Privacy Policy

We at the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, Inc. (PAWS) want this website to be a safe place for users. PAWS will do its part by not requiring you to register or provide any information at all to use most of the basic features of this and our other websites. In turn, you can do your part by reading this policy, making your own informed decisions, and taking the precautions outlined below.

There are certain actions and areas of the site that will require you to provide personal information, such as:

• Registering for our e-newsletters or other e-mails. Applying for an internship or volunteer position.
• Making a donation.
• Registering for or requesting a class.
• Making an appointment for a spay/neuter surgery.
• Submitting forms for a lost/found pet or to surrender your pet.

This privacy policy does not apply when you use this website as a portal to click through to other websites including certain shopping websites affiliated with PAWS. For example, PAWS merchandise is sold through an affiliated website with its own privacy policy. Additionally, this is not the privacy statement for any forums or social networking sites where PAWS has a presence that are hosted on websites other that the PAWS site. Please review the new site's privacy policy to determine the treatment and collection of your information if you leave this site.

We will update this privacy policy as we deem necessary, so please be sure to reread it from time to time. By submitting your personal information to us, you agree that PAWS may use the information in accordance with this privacy policy.

If you have questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us by sending an e-mail to webmaster@paws.org or by mail to PO Box 1037, Lynnwood, WA 98046.

Personal information you may choose to provide

In order to utilize certain features of our site or receive information from PAWS, you may choose to provide information. If you do submit information to us, we will use that information for the purposes for which it was submitted. We may also use your information in other ways, such as to contact you about other PAWS activities and/or fundraising campaigns or as otherwise disclosed to you at the point of collection. For example:

• If you join our main e-mail list by registering for PAWS' newsletters, we will have a record of your e-mail address and all other information you choose to provide. We will send you newsletters and also may contact you with action alerts to help animals, fundraising campaigns, and other PAWS activities.
• If you make an online donation to PAWS, your information will be added to our donor list and database, and you may be contacted about other PAWS activities, news, action alerts, and/or fundraising campaigns. PAWS does not sell, rent, exchange or otherwise disclose your information, including your name, address, e-mail address or any other personal information, with any group, private, public or non-profit.
• When you take an action, such as sending an e-mail or letter, in response to a cause PAWS is championing PAWS is not responsible for what the recipients of your action may do with the information you provide. Please note that elected officials receiving these communications may choose to contact you. In addition, sometimes government agencies add the names of people who submit comments on government proposals into public documents recording the names of people who've commented in favor or opposed to a given proposal. This is often a part of the government process for receiving and recording feedback from the public. Government agencies typically have strict guidelines around not misusing information provided to them by the public for other purposes. However, you should review the policies of the appropriate government body if you are concerned.
• We will receive any other information you choose to provide. For example, we may manage blogs or allow you to post stories or photos from time to time. By submitting such information to us, you give us permission to post it in the designated area on our website, edit it, or remove it if we deem that the content is not appropriate, outdated, etc. To protect your privacy, please do not include any identifying information when submitting blog entries or stories.

The http://www.paws.org site is owned and operated solely by PAWS.

You should be aware that we use third-party vendors to provide services on this site and in our offline business operations. The information that you submit on this site may be provided to those vendors on a confidential basis so that those vendors can provide services (such as maintaining our database, sending e-mail messages to activists, facilitating our fundraising activities and campaigns, or processing credit card transactions) on our behalf.

Other than as described in this privacy policy, or as may be necessary to protect the rights, property, and safety of our organization or others, or as may be necessary to comply with applicable law, PAWS will not give or sell the personal information you provide online.

Opt-out

If for any reason at any time you would like PAWS to remove your name and contact information from our database(s), please send an e-mail to donations@paws.org or write to PO Box 1037, Lynnwood, WA 98046.

Financial information you may choose to provide

If you choose to make a purchase or online donation to PAWS, you will be directed to GiftTool to provide your credit card billing information. Users are bound by GiftTool's privacy policy.

Children

We do not knowingly collect information from children under the age of 13.

Information we automatically collect and store

As is true of most websites you enter, we automatically collect and store some information about your computer and your visit and store it in log files. This information includes information such as your computer's (or your Internet Service Provider's) Internet Protocol (IP) address (this is not your e-mail address); the domain from which you access the Internet (e.g., "AOL.com" or "Princeton.edu"); the name, version, and specifications of your computer and your computer's operating system; the Internet address of the website, if any, from which you came to our site; the date and time you arrived at our site and how long you spent on the site; and which pages you visited.

We use this information to formulate statistics that show the number of visitors to the different sections of our site and to help us make our site more useful to visitors. For example, we use the browser information to help us design our website so that as many people as possible will be able to view the pages correctly. These statistics do not reveal personal information.

Use of "cookies"

We collect some data through the use of cookies. Cookies are small text files that are transferred either to your computer's hard drive ("Long-term Cookies") or temporarily to your computer's Random Access Memory ("Session Cookies"). At this time, we use only Long-term cookies on our site.

We use Long-term Cookies only when you select a "remember" option on the PAWS site, for example the "remember me" option offered on a "take action" page. If you select this option, a Long-term Cookie will be stored on your computer's hard drive solely for the purpose of automatically filling in the remembered information, for example, automatically filling in your postal address when you write a letter to your representative. These "remember" options are offered only for your convenience and are voluntary. If you do not select a "remember" option, no Long-Term Cookie will be stored on your computer's hard drive.

Security

This website has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. The security measures used on this site include, but are not limited to, industry-standard firewalls and internal policies to maintain the security of stored data. The Voluntarily Submitted Data we collect about you is stored on a secure, password protected server and only authorized personnel have access to your information.

While we follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.