BMC wants to assure you that it respects your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal information. That is why we collect only the information that is needed to serve you and administer our programs. BMC follows the principles outlined below.
This Policy is intended to cover personally identifiable information (“PII”). PII includes information such as your first or last name, your home or e-mail address, and your telephone number.
BMC collects PII order to deliver the products, information, and services you request easily and efficiently and to administer BMC’s programs. The privacy of your PII is a serious matter. BMC will not sell or distribute your personal information except as required to provide these services (see “Use of Information” below).
Consent
When you provide personally identifiable information to BMC, you are implicitly giving us consent to use this data to perform the services you requested. You are also giving us consent to create and maintain summary statistics (see below) to plan future services.
Visitors to our Website
If you chose to engage in certain activities on BMC's website https://www.baltometro.org, such as ordering publications or products, registering for services, registering for meetings and events, entering contests, or sending comments, BMC may ask you to provide PII by filling out and submitting an online form. These activities, are completely optional for you to engage in, however, BMC may ask that you provide information, such as your first and last name, home or business mailing address (including ZIP code), e-mail address, employer name, job title and department, telephone and facsimile numbers, as well as some other personal information that may be used for verification (i.e. birth-place, eye color, etc). Some of the information that BMC asks you to provide is identified as mandatory and some as voluntary. If you choose to not provide the mandatory information with respect to a particular activity, you will not be able to engage in that activity. BMC may also log the IP address and time of the visit.
BMC uses a third party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behavior patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. When you visit www.baltometro.org, Google sends one or more “cookies” (a small file containing a string of characters) to your computer that uniquely identifies your browser. We use cookies to improve the quality of our service by storing user preferences and tracking user trends, such as how people search. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not make, and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website. If we do want to collect personally identifiable information through our website, we will be up front about this. We will make it clear when we collect personal information and will explain what we intend to do with it.
Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, but you can reset your browser to delete individual cookies, refuse all cookies, or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, some BMC features and services may not function properly if your cookies are disabled.
Other Means of Collection
Some of BMC’s planning activities depend on the collection of personal data by means other than its website. For example, you may fill out a paper attendance form at a meeting, or participate in a survey at a public event. BMC will treat all personally identifiable information, whether collected through the website or otherwise, by the terms of this policy.
BMC may be required to, or may obligate itself to, abide by more stringent restrictions on the use of detailed personally identifiable information for some programs. Threre are no "implied" additional restrictions: If additional privacy restrictions apply, a description will be made available to you on the form that you fill out. However, this policy will always apply as a minimum standard.
Third Party Use of Information
BMC’s website uses Google Analytics to track website traffic. Google may use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve their technologies and services.
We may use personal information to provide the services you've requested, including services that display customized content.
We may share aggregated information with third parties, including Google, BMC’s partner agencies, and companies that we have contracted with to help provide services.
When we use third parties to assist us in processing your personal information, we require that they comply with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.
Summary Statistics
BMC reserves the right to create and retain summary statistics based upon PII it collects. The statistics will be created in such a way as to remove any information that identifies a specific individual. We use the summary statistics to help us make our site more useful to visitors, such as assessing what information is of most interest to visitors, as well as for other purposes such as improving website usability.
In addition, BMC may use summary statistics from event registrations to help plan future events. For example, each person who registers for “Bike to Work Day” must specify a “pitstop” and “t-shirt size” in the registration form. In this example, BMC might summarize information from the registration forms to estimate the number of t-shirts to be delivered to each pitstop in a future Bike to Work Day.
Your Choices
We offer you choices when we ask for personal information, whenever reasonably possible.
You may decline to provide personal information to us and/or refuse cookies in your browser, although some of our features or services may not function properly as a result.
We make good faith efforts to provide you access to your personal information upon request and to let you correct such data if it is inaccurate and delete it, when reasonably possible.
Security
BMC uses secure sockets layers (SSL) encryption to protect the transmission of the information you submit, through secure online forms.
If you send BMC an e-mail, you should know that e-mail is not necessarily secure against interception. So if your communication includes sensitive information and you would prefer not to use one of our online forms, contact us by postal mail or telephone rather than e-mail.
Notice of Changes to this Policy
If BMC decides to change its privacy policy, those changes will be posted here so that you will always know what information BMC gathers, how it might be used, and whether BMC will disclose it to anyone. Your use of this site will be subject to the most current version of the Privacy Policy at the time of such use.
Notice to Parents
Parents or guardians: BMC wants to assist you in guarding your children’s privacy. BMC encourages you to discuss safe and responsible use of personal information while using the Internet. You can find more information on this subject here.
Furthermore, under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, no Web site operator can require, as a condition of participation in an activity, that a child under the age of 13 disclose more information than is reasonably necessary. BMC abides by this requirement.