First, this
We at Draw the Lines PA take your privacy seriously. To that end, Draw the Lines PA and its parent organization, Committee of Seventy in Philadelphia, promise we will never sell your personal information, such as your name or email address, to anyone. Ever.
We might, at some point in the future, however, ask your permission to provide some personal information, such as your name and email address, to outside organizations. Then, if we have your permission, we might share the email address of people who have used our mapping tool, or subscribed to our newsletters.
When might we ask permission to share your email or other personal information? This would be only in very rare and narrow situations. Let’s say, at some point in the future, Draw The Lines PA expands into other states or onto the national scene. In that case, we might join forces with other organizations in other states. If that happened, we might ask your permission to add your personal information to a new partner’s database so they could contact you.
Otherwise, only the appropriate people working for Draw the Lines PA or Committee of Seventy will have access to this personal data.
We, of course, would never share any sensitive personal information, such as credit card or financial information. You will be asked to provide this information, in a secure environment, only when donating money to Draw the Lines PA or when you are paying for tickets to an event through our parent organization, Committee of Seventy. In those cases, your credit card information is stored by a third-party service that specializes in transactional services. Neither Draw the Lines PA nor Committee of Seventy stores your credit card information in its internal computer systems.
Our Commitment to You
We will do our best to keep your information secure when it is in our possession. We will do this by following accepted best practices for data security. However, nothing online is 100 percent secure, and we want you to understand that from the beginning.
In fact, we also need to tell you that there’s currently a debate about whether Internet privacy is even still a thing. Why? Because most people share massive amounts of personal information, intentionally or unintentionally, as they, well, live. This often happens without users’ specific knowledge. That even applies to users like you, who actually read these policies.
Social media sites such as Facebook make their money by watching what you do online, in astounding detail, and then selling that knowledge to advertisers who pay big bucks to reach you and people just like you. Same for your internet service provider and your mobile phone company.
Google has a massive trove of data on you that comes from your web searches and other online behavior. Until 2017, Google even mined all personal gmail accounts for information about users that it could then make money from by aggregating and selling. (Aggregation means Google removed your identifiable information from the data, bundled it up and sold it to any company that wanted to reach people who behave like you do online, usually through advertising.) Facebook and many other sites do exactly the same thing.
In this Age of the Selfie, companies like Facebook and others have even begun to routinely use facial recognition to match identities with faces. It’s unclear where that will end up. We don’t do anything like that, and won’t.
And don’t even get us started on your mobile phones, geolocation or smart speakers, which listen to every word you say.
This all increases our resolve to treat your personal data with the utmost care and respect. Still, you need to be your own advocate in maintaining your privacy online and taking steps to safeguard the privacy you have left. At the very least, this means familiarizing yourself with the privacy settings on any site that makes profits off your information, which we don’t. Do the same with all the software and browsers you use. Don’t assume that default settings protect your privacy. Often, they don’t.
Below you will find the specifics of what information we collect that can be tied to your identity directly, such as your name or email address, as well as what information we collect about what you read and do on our sites. In some cases, this information may be tied to your identity, in other cases, the information shows only an anonymous users’ path through the site.
Personal Information
To use or participate in certain services or activities, you may be asked for certain personal information. It’s entirely up to you whether you provide that information to us. In a few instances, you won’t be able to use services on the site unless you provide a working email address.
Here are some examples of information you may be asked to provide: Name, email address, address, age, gender, birthday, content preferences, country of residence.
It’s also important you understand what information we will never ask you to provide. First, of course, is passwords. If you get an email that appears to be from the Committee of Seventy or Draw the Lines PA but that asks you to send us your password, the email IS NOT FROM US. In fact, you should assume to be fraudulent any email or web page that asks for personal information such as passwords, logons, social security number, tax information, banking information, credit card numbers etc. If you receive such an email you haven't signed up for that purports to be from us, please let us know immediately at info@drawthelines.org.
In certain instances, you might even think you are on our website while you are actually on a site that is impersonating us to try to get your personal information. Any page that seeks personal information, such financial information, social security numbers, etc. is NOT us. Again, please contact us at info@drawthelines.org if you encounter such a site or web page.
At present, neither Draw the Lines PA nor Committee of Seventy requires you to log in to use the general website.
Why do we need any personal information at all?
Generally it is to improve your experience on Draw the Lines PA and provide you better service.
For instance, we need your email address for our site alerts and newsletters.
One of our most important resources, the election mapping tool (map.drawthelines.org), won’t work right unless you provide your email address and name. That information permits the tool to save your work so you can return to it later.
Draw the Lines PA also sometimes needs your personal information for contests, such as the one associated with drawing election maps. Or to register for our events.
Many of the help and participation forms on the site require you to provide an email address and name. This is so we can follow-up with you and make sure you get what you need.
We also might need to contact you with important information about site outages, site improvements or other alerts that can help you use Draw the Lines PA.
In general, we require you to provide the absolute minimum amount of information for any given interaction. Required information will be clearly labeled. All other information you provide is voluntary.
Non-personally-identifiable information
What is not non-personally-identifiable information? For our purposes, we are talking about information we track and/or store about your activity on Draw the Lines PA.
Basically, this type of information let’s us see what “a user” is doing on the site, but we can’t tell that user is you (or anyone else). We can’t tie that information to your name or email address. More importantly, we don’t even try.
Mainly, we track this information using Google Analytics, which is a service we and many other sites on the internet use to see what people are doing on our site and how we can improve their experience.
To keep track of your activity on Draw the Lines PA, Google Analytics stores little bits of information on your device. These bits are called “cookies.” To learn more about Google Analytics, we suggest reading this wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics, Google Analytics Terms of Service. https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html and Google’s general privacy documents. https://policies.google.com/privacy
Draw the Lines PA may also track some information outside of Google Analytics, using its own software to make sure the site works properly on your devices, and to optimize site performance and user experience. This data is not associated with your name or email address and will not be shared.
We also may track non-identifiable information about your computer’s internet address and your device’s location. Using your device’s settings, you can restrict whether, how and when your device shares its location.
Help us protect your privacy
As the internet changes, it’s important that we continue to strengthen our privacy efforts.
You can help us do that by sharing any ideas or criticism with us at info@drawthelinespa.org.
This policy will change. Please check back from time to time.