Privacy Policy and More

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The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) believes strongly in the internet as a vital tool for education, advocacy, and information exchange.

In order for the tool to be used effectively, any data and other information provided online by users must be used appropriately and responsibly. To protect your online privacy we have developed the following privacy policy and other guidelines.

Personally Identifiable Information

We will not collect any personally identifiable information about you, such as your name, email address, credit card or other information, unless we explicitly request the information and you choose to provide it. We use your personal information to send you email alerts, respond to questions or requests and process online donations. You can always "opt-out" of our online communications to keep from receiving unwanted emails.

CMD does not sell or trade names or other personal data or metadata from our website, nor do we maintain credit card information. Credit card donations through our website are processed by Democracy in Action, part of "Salsa," which is committed to providing safe, secure, and private online transactions. Salsa's privacy protections are available here.

When you make a secure donation to us through the Donate button on our website, you will receive our weekly newsletter The Weekly Spin. Democracy In Action shares your contact information (name, address and email address) with us. We maintain this information in our database of supporters in order to keep you updated on our work and related issues that may be of interest to you. If you decide you do not want to receive electronic mailings from us, you can call (608) 260-9713 or email us at editor@prwatch.org.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies to store visitors preferences, record session information, alert visitors to new areas that we think might be of interest to them when they return to our site, and record past activity at a site in order to provide better service when visitors return to our site. However, we do not use the cookies to monitor any particular individual's activity.

Email Lists

Supporters who donate will receive regular communications from us about our work and opportunities to help. People interested in our work may sign up to receive our electronic publications and information without donating. Each electronic message from us will provide information on how to unsubscribe to this service.

If you join or donate to the Center for Media and Democracy online, you will receive our electronic communications. We will not sell, rent, provide, or disclose personally identifiable information to any commercial users or marketing firms.

Browser Information

When you visit a Center for Media and Democracy website to read or download information, general information is collected to analyze trends, gather broad demographic information, and monitor site traffic patterns that can help us further develop and improve the design and functionality of our site: your computer's IP address, browser type, and operating system, the date and time you access our site, the Internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site, the search terms used in connecting to our site, and the various pages that you visit while on our site are part of this data. Under our policies, we view this information in aggregate form, not about particular individuals. We will not disseminate this information to the general public.

Publicly Sharing Your Comments

We often receive information from website visitors who have successfully participated in our programs and/or used our resources. In certain instances, we would like to publicly share the comments and stories we receive by posting this information on one of our websites. We will not, however, publicly share ANY information we receive on any of our websites without first receiving the express consent of the individual who submitted the information. If you choose to comment on a news item via the comment option on the website, those comments will be made public. We do reserve the right to block posts that are spam, are off-topic, or threatening.

Protecting Children

Center for Media and Democracy will make all efforts to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). We do not and will 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, and we will develop our site with the capacity to block acceptance of information from children under 13 whenever age-related information is requested. It is possible that by fraud or deception by others we may receive information given to us by, or 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 else 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 editor AT prwatch.org.

Other Security Measures

We want to provide Center for Media and Democracy members and other supporters with a secure experience whether they are making a donation or joining for the first time. We will use all reasonable means to safeguard the privacy of your personal information. Our technical security measures include using industry standard 128bit encryption to secure the transfer of data between your browser and our servers. When our forms ask users to enter sensitive information (such as credit card number and/or social security number), that information is encrypted and is protected with one of the best encryption methods in the industry today, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). While on a secure page, such as our sign-up form, the lock icon on the bottom of Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer becomes locked, as opposed to un-locked, or open, when you are just 'surfing'.

Policy Revisions

We reserve the right to periodically amend this privacy policy. If we make any substantial changes, we will notify you by posting an announcement on our web site. Regardless of later updates, we will never use the information that you submit under this current notice in a new way without providing you an opportunity to opt-out or otherwise prevent that use.

Access and Correction of Visitor Data

Upon request we will provide access to the information that we maintain about you. You can request this information by email.

We work hard to ensure that your experience on our site is a positive one. If you have any questions about this privacy policy or our site, please contact us at the address below.

Comment and Photo Posting Policy

The Center generally follows the New York Times standard for comments. Our goal is offer our audience an opportunity to share opinions on the issues we are covering. Our comment queue system does not screen out comments based on the partisan views of readers, but the Center is non-partisan and we have strongly criticized members of both major political parties. We are not endorsing the comments that are posted, except for any comments we may post in response.

Ground Rules

As per the Times, do "not submit any libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, abusive or otherwise illegal material. Please use respectful language that does not abuse or discriminate on the basis of race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual preference, age, region, disability, etc." Please do not post material in violation of copyright or trademark or other laws. Violators may be banned through the comment queue process.

Comments are moderated by our spam blocker and internal processes before posting. Occasionally, comments get through that are inconsistent with these policies, including spamming links to commercial sites. If you believe a comment has been posted that violates these policies, please let us know right away through the contact form. We reserve the right to delete, move or edit posts for any reason, except that we will not edit someone's comment in any way that alters its meaning.