will have its own privacy practices that may include trying to place a cookie and/or web-bug on your computer, collecting your IP address, and other forms of tracking. The Twitter feed may include the usernames of other Twitter users, particularly when we respond to questions and/or “retweet.” Apart from this information appearing on our website temporarily, we do not process this information beyond the Twitter-environment.
The A4AI Facebook page is administered by us through Facebook and is accessible by Facebook users who already have consented to Facebook’s Privacy Policy. The page is managed by World Wide Web Foundation staff members. We do not store information on our followers nor process any information beyond Facebook.
10. Children
The World Wide Web Foundation does not solicit personally identifying information from children. Visitors who are under 13 years of age should ask their parent or legal guardian for assistance when using our site and should not submit any personally identifying information to the Site.
11. Staff
All World Wide Web Foundation staff members with access to data are bound by confidentiality obligations and may be subject to discipline, including termination and criminal prosecution, if they fail to meet these obligations.
12. Financial Donations
If you choose to make a donation to the World Wide Web Foundation, your credit card information will be used only for this transaction through our secure online payment system. The World Wide Web Foundation does not retain credit card information. We are pleased to receive anonymous donations, but please note that your personal information is required if you choose to donate using our online form (see above). If you are interested in making a donation to the World Wide Web Foundation by another method, please email contact@webfoundation.org.
13. Security
The World Wide Web Foundation employs industry standard security measures to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. Information submitted through our sign up form or any other action forms is encrypted through a Secured Socket Layer (SSL) connection, which protects the information while in transit.
This website, https://www.a4ai.org is secured using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), which utilizes a SSL certificate. HTTPS provides a secure channel over which data can be transferred from your computer to the web servers that host the site. Please note, however, that several pages on the website contain mixed content (including Twitter feeds and YouTube/Vimeo videos) that is not necessarily secured by HTTPS.
Although we make every effort to store information collected by World Wide Web Foundation in the securest of operating environments, no organisation or website can guarantee complete security. Therefore, if you believe that you may be at risk by putting your name to an online campaign or making a donation, we would encourage you to consider the implications before doing so.
14. Updating or Removing Your Information
You may choose to correct, update, or delete the information you have submitted to us by sending an email requesting changes to contact@webfoundation.org.
15. Changes to this Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy may change from time to time. However, any revised privacy policy will be consistent with the World Wide Web Foundation’ mission.
We will post any Privacy Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain changes, an email notification announcing and explaining said changes to our Privacy Policy).
We’ve based this privacy policy on one developed by our friends at Access Now – with thanks to them for making it available under a Creative Commons licence!
B. Copyright
1. Reuse of Material
The Site contains a variety of information, including (without limitation) information, data, text, software, music, sound, photographs, graphics, video, messages or other materials, that you upload, post or otherwise provide in connection with the Site (“Content”). All content on the site, unless clearly marked otherwise, is available for download and re-use (with attribution) under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. You can click here to find out more about how you may use our material: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
2. User Generated Content
Sometimes on the site, you may be able to upload content – such as in the comments sections of our news and blog posts. Please don’t upload anything which you don’t have the rights to reuse. Bear in mind that our site is Creative Commons licensed, so if you upload something to our site, you should expect that it could be used and shared widely.
Also, please don’t upload anything illegal. We won’t tolerate hate speech, libel, sexual harassment or other unlawful content.
3. Copyright Infringement Notification
If you believe there is content on a World Wide Web Foundation website that violates copyright law, let us know. Specifically, send us an email or letter that includes substantially the following:
A physical or electronic signature of a person authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
- Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
- Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material.
- Information reasonably sufficient to permit us to contact you, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an e-mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
- A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
- A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
The notice should be sent to: contact@webfoundation.org. If you want to send us a letter, address it to:
World Wide Web Foundation
1110 Vermont Ave NW
Suite 500
Washington, DC 20005
Attn: Legal
We may display a copy of your DMCA notice in place of the removed content.
The World Wide Web Foundation reserves the right to review the allegedly infringing material and independently determine whether it is infringing.
3. Questions
In an effort to create the most secure website possible, we welcome your feedback and input on our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . If you have any questions about this, please contact us at: contact@webfoundation.org.