This policy is effective as of April 3, 2007.

Please read this entire document, so you have a complete understanding of what we do and how we use your personal information.

Overview

This Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand how we (Asbury United Methodist Church) collect and use the personal information you decide to share, and help you make informed decisions when using this site located at http://asburyumc.ourchurchfamily.net/ ("Asbury United Methodist Church" or "Web Site").

This Web Site is primarily a church directory, with added features that support social networking and other online and offline communication.

When you attend Asbury United Methodist Church and provide information to the church, some of that information is made available to other churchgoers on this Web Site.

Sensible defaults are chosen regarding how much of your personal information is displayed to other churchgoers (Users of the site). This is meant to protect your privacy while still facilitating basic communication and church fellowship by allowing others in the church to contact you in a few basic ways. You have control over what information (if any) is displayed to other Users of this web site.

If you have questions or concerns regarding this policy, you should first contact our staff at [[contact||community_email]].

Site Access

Only members and regular attenders of Asbury United Methodist Church are given access to this site. In order to gain access, church-goers must demonstrate a certain level of commitment to the church and to attending regularly. All visitors to the church must have had some contact with church staff before they are considered a regular attender and allowed to sign in.

This restriction to regular attenders and members protects your private information from people who wish to use it for inappropriate and undesired purposes. All pages on this site containing personal information is protected from accidental or purposeful access by people unrelated to Asbury United Methodist Church. Only the sign in page, and other help documents such as this one, are available to everyone that views this Web Site.

Generally, when a churchgoer stops attending the Church, their access to this site is revoked. In a few rare circumstances, access is maintained for respected people no longer attending the church (but still involved), i.e. some Elders, Staff, etc.

People with a known history of abuse, a criminal record, etc. are not given access to the site and its data.

Children Under Age 13

We strive to protect children online. No one under 13 years of age is allowed to sign into the site by default, nor is their information available to others on the site. In order to allow children under 13 to sign in, a parent or guardian must first sign in, read this Privacy Policy, and give consent on the Privacy page.

The Information We Collect

We collect several types of information:

• Personal information you knowingly choose to disclose, either:
  • via our website
  • via phone, email, postal mail, etc.
  • via forms you complete, electronic or otherwise
• Information knowingly or unknowingly recorded about your attendance at the Church
• Technical information collected by our server(s) as you interact with our Web Site

When you provide information to the Church, such as your name, your email address, your telephone number, your address, your gender, schools attended and any other personal or preference information that you provide to us, this information may be recorded in our membership database. The Web Site uses that information in order to:

• Provide limited contact information (based on your privacy settings) to other members of the Web Site
• Provide contact information to Church Staff and Elders
• Customize content, news or otherwise, provided to you upon signing into the Web Site
• Customize announcements, flyers, and other ministry related information sent to you via email, postal mail, etc.

When you enter the Web Site, we collect your browser type and IP address. This information is gathered for all Web Site visitors. In addition, we store certain information from your browser using "cookies." A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's computer tied to information about the user. We use session ID cookies to confirm that users are signed in. These cookies terminate once the user closes the browser. If you choose the "Remember my email" option on the sign in screen, we use a persistent cookie that stores your email address (but not your password) to make it easier for you to sign in when you come back to the Web Site. You can remove or block this cookie using the settings in your browser if you want to disable this convenience feature.

When you use the Web Site, you may form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features. In most cases, we retain it so that, for instance, you can return to view prior messages you have sent or easily see your contact list. When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.

You post User Content on the Web Site at your own risk. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your pages, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users of the Web Site. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.

Use of Information Obtained

Your profile information, including but not limited to your name, home phone, and address are displayed to other members of the Web Site to enable you to connect with other churchgoers. We may occasionally use your name and email address to send you notifications regarding new services offered by the Web Site that we think you may find valuable.

Information about your children under 13 years of age — even the fact that you have children under 13 — is never displayed without your consent.

Profile information is used by the Web Site primarily to be presented back to and edited by you when you access the service and to be presented to others permitted to view that information by your privacy settings. In some cases where your privacy settings permit it (e.g., posting to your wall), other Web Site users may be able to supplement your profile.

Profile information you submit to the Web Site will be available to other users of the Web Site according to the privacy settings you have in place.

We will send you only service-related announcements from time to time through the general operation of the service. For instance, if someone posts on your wall, you may receive an email alerting you to that fact. Generally, you may opt-out of these communications, which are not promotional in nature.

Your password is encrypted using industry-standard technology, and church staff, technical administrators, nor anyone else can get access to your password in its unencrypted form.

Sharing Your Information with Third Parties

Asbury United Methodist Church is about sharing information with other churchgoers, while providing you with controls that restrict them from accessing certain information. We allow you to choose the information you provide to others through the Web Site. We do not knowingly provide contact information to third party marketers, ever. We share your information with third parties only in limited circumstances where we believe such sharing is:

• Necessary for the operation of the service, i.e. database administrators, server operators, etc.
• Legally required to do so, at the request of governmental authorities conducting an investigation, to verify or enforce compliance with the policies governing our Web site and applicable laws, or to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our Web site.

Unlike most sites on the Web, Asbury United Methodist Church limits access to site information by third party search engine "crawlers" (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask). We block access by these engines to all personal information.

We may provide information to service providers to help us bring you the services we offer. Specifically, we may use third parties to facilitate our business, such as to host the service at a co-location facility for servers or to send out email updates about the Web Site.

The Web Site may contain links to other web sites. We are of course not responsible for the privacy practices of other web sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects personally identifiable information. This Privacy Policy applies solely to information collected by Asbury United Methodist Church.

Changing or Removing Information

Access and control over most personal information on the Web Site is readily available through the profile editing tools. Users may modify or hide any of their profile information at any time by logging into their account. Some information changes will be updated immediately, while other changes require approval from church staff before being seen. Changing privacy settings is always immediate. Individuals who wish to hide all of their information completely may do so on the Privacy page. Removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be generally available to Users of the Web Site.

Because a person's limited personal contact information is made available on the Web Site without them having signed in, anyone who wishes to have their information removed from the site may call the church office at 417-865-1335 or email us at to have their information removed immediately.

Where you make use of the communication features of the service to share information with other individuals, however, (e.g., sending a private message to another User) you generally cannot remove such communications.

Security

We take appropriate precautions to protect our users' information. Your account information is located on a secured server behind a firewall. Because email and instant messaging are not recognized as secure communications, we request that you not send private information to us by email or instant messaging services. If you have any questions about the security of the Web Site, please contact us at asburyumc@sbcglobal.net.

Notices and Revisions

We reserve the right to change our Privacy Policy at any time. Non-material changes and clarifications will take effect immediately, and material changes will take effect within 30 days of their posting on this site. If we make changes, we will post them and will indicate at the top of this page the policy's effective date. We therefore encourage you to refer to this policy on an ongoing basis so that you understand our current privacy policy. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at asburyumc@sbcglobal.net. You may also contact us by mail at 1500 South Campbell Avenue Springfield, MO 65807.