Privacy Policy
Thank you for visiting bostonlocaltv.org (the “Site”), owned and maintained by WGBH Educational Foundation (“WGBH”). The Boston TV News Digital Library: 1960-2000 Project (the “Project”) was created by WGBH in collaboration with the following “Project Partners”: Boston Public Library, Cambridge Community Television and Northeast Historic Film. This Site serves to document and share the progress of the Project with the public.
We know you don’t want the information you provide us shared indiscriminately. Here we explain what information WGBH and our third-party vendors and Project Partners (collectively “we”) acting on our behalf to help deliver the services and operate and analyze use of the Site collect, what we do with the information, and what controls you have over the information collected. We’re committed to ensuring the privacy of your personally identifiable information, and to protecting your ability to make financial transactions (if available on this Site) and transmit your personal data with full confidence.
The privacy policy set forth here refers solely to bostonlocaltv.org. Please read it carefully, and if you have any questions or concerns, please contact us. Also, note that bostonlocaltv.org links to numerous other sites, such as WGBH, the Boston Public Library, Cambridge Community Television and Northeast Historic Film. Please consult those sites to learn more about their policies and terms of use.
1. WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU?
We collect two types of information from you: a) personally identifiable information, which includes personal information (such as your name, address, email address, telephone number, credit card information (if financial transactions are available on this Site) and/or other identifying information) you voluntarily supply upon request when you register for the Site, make a donation, complete a survey, register for an online discussion, enter a contest or sweepstakes, and/or comment on the Site; and b) Non-personally identifiable information, for example IP Addresses and cookies, which include tracking information collected as you navigate through our Site. Uses of this information are discussed in Section 2 below.
A. Personally Identifiable Information
We will not collect personally identifiable information from you, other than what you supply to us on a voluntary basis upon request.
Registration for our website: Anyone can view our Site, however some functions of the Site may require a free registration which enables full access to the information and resources offered throughout the Site. A unique email address (user name) and password must be supplied to register. By using the Site, you are agreeing to the conditions of our Terms of Use.
Support of the Site and the WGBH Media Library and Archives: On certain pages within the Site we may now or in the future offer visitors the opportunity to make a donation in support of the Site and the WGBH Media Library and Archives. If a visitor chooses to make a donation, we will collect and store your telephone number, email address, billing address and credit card information.
Feedback and Content Submissions: On certain pages within the Site you may be able to submit content to be published, such as tags, annotations, and make comments and vote. We may collect your name, address, and email addresses in connection with these activities. We will indicate which information is required and which is optional. We may contact users regarding their submissions in certain circumstances.
Your submission of others’ Personally Identifiable Information: On certain pages within the Site you may be able to submit information about other people. For example, you may submit a person’s name and email address to send an article. This information will only be used for your intended purpose.
Email and Email Newsletters: On occasion, we may collect personal information from users in connection with optional emails and email newsletters. We will indicate which information is required and which is optional. Such information will be used as indicated at the time of collection.
Marketing and Promotional Communications: On occasion, we may collect personal information from users in connection with optional marketing and promotional communications from WGBH, PBS or other entities. We will indicate which information is required and which is optional. Such information will be used as indicated at the time of collection.
B. Non-personally Identifiable Information
In addition to information that you provide to us, we may also collect and store certain non-personally identifiable information automatically when you use the Site. This information helps us improve the experience you and other visitors have with the Site.
For example, we may collect your IP address, browser information and reference site domain, as well as related information such as the date on which you visit the Site. This information does not identify you personally and is only used in the aggregate.
As is common practice among web sites, we use “cookies” and similar technologies. In general, cookies – the informational files that your web browser places on your computer when you visit a website – are used on this Site to track and analyze how you and other visitors use our Site. We use these cookies in order to improve the Site, to identify the source of visitors and what pages you use while on our site, to offer visitors interactive and/or personalized features that would not be possible without the cookies, to recall specific information to save visitors time when they return to the Site, to provide our sponsors targeted sponsorship opportunities, to provide visitors customized sponsorship messages or list of customized videos of interest, and to identify usage and statistical trends. By looking at this traffic we can better understand our community, which allows us to improve our Site and to provide you with an optimal experience and better service. Our sponsorship service vendors, which serve sponsorship messages onto our site, and third party vendors that measure and analyze the use of the Site for us, may also use their own cookies. At no time does the cookie reveal your name, address, or email address (even if you have entered these in specific areas of the Site). The Site pages cannot extract any personally identifying information about you from what we receive via a cookie and your browser. We also allow third-party companies, including AddThis, to collect certain anonymous information when you visit our Site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information during your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. These companies typically use a cookie or a third party web beacon to collect this information. To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice, you can visit www.networkadvertising.org.
You can set your browser preferences to refuse cookies or to alert you when cookies are being sent. However, some parts of the Site will not function properly if you do so.
2. HOW DO WE USE INFORMATION GATHERED ON THE SITE?
Neither WGBH, nor our third-party vendors acting on our behalf to help deliver the services and operate the Site, will willfully disclose, sell, exchange or lend any personally identifiable information about our online users to any third party other than Project Partners without first receiving the user’s permission, unless disclosure to third party(ies) is required by law, we believe in good faith that the law or legal process requires it, we have received a valid administrative request from a law enforcement agency, or such release is necessary to protect anyone’s rights, property or safety. In terms of our own use of information, we may use your personally identifiable information for the activities described in the previous sections, for the activities described when you submitted the information, or for internal and marketing promotional purposes as further described in this policy. We will typically explain the extent of use at the time you are asked to provide personal information. If you do not want this information to be collected or used by us for these purposes, you can simply “opt out.” Under certain circumstances, opting out may prevent your participation in activities for which personal information is needed, as in contests or sweepstakes.
As mentioned, in certain cases, we contract with third party vendors to provide services on our behalf. These vendors maintain customer databases with email addresses of Site visitors who have provided their email addresses to us by registering at our site, signing up for a newsletter or email, emailing us questions about the service, donors who submit online contributions, or online buyers who make a purchase. We will use these addresses to respond to the general purposes for which we collected the information, to provide services and to operate the Site, including to respond to inquiries; to process credit card payments, billing, and shipping; to process email distribution; for list processing and analysis; for promotions management; to send information about WGBH’s programs, services, or your local public broadcasting station’s membership/fundraising; or to correspond about purchase or product offers. Our third party vendors have access to your personally identifiable information as necessary to provide certain services on our behalf. They are required to maintain the privacy of all such information in their possession or control and can only use the information for the purpose that we have contracted them, for example sending you a newsletter. They are not authorized to use your information for any other purpose.
Similarly, personally identifiable information provided in connection with a donation will be shared with third party vendors who perform services to process the donation.
On certain pages, we may now or in the future, offer visitors the opportunity to provide comments, messages or other user-generated text, content or materials (collectively “User Materials”). Any information that you disclose when posting a message to these areas, such as your name, screen name or ID used, becomes public. In addition, we may use the information that you disclose in these areas for promotional and marketing purposes. We are not responsible for any personally identifiable information that you choose to disclose in these public areas. Further, we may use, copy, sublicense, modify, transmit, publicly perform, display, create derivative works of, host, index, cache, tag, encode, and/or adapt any User Materials, and any information contained therein, in any and all media formats or channels, whether now known or hereafter devised, including, but not limited to, the Site, public broadcasting station web sites, other third party web sites, over the air (on radio or television), and on mobile platforms.
You may also have the opportunity to engage with our content on the Site, such as video, text or other offerings, via links or other integrations, on or through third-party social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) or third-party social media plug-ins and applications. When you engage with our content on or through third party social networking sites or via third-party social media plug-ins and applications, you agree that by doing so, we will have access to certain information from your social media profile (e.g., name, email address, photo etc.) to deliver the content or as part of the operation of the application. When you provide personal information to us from your social media account, you consent to the use of this information in accordance with our privacy policy. In addition, when you provide personal information to us through an application or media plug-in on our Site or on social networking sites, other members of these sites may publicly view it and we cannot prevent further use of the information by third parties. For more information about how social networking sites handle your personal information, please refer to their privacy policies and terms of use, as we have no control over information that is submitted to, or collected by, these third parties.
We may also use the services of third parties to provide us with data collection, reporting, site analytics, and/or plug-in functionality. These third parties may view, edit or set their own cookies. The use of technologies by these third parties, including, for example, social media plug-ins, are subject to their own privacy policies and is not covered by this Privacy Policy.
We reserve the right to send you email relating to your account status. This includes notices of credit-card problems and notifications about major changes to our Site and/or to our Privacy Policy.
WGBH, with the assistance from time to time of its third party service vendors, uses non-identifying aggregate information to analyze use of and better design the Site and to share with third parties in aggregate form only as appropriate. For example, we may tell a third party that a certain number of users accessed a particular video on our Site. However, we will not disclose any information that could be used to identify those users.
3. SECURITY OF INFORMATION
WGBH has in place what we believe to be appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online. Credit card information provided on the Site, if any, is protected against unauthorized use by Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security features. The SSL protocol is the industry standard method for creating an encrypted, secure connection between your web browser and a web server, such as the Site’s server. You should, however, keep in mind that no Internet or email transmission is ever fully secure or error free. Because most email is not encrypted, you should take special care in deciding what information you send to us via email.
4. CHILDREN’S GUIDELINES
This Site is a general audience site and does not knowingly collect or store personally identifiable information about children under the age of 13. If we become aware that a child under the age of 13 has made a request for information, we will respond to the request and any identifying information will be deleted once we have responded. Similarly, if we become aware that a child under 13 posted identifiable information on any of our websites, we will also delete that information. We take children’s privacy very seriously and encourage parents to contact us with any questions or concerns they may have. Additionally, if parents want us to delete any collected personally identifiable information about their children under the age of 13, they can also contact us at the following website address: bostonlocaltv@wgbh.org.
5. CORRECTIONS TO PERSONAL DATA; OPTING OUT
Please Contact Us to a) correct or update any personal information in the WGBH database that you state is erroneous, b) opt-out of future communications from WGBH, or c) request WGBH to make reasonable efforts to remove your personal information from the WGBH online database, thereby canceling your profile, newsletter registration and other WGBH registrations. This will not necessarily remove previous public comments and other User Materials submitted for public display on the Site. You should understand that it might be impossible to delete personal information entirely because of backups and records of deletions.
6. ACCEPTANCE OF THIS PRIVACY POLICY FOR BOSTONLOCALTV.ORG
By using this Site, you signify your agreement to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy for bostonlocaltv.org. If you do not agree to these terms and conditions, please do not use this Site. We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions of this policy at any time. Please check this page periodically for any changes. Your continued use of bostonlocaltv.org following the posting of any changes to these terms shall mean that you have accepted those changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.
7. CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY
Whenever this Privacy Policy for our Site changes, we will post the changes to the Site, and such changes will be effective immediately upon posting. If you do not agree to the changes, please do not continue to use the Site. Under certain circumstances, we may also elect to notify you of changes or updates to our Privacy Policy by additional means, such as posting a notice on the front page of our Site or sending you email if we have your email address.
8. TERMS OF USE
Please also make sure to read bostonlocaltv.org’s Terms of Use to understand the additional terms and conditions that apply to your use of our Site.
