Friends' Health Connection Privacy Policy

Effective October 1, 2008

Our Commitment to Privacy

At Friends' Health Connection, we understand that your health is a very personal matter, and we appreciate the trust you place in us to treat your information carefully and sensibly. As part of our commitment to honoring your privacy, Friends' Health Connection ("we" or "us"), the operator of this site provides this policy ("Privacy Policy") to make you aware of the way your information is used and to explain how we guard your information. We hope this policy will help you make informed decisions about sharing information with us.
 

Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used.

The Information We Collect and Use:
We collect personal and non-personal information to customize the content and improve our services, and contact you. We also may use your information to pre-fill fields to save you from entering the same information over and over again. By knowing about you, we can deliver more helpful information, programs and tools, and offer you the most relevant services. We collect personally identifiable information about you only when you provide it to us. We never use or share the personally identifiable information provided to us online without also providing you an opportunity to opt-out or otherwise prohibit such unrelated uses.

Our Commitment to Data Security
To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.

Our Commitment to Children's Privacy:
Protecting the privacy of the very young is especially important. For that reason, we never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 16, and no part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 16.

How You Can Access or Correct Your Information
You can access all your personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain by going to your profile page on our community and clicking "Edit my information."  This will take you to an area where you can change any of your personal information.  We use this procedure to better safeguard your information. You can correct factual errors in your personally identifiable information by sending us a request that credibly shows error or by clicking "Edit my information" after you login to our community. 

Information disclosure to third parties
We know how important it is to keep the information you've entrusted to us confidential. We will not rent, sell or share personal information about you with third parties except to provide you with a product or service you request or under certain circumstances as described below. In all other cases, we will ask for your permission before we disclose your personal information.

Disclosure for legal reasons: We may release personal information to third parties: (1) to comply with valid legal requirements such as a law, regulation, search warrant, subpoena or court order; or (2) in special cases, such as a physical threat to you or others, a threat to homeland security, a threat to our system or network, or cases in which we believe it is reasonably necessary to investigate or prevent harm, fraud, abuse, or illegal conduct. In the event that we are legally compelled to disclose your personal information to a third party, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you unless doing so would violate the law or court order.

Agents and contractors: Contractors sometimes have access to your personal information in the course of assisting in operating our business and providing products or services to you. These contractors include vendors and suppliers that provide us with technology, services, and/or content for the operation and maintenance of our site. Some of these relationships may be with companies that provide services to you on our behalf. Access to your personal information by these contractors is limited to the information reasonably necessary for the contractor to perform its limited function. 

Community
Our site features community areas where people with similar health and wellness interests can share information and support one another. We may have blogs, forums, public profiles, and stories. Please remember that any information that you post in public areas such as forums and public group discussions is, by design, open to the public and may appear in search engine results. We strongly suggest you not use your full name, address or any other identifying information in these posts.

Efforts we take to safeguard your personal information

• We are committed to protecting the security of your information through procedures and technology designed for this purpose by taking these steps:

• We limit access to your personal information to employees having a reasonable need to access this information to provide products and services to you.

• Employees who misuse information are subject to disciplinary action, including termination.

• We have physical, technical and procedural safeguards to help protect your personal information.

In areas that contain your personal information, we use secure socket layer (SSL) encryption to help protect this information while it is in transit between our servers and your computer.

Choose your passwords carefully: Always create a password that's easy for you to remember but difficult for someone else to figure out. Don't use your name, address, phone number, initials, Social Security number, license plate or birthday. Don't use names of your friends, family or pets, company names, common numerical sequences or the word "password."
Suggestion: Use a mix of special characters, numbers, and upper- and lowercase letters. Also, remember to change your password frequently and never give your password to anyone.

Log out and close your browser: Open browsers invite snoops. When you finish your online session, close your browser to erase any information it may have temporarily stored on your computer.

Install antivirus software and spyware protection: Viruses are dangerous. Many viruses are sent as email attachments. They can slip into your system without your knowledge the moment you open the email. Some viruses such as Trojan Horses can capture the contents of your system, including your passwords. Installing up-to-date antivirus software and running it will help thwart these and other unwanted programs.

Spyware is a program or technology that aids in gathering information about a person or organization, often without their knowledge, and includes programs like hijackers and keyloggers. The best way to identify whether or not spyware is installed on your computer is to run and regularly update antispyware programs. Similar to antivirus software, antispyware software identifies and helps you remove spyware.

Closing your account: In the event that you would like to close your account, you can do so by writing admin@friendshealthconnection.org or by calling our customer support. We will strive to make your registration, profile and information inaccessible to other users within five business days. We may, however, retain this information in conformance with our data retention policy in our systems and it may be retrieved in the event that you would like to register again for our services.

Changes to this Policy: 
We may update this Policy. We will notify you about material changes in the way we treat personal information by sending a notice to the email address specified in your account. We may also make nonmaterial changes to our Policy that generally will not affect our use of your personal information. If you don't agree with the new policy, you always have the option of closing your account. Our current policy, identified by its effective date, will be posted on the Site, and you should check it frequently. 

How to Contact Us

Should you have other questions or concerns about these privacy policies, please call us at 732-945-4277. For any questions or comments, or to report violations of this agreement, let us know, or contact us at: 

Executive Director
Roxanne Black-Weisheit
732-945-4277
admin@friendshealthconnection.org