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Consumers Union Privacy Policy
Consumers Union does not sell or rent any information provided by you via this ConsumersUnion.org web site with any unaffiliated third party. Our affiliates are the Consumers Union Foundation and the Consumers Union Action Fund. No such information is shared with any unaffiliated third party except in limited circumstances to provide products and service to you or in response to a request from law enforcement (see here for more details). For purposes of our User Agreement, which includes this Privacy Policy, the ConsumersUnion.org web site includes all of the Consumers Union advocacy campaign web sites accessible from ConsumersUnion.org except for Consumer Reports WebWatch and Greener Choices, which are governed by the ConsumerReports.org Privacy Policy.
INFORMATION WE COLLECT AND HOW WE COLLECT IT
Much of the information on our site can be accessed without our collecting any personally identifiable information from you. You can surf ConsumersUnion.org and view much of our content anonymously. For instance, you can access information on policy issues affecting consumers without giving out any personally identifiable information.
The information we gather on our site falls into two categories: (1) personal information you supply when you engage in certain activities on our site, such as "taking action" on a policy issue, donating, registering to receive email updates, or sharing your personal experience of a particular consumer issue through our Share Your Story feature, and (2) tracking information collected as you navigate through our site.
Personally identifiable information
To use certain features on our site, we ask you to subscribe or register. When you do this, we will collect personally identifiable information about you such as your name, mailing address, email address, and telephone number. In addition, we may ask you for the same type of information when you transmit letters to decision-makers or corporations on a policy issue, complete a survey, post messages on a discussion board or comment on a blog. We use this information to complete the transaction you requested, to provide you information relevant to your interests or to help improve our site. We also enable you to donate to our organization through our site. If you donate through our site, we collect your payment card information in addition to your name and address.
Our site also contains a Share Your Story feature whereby you can share your experiences with important issues facing consumers, such as identity theft, prescription drug costs, unfair credit card fees or practices, food poisoning, hospital infections, unsafe consumer goods and other issues. Each Share Your Story feature asks you to provide specific information about your experience and to provide your contact information, including name, email address, street address and telephone number. The information we learn from you helps us better understand the issues facing consumers and informs our efforts to effect policy change. In each Share Your Story feature, we provide terms addressing how we will treat your information and ask you to indicate your preferences with respect to our sharing information about you and your experiences. Those terms govern CU’s treatment of your story and the personal information you provide with it.
Aggregate information
When you use our site, we may collect tracking information such as your browser type, the type of operating system you use, the domain name of your Internet service provider, and pages visited on the site. None of this information identifies you personally; we collect it for aggregate reporting on site activity. For example, we may want to know how long the average user spends on our site, or which pages or features get the most attention. We use this information to make the site more useful to you.
We use "cookies" to store and sometimes to track user information. Cookies, by themselves, do not tell us email address or other personally identifiable information unless you choose to provide this information to us by, for example, taking action on one of our advocacy campaigns, agreeing to be part of our advocacy network or subscribing to our site. A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. A cookie contains a unique number that allows our site to recognize your computer. For example, cookies allow us to keep track of your user name and password (if you are a subscriber) so you don't have to re-enter that information each time you visit our site. The "help" function on most browsers contains information on how to set your browser to notify you before accepting cookies or to disable cookies entirely. However, if you don't accept cookies, you won't be able to take advantage of various features on our site that are available to other visitors.
HOW YOUR INFORMATION WILL BE USED
ConsumersUnion.org uses personally identifiable information in a limited number of ways. We use the information to provide you with news and action alerts based on the interests you have expressed by taking action on an advocacy campaign through our web site or through an online form that you have filled out. We also use information you have provided about specific consumer experiences to inform our efforts to effect policy change, subject to your selected preferences concerning our use of your information. We also use the information you provide to send you email about Consumers Union advocacy issues, and programs or services that we believe may be of interest to you.
Sharing your personally identifiable information
In some instances, we use third party companies to help us provide our products and services to you, like donation processing and email delivery services for our email communications and e-newsletters. In those instances we need to share your information with them. We require that those companies agree to use the information only to deliver the product or service or to process your donation.
We reserve the right to share your personal information as required by law, for example, to comply with a court order or subpoena, or if we determine in our sole discretion that it is necessary to investigate, prevent or take action regarding suspected illegal activities, any violations of our User Agreement (including this Privacy Policy), or in connection with any safety or security concerns.
Under the terms governing your Share Your Story submission, we may also share certain personal information when disclosing your experience with a particular consumer issue to policymakers, fellow consumer groups and consumers and the media (subject to the preferences you have set when submitting your story).
If Consumers Union ever transfers its programs and assets to a successor organization, your personal information would be transferred as part of the programs and assets and may become subject to a different privacy policy.
HOW YOU CAN CORRECT YOUR INFORMATION
Consumers Union believes in providing you with the ability to access and edit the personal information that you have provided to us. To update your information you have provided if you took action on one of our advocacy campaigns through our web site, follow the links at the bottom of our newsletter ConsumerLine, or access your profile and update your contact information and user preferences by following the instructions at http://cu.convio.net/site/UserLogin.
OUR EMAIL POLICIES
Account and services related email: If you have taken action on a policy issue, we may send you emails relating to your account. For example, these include confirmations that the email you sent through our web site has been delivered.
Email newsletters and action alerts: You may request updates or news about Consumers Union's activities, which will be sent to the email account you identified. To unsubscribe, follow the instructions included in every email we send you. If you have taken an action on a policy issue, we may send you email about other policy issues that may be of interest to you. You can choose not to receive additional types of messages in the future by following the 'unsubscribe' instructions located near the bottom of each email.
HTML verification: When receiving an email from CU, we may place a one-pixel gif in that email to understand whether or not you can accept HTML images and, if you can accept HTML, whether or not you viewed the email. This process does not leave any information on your computer, nor does it collect information from your computer. Consumers Union does not share or sell this information with others, and we only use it to improve our email communications with you.
DONATIONS
If you make a tax-deductible donation to Consumer Reports Foundation or Consumers Union, none of the information from that donation will be rented or exchanged with any other company or organization except our affiliate, the Consumers Union Action Fund, Inc. (CUAF).
You may be contacted by mail, phone or email to make an additional donation to Consumer Reports Foundation, to Consumers Union or to CUAF or to subscribe to our publications, books and other services.
If you do not wish to receive any postal mail solicitations from us please write:
Consumer Reports Development Office
No Mail Solicitations
101 Truman Ave
Yonkers, NY 10703
If you do not wish to receive telephone solicitations from Consumers Union please write:
Consumer Reports Development Office
No Telephone Solicitations
101 Truman Ave
Yonkers, NY 10703
If you do not wish to receive email solicitations from Consumers Union please write:
Consumer Reports Development Office
No Email Solicitations
101 Truman Ave
Yonkers, NY 10703
If you do not wish to receive email solicitations from CUAF, please access your profile and update your contact information and user preferences by following the instructions at http://cu.convio.net/site/UserLogin.
SECURITY
We work to protect your personal information from loss, misuse or unauthorized alteration. We have put in place appropriate physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and help prevent unauthorized access, maintain data security, and correctly use the information we collect through all channels.
Security of the Personal Information You Provide
Credit card information. Your donation will be processed through the Consumer Reports donation system. We use data encryption technology to help protect against loss, misuse or alteration of your sensitive credit or debit card information. We use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) software, which creates an encrypted connection for the transmission of any credit or debit card information you input online and we use the same encryption protection for any payment authorizations for transactions we request through any channel. Once we collect your credit card or debit card information, it is stored on restricted-access computers that are not directly accessible via the Internet.
Personal Information. We protect the confidentiality and security of your personal information by using industry-recognized security safeguards such as firewalls, coupled with security procedures to protect your information from loss, misuse or unauthorized alteration.
Please keep in mind that any information you include in a message you post online to any discussion group, or other public posting area on our sites is available to anyone with Internet access. If you don't want people to know your name or email address, for example, do not include them in any message you post publicly.
Information use by our employees and agents. Our employees are trained and required to safeguard your information. Using physical, electronic and procedural safeguards, our policies restrict access to personal information only to those employees who need to access it for business purposes.
Security Enforcement
Any unauthorized access to any Consumer Reports or Consumers Union web sites or to the information collected and maintained by us should be immediately brought to our attention by contacting us via email at cuwebsite@consumersunion.org or by writing to us at Consumers Union Customer Relations, Attn: Security, 101 Truman Avenue, Yonkers, NY 10703. We will investigate, and, if necessary, take action to halt any violation of the security of your personal information of which we become aware.
In the unlikely event that we believe the security of your sensitive personal information, such as payment card information, in our possession or control may have been compromised, we will apply the same notification policy to all of those individuals affected. We will endeavor to provide required notice as soon as possible under the circumstances and will ensure that in addition to any other methods, notices are posted on our ConsumerReports.org and (if applicable) our Consumers Union web sites.
Security Of Access To Your Online Account Information
If you sign up to receive Consumers Union Advocacy email, we maintain the information you provide to us (name, email address, physical address and sometimes phone number) in a secure database. In order to change that information, click here, and you will be instructed how to access your username and then receive your password by email. Then you may log on to your profile, enter your username and password and make any changes to your account information. If you want to change your password or other Advocacy account information, you may do so at any time and there is a link at the bottom of every email to help you. If you wish to change your email preferences (for example, you wish to get action alerts but not a monthly newsletter), click here.
If you have forgotten your username, we will ask you for the email address you used when you signed up for email (or an updated email address that you have previously provided to us), and we will promptly email your user name to that email address. If you have forgotten your password, we will ask you for both your email address and your user name.
It is your responsibility to control the dissemination and use of your user name and password and to control access to and use of your Advocacy account. We urge you to keep your user name and password confidential and not disclose them to anyone. We will not be responsible or liable for any loss or damage arising from your failure to comply with this provision.
IMPORTANT - Although we take these steps to protect your personal information, no method of transmitting or storing electronic data is ever completely secure, therefore we cannot promise or guarantee that such information will never be accessed, used or released in a manner that is inconsistent with this policy.
CHILDREN'S PRIVACY
Our site is a general audience site, and we do not knowingly collect information about children. Should a child whom we know to be under 13 make known to us his or her personally identifiable information, we will use that information only to respond directly to that child to inform him or her that we must have parental consent before receiving his or her personally identifiable information.
INTERNATIONAL PRIVACY
Our site is primarily hosted by servers in the United States. We may have site visitors and registrants from countries around the world. Accordingly, if you are located outside of the United States, the personal information you provide to us will be transferred to the United States. By submitting your personal information, you consent to its transfer and storage in the United States and its use in accordance with the purposes for which it was originally collected and as set forth in this Privacy Policy.
HOW TO CONTACT US
If you have any questions or concerns about the ConsumersUnion.org and related advocacy sites’ Privacy Policy or its implementation, contact us at wcrowebmaster@consumer.org or at Consumers Union West Coast Regional Office, 1535 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103.
If you are a subscriber to Consumer Reports or ConsumerReports.org, contact us at Consumers Union, Customer Relations, 101 Truman Avenue, Yonkers, NY 10703.
If you feel that we have not followed our Privacy Policy please let us know. Additionally, you may contact your state or local consumer protection office, The Direct Marketing Association's Committee on Ethical Business Practices at mgoldberger@the-dma.org, the Better Business Bureau, or The Federal Trade Commission by phone at (202) FTC-HELP (202/382-4357) and online at www.ftc.gov.
If you are a subscriber to Consumer Reports or any of our other publications, click here to review the Consumer Reports privacy policy.
This policy was last revised May 23, 2008.
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