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 | We do not access identifiable information to visitors of our web site. (Identifiable information is any data that tells us something about an individual, or would allow us to contact a person.) The only exception to this policy are persons who donate to our group or purchase a CD of our site via PayPal, a credit card or a charge on their phone number. We receive an Email from Ibill, Paypal and InternetSecure which confirms the donation and contains identifying information of the donor We delete these Emails. |
| We do send out newsletters. |
| We do not share personal information with other organizations. |
| Our web site does not use "cookies." This is a method of storing information about visitors to our site. |
| We do access non-identifying aggregate data that describe our visitors as a group. This includes information which our statistical program collects about the browsers and operating systems used by our visitors. These data are protected by passwords and is accessed by only one OCRT staff member. |
| All OCRT staff are bound by our privacy and security policies. |
| We have little or no knowledge of the data other Internet sites collect -- those which are reachable from our web site via hyperlinks. |
This statement also applies to domains ReligiousTolerance.com, ReligiousTolerance.ca and ReligiousDivresity.info which automatically redirect readers to ReligiousTolerance.org
Why a privacy statement?
Surveys have indicated that almost all users of the Internet are concerned about their personal privacy while surfing the web. 1 One way of addressing these concerns is for individual web sites to publish their privacy policy. Unfortunately, many have not yet done so.
The Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to our readers' privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for this website: ReligiousTolerance.org. We have also added some material on our site's contents and external links.
If you have any concerns, please Email us.
Information that we can access:
| CIHost: This is the Texas company that hosts our web site. Like essentially all other web hosting services, they collect information such as IP addresses, time of access, essay URL, etc. from all of the visitors to the web sites on their computers. These data are stored in daily log files in our directory. We are unable to read these files; they cannot be viewed in any programs that we have available. However, we do indirectly access these data once a week. We analyze the files using the Wusage program. This program supplies us with a statistical report indicating the total number of hits, the distribution of hits as a function of hour of day and day of week, and the numbers of hits that each of our essays received. The statistical report prepared by this program contains no identifying information; it tells us absolutely nothing about individual visitors to our web site. |
| Hitbox.com: About 10 of our most popular essays contain a Hitbox.com logo. Hitbox collects information about each visitor to these essays. They make selected data available to us in various forms. Almost all of the data (level of traffic, the search engine from where they are referred, the browsers that they use, etc.) are only reported as totals or averages of all visitors. For example, Hitbox tells us that 59% of our visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer, 41% use Netscape and 1% use other browsers. Almost all use version 4 or 5; 3% use version 3; less than 1% use other browsers. This sort of information helps us design our pages for optimum viewing. The Last 100 visits subsection of their visitor section does list individual host computer names and IP addresses. However, as a matter of policy, we have only viewed this screen on one occasion, in order to see its format. |
What information do we share?
The only information that we share is on our web site for all to see:
| Our essay on site statistics describes overall traffic on our web site. This information is posted for anyone to read. It only shows averages and totals and does not identify individuals in any way. |
| Our site surveys also contain aggregate, non-identifying information about our readers. |
External links from our web site:
| All external links: We have no influence over, and thus cannot be responsible for, the privacy practices or the content of other Web sites to which our essays and menus link. | ||||||
| Hate sites: This site contains thousands of links to other sites. Almost all of them are benign. However, a very few of the sites that we link to contain material that exhibits extreme religious hatred. We link to them as examples of unethical and despicable web sites. | ||||||
| Defunct sites: The Internet is a very dynamic medium. New web sites are being created and existing sites are being taken offline. Occasionally, a pornographic group will obtain the URL of a defunct web site and link it to their pornographic site, without our awareness. | ||||||
| Ibill.com and InternetSecure.com: We appeal for donations on our "help us"
page. This is linked to Ibill.com, a company that accepts credit
card data and passes it on to credit card companies. Ibill provides
an accounting package that enables us to find out the amount of each
donation, the Email address, and the name of each person donating. For
reasons of privacy, we do not read or otherwise use any of this information other
than the amounts donated, except at rare intervals:
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Incoming E-mails:
Any E-mails that we receive which describe a personal problem are answered as quickly as possible, and then deleted.
Unfortunately, our incoming traffic is so high that we cannot answer all E-mails. In particular, we cannot enter into continuing discussions. We would like to, but time does not permit.
About one out of every thousand E-mails contains a thought provoking theological comment or question that we discuss on our web site. These are questions like "Who is a Christian?" "What religion should I follow?" "Can therapy change gays?" etc. We paraphrase the incoming E-mail and remove any identifying information before posting one or more excerpts from the E-mail it to our web site. For example, we might identify the Email as coming from a teacher, but we would not reveal the person's name, age, gender, city or state.
Child visitors:
A poll of our readers has indicated that 0.2% are under 13 years of age. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act became effective in the U.S. on 2000-APR-21. 2 It requires compliance from commercial web sites which:
| Are a commercial web site or online service directed to children under 13 years of age, and which collect personal information, or |
| Are a web site directed at a general audience and which have actual knowledge that data is being collected from children. |
We do not believe that our site qualifies under either of these criteria.
Public Forums:
This site makes a message board available to its users. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information in the sense that anyone, anywhere in the world has access to it. You should exercise caution when deciding to disclose any personal information.
Security:
This site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Our web site is under continual attack by abusive hackers who attempt to modify our essays and menus. So far, all of the modifications have occurred to our essays on abortion, homosexuality, and the Mormon movement. One hacker was a little more imaginative. They briefly added an audio file to our home page -- a song about vampires.
Contacting this Web Site:
If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this Web site, you can contact:Bruce Robinson, coordinator
Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
PO Box 27026
Kingston ON, Canada
K7M 8A3
Email: ocrt4@religioustolerance.org
Fax: 613.547.9015
Voice: 416.238.1302. Our office is staffed at irregular times. We are in the Eastern time zone of North America.
Reference:
- "Protecting Online Privacy," at: http://www.witchvox.com/fritz/privacynotes.html
- "How to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule," at: http://www.ftc.gov/
Originally written: 1999-NOV-25
Latest update: 2005-NOV-04
Author: B.A. Robinson
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