| Privacy Policies |
| BALTIMORE (Aug. 7, 2009)— |
Some things about Voxitatis have changed in the last year. First, we incorporated in a new state, Delaware, which allows us to handle our operations a little differently. Our coverage of the schools has not changed substantially, but some of the information we collect from you has changed, making it necessary to update this privacy policy. The original was written at San Antonio, Sept. 8, 2007.
Voxitatis is committed to protecting you and your family's personal information when you are using our website. We want our services to be safe and enjoyable environments for you. This Privacy Policy concerns our use of any personal information you provide to us through the schoolsnapshots.org websites.
In order to provide you with the full range of Voxitatis services, we sometimes collect information about you.
Voxitatis is also committed to safeguarding your personal information. Whenever you provide such information, we are legally obliged to use your information in line with all laws concerning the protection of personal information (these laws are referred to collectively in this Privacy Policy as the "data laws").
Please note that our Web site contains hyperlinks to sites owned and operated by third parties. These third party websites have their own privacy policies, including cookies, and we urge you to review them. They will govern the use of personal information you submit or are collected by cookies while visiting these websites. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of such third party websites and your use of such websites is at your own risk.
When you sign up to participate in or receive a service from any schoolsnapshots.org website, such as newsletters, message boards, blogs, etc., we may ask for personal information about you. This can consist of information such as your name and e-mail address, or date of birth.
By entering your details in the fields requested, you enable Voxitatis to provide you with the services you select.
Voxitatis does not use cookies, except that third-party software (our Main Index or Dashboard and our Wordpress blog) makes use of cookies for their own purposes. We do not access these cookies, but please be aware, if you select something like "Remember me each time I log in," the blog or message board software will put a cookie on your computer to track your login.
We do, however, collect IP addresses (an IP address is a number that can identify a specific computer or other network device on the Internet). We use analysis software to look at IP addresses so we can enhance your user experience. This information is not used to develop a personal profile of you, and the log files are regularly deleted after our analysis is complete.
For news stories, we typically collect information such as email addresses and phone numbers, even from students, for our own files. This information is never published by us.
Voxitatis will use your personal information for a number of purposes, possibly including contacting you about a submission you have made to the websites, including any content you provide.
IP addresses are used to identify the location of users, the number of visits from different countries or superdomains, and to block disruptive use (see below).
We also analyze our services in order to improve them to provide you with the most user-friendly navigation experience.
When we collect personal information from news sources, such as an email address or phone number, we are doing so in order to enable follow-up and confirmation of any facts that others may question or that we feel need to be investigated further.
Voxitatis may contact you in relation to the functioning of any service you have signed up for in order to ensure that we can deliver the services to you. We may also contact you in relation to any contribution you have made to schoolsnapshots.org, e.g. on the message boards, or to invite you to participate (voluntarily) in surveys.
We will never contact you for marketing purposes. We don't actually sell anything, so this is sort of an obvious statement.
We may contact you in order to follow up on information you have provided to us in the context of a news story, whether or not the story was about you.
We will never share your personal information with anyone else, except where required and permitted by law. For example, we must comply with law enforcement agencies who make a legitimate request for this information. We never sell your personal information (see above); nor do we provide it to anyone who has not presented a valid subpoena for the information, except as provided in this Privacy Policy.
If you post or send offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content anywhere on or to schoolsnapshots.org, or otherwise engage in any disruptive behavior on schoolsnapshots.org, Voxitatis may use your personal information to stop such behavior.
Where we reasonably believe that you are or may be in violation of any applicable laws (e.g. because content you have posted may be defamatory), Voxitatis may use your personal information to inform relevant third parties such as your employer, school e-mail/Internet provider, or law enforcement agencies about the content and your behavior.
If you are under 13, you are not allowed to provide personal information on any Chicago Voxitatis website, including without limitation schoolsnapshots.org.
If you are aged 17 or under, please get your parent/guardian's permission beforehand whenever you provide personal information to the Voxitatis website. Users without this consent are not allowed to provide us with personal information.
If you are providing the name of anyone under 18, you are required to get the permission first of their parent or legal guardian to allow us to publish the first and last name in the context of news stories or relevant historical information.
We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant service.
Where you contribute to schoolsnapshots.org, Voxitatis will generally only keep your content for as long as is reasonably required for the purpose(s) for which it was submitted. For example, Voxitatis will only keep copies of entries to a contest for the duration of the events for which the contest was developed. However, other projects are likely to have a longer, or even permanent, duration.
We record snapshots of school history on the website, which may include some User Generated Content, i.e. content provided by users. It may also include names of minor students.
Therefore, some content submitted to or shared with Voxitatis may be retained for prolonged periods of time or potentially indefinitely in our Archive, which is true of News contributions and school data that are published. There may also be rare instances where we will share your contribution with third parties in the interests of maintaining historical archives. Where possible, we will try to inform you upfront or let you know at a later date where we are likely to keep content indefinitely or pass it onto an approved historical archive. However, names of students, e.g. the quarterback of the football team, will not be available on the Web pages (except in the text of any News stories) after the season has ended.
Some further clarification is necessary here: We will keep a school's PSAE or ACT scores in our archives indefinitely, and this information will always be available to the public for comparison with the current year's data, and so on. We also keep the name of the football coach in our database for Illinois high schools, and we do this every year. Our purpose in doing this is for News coverage of the progress of the football team in that year. After the current season, releasing the name of the football coach may have a bit of newsworthiness left, and so we may report it, since the coach is an adult.
On the other hand, we usually know the names of the quarterback from a few of the teams that make the playoffs and championships in a given year. We hold this information in our database as well, but when the next season comes, that information is purged from our database. First, the quarterback is probably a minor student. Second, comparisons of one student's performance with another's (say the quarterback of the current year) is not newsworthy. The reporting of the name, after the season has ended, is no longer newsworthy, so our database is purged of the quarterback names each year. Our policy about student names is similar in other channels on our websites as well.
Under the data laws, you have the right to request a copy of the personal information Voxitatis holds about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. We may charge a fee for such information requests and will require you to prove your identity with two pieces of approved photographic identification. We will use reasonable efforts to supply, correct, or delete personal information about you on our files.
Please address requests and questions about this or any other question about this Privacy Policy to Paul Katula, 10121 Daventry Drive, Cockeysville, MD 21030 (email: paul@schoolsnapshots.org; pkatula@msde.state.md.us).
This privacy policy may be updated from time to time, so you may wish to check it each time you submit personal information to any Voxitatis website. The date of the most recent revision is Aug. 7, 2009.
If a student's name has been published in a document that can be obtained by the public, such as a newspaper, sports program, program for a school play, or on the school's Web site in open HTML that is not protected by password, we may publish the name on our Web site in the appropriate context. However, Voxitatis will never be the first organization to publish a student's name.
If a student's name has not been published in the context of a news story we are running, we will not publish the student's last name. The only exception to this rule would be to protect life or property from an unlawful act.
Even if a student's name has been published in a public-readable document, we will not run a photograph in which a named student's face is recognizable.
There are good reasons for these restrictions, and they do not follow the standard rules of good journalism. However, the Web has changed things quite a bit. We do not wish to encourage or promote the use of student names or images for unlawful purposes, so we have imposed these additional restrictions on ourselves. We believe it matters little to the reporting of newsworthy events within our schools.
The trolling of news and historical Web sites like Chicago Voxitatis is becoming less common with the advent of social networks like Facebook, which store much more personal information about individuals. Still, we maintain that our policy of excluding the as-yet unpublished names of minors from our Web pages is a sound practice.
Other contexts for publishing the full names of students include identification of the student as the author of a document, as the creator of an artistic work, and so on. Copyright laws require us to identify the author of creative works that we publish, whether the work is artistic or factual in nature, and the names are published only with permission from the copyright holder and/or the parent or guardian, if the copyright holder is under 18.
A cookie is a small amount of data, which usually includes a unique identifier, that is sent to your computer or mobile phone browser from a website's computer and is stored on your device's hard drive. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser's preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites. Many sites do this whenever a user visits their website in order to track online traffic flows.
Check the "Help" menu of your browser to learn how to change your cookie preferences.
Although many websites do this, because cookies enable website publishers to do useful things like find out whether the device (and probably its user) has visited the website before, we don't do it, except when we use software published by a third party to run some function on our websites.
The only functions on Voxitatis that make use of cookies are schoolsnapshots.org/bb3 (published by the phpBB Group) and schoolsnapshots.org/blog (published by WordPress). We do not know how these publishers use the cookies, although it would appear they track online traffic flow. With the exception of not knowing who you are the next time you log in, none of the functionality of Voxitatis will be disabled if you turn cookies off in your browser's preferences.
Please note, as specified above, Voxitatis cannot be responsible for the cookie policies of other sites to which our site is linked. Please see the cookie policy on those sites for more information.
We take privacy very seriously. A great deal of information from schools is sensitive and some is outright confidential. State and federal laws govern the disclosure of some information. If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy please contact
Paul Katula
10121 Daventry Drive
Cockeysville, MD 21030
(email paul@schoolsnapshots.org; alternate: pkatula@msde.state.md.us)
(cellphone (630) 863-5871)