Privacy Policy - SpeakOut.com

The ads appearing on this Web site are delivered to you by several Web advertising partners. In the course of delivering an ad to you, some advertisers may collect certain non-personally identifiable information about you. This information is used to deliver tailored ads to you. If you would like to know more about the information gathering practices and "opt-out" procedures of DoubleClick, please click here.

Before we begin, we have a special message to our younger users under the age of 13. We welcome you to SpeakOut.com and hope you enjoy the many parts of our site that do not require registration. We do not allow users under the age of 13 to register, in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. We are working to properly implement systems that will comply with all of our government's latest privacy requirements. Until then, we will not maintain any information about users who we learn are under the age of 13.

The more understanding we have about you and your interests, the better equipped we are to customize the information and opportunities we bring to you. At the same time, we understand the importance of protecting your privacy.

When you register with SpeakOut.com you will be asked for personal information: Full Name, Address, Email Address, Gender, and Date of Birth. You will also be asked to provide a User Name, which will be used to identify you in SpeakOut debate and message boards. We collect your address so that when you send a message to an elected official, that elected official can identify whether you are a constituent or not and have the opportunity to respond back to you. We collect date of birth information to ensure that all of our registered users are at least 13 years old, in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

In the registration form, you have the opportunity to opt into email mailing lists. These preferences can be changed at any time by changing your preferences in the "My Profile" section. The email mailing list is used about twice a month.

There is also another section of SpeakOut.com, the "Subscription Center," where you can sign up for daily or weekly email updates without being a registered user. These email subscriptions are not tied to the SpeakOut.com registration, and can only be subscribed and unsubscribed to at the Subscription Center.

You can modify your registration profile by clicking on "My Profile." On this page you have the option to change your email address or your password, and the chance to update all of the personal information you previously entered. You will also have the opportunity to fill out additional, optional questions. This screen allows you to opt in and out of email messages from SpeakOut.com.

We do not sell or market lists of our users or any of our users' personally identifiable information to any commercial entities. All of your personal information, including your name, e-mail address, and postal address, will not be given to any commercial organization or person outside our Foundation. We do use the e-mail adress you provide for sending periodic newsletters about changes on the website. We also may provide your e-mail address only to campaigns, not your name and address.

SpeakOut.com's network utilizes a redundant, multi-layered infrastructure that provides a very high level of security. With the use of multiple firewalls and secure translations, SpeakOut.com's internal network remains transparent to the external user. All of the end user's database information is processed on the back-end of our site requiring multiple authentication processes to gain access. Employee access to this data is limited to personnel that are responsible for maintaining the database.

We ourselves do make use of that information. We are an activism portal that facilitates communication and understanding between citizens and those people who make decisions. Based on information provided by you, we may ask you if you wish to participate in particular research projects from time to time. We may report collective aggregated opinions using basic demographic information (for example, the views expressed by 40-45 year old females pertaining to gun control, living in East Coast states) or the anonymous opinions of those who elect to participate in our polls or other forms of online research. There are a few exceptions, which we want you to be aware of.

If you send a message to a public or corporate official via SpeakOut.com, as when you send a paper letter, the recipient of a SpeakOut.com message will receive your name, physical address and e-mail address. We do this because our experience and research has shown that recipients will not take your message seriously unless they know who you are (Congressional offices, for the most part, discard all such anonymous e-mail messages). Furthermore, this also increases the likelihood of your receiving a response to your message, creating a new, all-important dialogue. If you do not want the recipients to know who you are, do not send messages using SpeakOut.com.

SpeakOut.com also provides a "Send to a Friend" feature, which allows you to forward a message or a petition to a friend. The email addresses you enter for your friends are used for this one-time only email, and are not stored by SpeakOut.com. Your friends will not be put on any sort of mailing list.

When you post a message in one of the SpeakOut forums, your user name and email address will be made available to those who read the posted message. Please consider this when you decide to post.

Occasionally, when you visit a site on the Internet, you may discover that various capabilities provided on that site are actually performed by our Company in cooperation with a specific group or organization, in order to provide yet another venue for online activism. Our relationships with the Republican, Democratic, and Reform parties are examples of such relationships.

In some instances, when you register to use these custom features, your registration information will be shared with partner organizations. However, in every such case, you will be told about the intended sharing of your information prior to registering and you will have the option of not using the service. These relationships fall under two privacy policies, the SpeakOut.com policy and the group or organization policy. It is important to note that the group or organization may abide by standards that differ from those of SpeakOut.com. To learn how a partner group or organization will use your information, make sure to check out the joint privacy policy, which will be clearly marked on any of these web pages.

When we run contests on our site, you may be asked to provide additional information in order to participate. The specific rules for any contest will state how that information may be used to the extent that it is different from this policy. And unless you have told us that you would prefer not to receive e-mail from us, we may send you e-mails about our products, promotions, or services, as well as, on behalf of other companies.

SpeakOut.com uses "cookies" to identify you automatically when you come to visit our site. If you set your browser to reject cookies, you will not be able to use the applications that require registration, although you will have use of the many features on our site that do not require registration. Please be aware that SpeakOut.com advertisers or other web sites that have links on SpeakOut.com may also use cookies. This privacy statement only applies to your use of SpeakOut.com.

We do not control the privacy policies of our business partners, advertisers, sponsors or other sites to which we provide hyperlinks.

Lastly, SpeakOut.com may also disclose account information when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our Membership Agreement or may be causing injury or interference, intentionally or unintentionally, to SpeakOut.com's rights or property, other SpeakOut.com users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities.