Your Privacy is Extremely Important to Us

This privacy policy describes the way in which the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster uses and protects the information that you have provided to us.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. All personal identifying information that you choose to provide to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster while using this website, will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.

• We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
• We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
• We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information we collect and to remove information you request to have removed.
• We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

What This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

• Our website (www.uuclonline.org), and
• Our social media profiles, signup forms, and donation forms

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our services, to communicate with you, or to make our website better.

We collect information in two ways: if and when you provide information to us, and automatically through operating our services. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

• name
• contact information including email address, mailing address, and phone number
• demographic information such as preferences and interests
• other information relevant to donations and church events

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depend on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

• Transaction and billing information: If you make a pledge or donate to us, you will provide personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, company name, credit card information, email address, billing address, mailing address, and phone number.
• Newsletter sign-up information: If you choose to sign up for our newsletter through our Facebook page or website, you will provide us with your name and email address.
• Communications with us (Hi there!): You may also provide us with information when you communicate directly with us via our contact forms or by contacting us on social media platforms.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

• Log information: Like most website providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our website–for example when you make a purchase, or create an account.
• Usage information: We collect information about your usage of our services. For example, we collect information about what happens when you use our website (e.g., page views, searches, etc.) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our website so we can make our website better.
• Location information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our website from certain geographic regions.
• Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our website. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our cookie policy below.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our services–for example, to set up and maintain your account, or to manage your pledges and donations;
• To further develop and improve our services–for example by adding new features that we think our visitors will enjoy or that will help them to use our website more efficiently;
• To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our website, which helps us improve our services and make them easier to use;
• To monitor and prevent any problems with our website, protect the security of our website, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of The Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our services;
• To communicate with you, for example through an email, to solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on what is happening with the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster; and
• To personalize your experience using our services, provide content recommendations (for example, through our suggested posts and), or through our social media pages.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

• Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you. This group includes vendors that help us provide our services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, registrars, registries, and data escrow services that allow our website to function, our hosting provider to troubleshoot website problems, those that help us understand and enhance our services (like analytics providers), and companies that make products available on our websites (such as the extensions on WooCommerce.com), who may need the information to, for example, provide technical or other support services. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
• Legal requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental requests.
• To protect rights, property, and others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
• With your consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties with which you authorize us to do so, such as the social media services that allow you to post comments in our blog by logging into your social media account.
• Other site owners: If you have a WordPress.com account and leave a comment on a site that uses our services (like a site created on WordPress.com or a site running Jetpack), your IP address and the email address associated with your WordPress.com account may be shared with the administrator(s) of our site.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is disclosed publicly.

That means that information like your “Likes” and comments on our website and social media platforms are all available to others.

For example, the photo that you upload to your public Gravatar profile (or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one), is your Globally Recognized Avatar, or Gravatar). Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, will display with the comments and “Likes” that you make on other users’ websites while logged in to your WordPress.com account. Your Gravatar + public profile information may also display with your comments, “Likes,” and other interactions on our website. The same is true if you choose to use your Facebook account or other social media accounts to comment on our blog posts, products, or social media posts.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

Cookie Policy

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of data, stored in text files, that are stored on your computer or other devices when websites are loaded in a browser. They are widely used to “remember” you and your preferences, either for a single visit (through a “session cookie”) or for multiple repeat visits (using a “persistent cookie”). They ensure a consistent and efficient experience for visitors and perform essential functions such as allowing users to register and remain logged in. Cookies may be set by the site that you are visiting (known as “first-party cookies”), or by third parties, such as those who serve content or provide advertising or analytics services on the website (“third party cookies”).

Both websites and HTML emails may also contain other tracking technologies such as “web beacons” or “pixels.” These are typically small transparent images that provide us with statistics, for similar purposes as cookies. They are often used in conjunction with cookies, though they are not stored on your computer in the same way. As a result, if you disable cookies, web beacons may still load, but their functionality will be restricted.

How We Use Cookies

We use cookies for a number of different purposes. Some cookies are necessary for technical reasons, while some enable a personalized experience for both visitors and registered users. Some of these cookies may be set when a page is loaded, or when a visitor takes a particular action (clicking the “like” or “follow” button on a post, for example).

Many of the cookies we use are only set if you are a registered user (so you don’t have to log in every time, for example), while others are set whenever you visit our website, irrespective of whether you have an account.

Types of Cookies

The table below explains the types of cookies we use on our websites and why we use them.

Category of cookies	Why we use these cookies
Strictly necessary	These cookies are essential for our website to perform basic functions. These include those required to allow registered users to authenticate and perform account-related functions, as well as to save the contents of virtual “carts.”
Functionality	These cookies are used to store preferences set by users such as account name, language, and location.
Security	We use these cookies to help identify and prevent potential security risks.
Analytics and performance	Performance cookies collect information on how users interact with our website, including what pages are visited most, as well as other analytical data. We use these details to improve how our website functions and to understand how users interact with it.
Third-party / embedded content	Sites with WordPress.com features make use of different third-party applications and services to enhance the experience of website visitors. These include social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (through the use of sharing buttons), or embedded content from Youtube and Vimeo. As a result, cookies may be set by these third parties and used by them to track your online activity. We have no direct control over the information that is collected by these cookies.

Cookies We Use

Cookie	Type	Duration	Description
CONSENT		16 years 5 months 16 days 7 hours	These cookies are set via embedded youtube-videos. They register anonymous statistical data on for example how many times the video is displayed and what settings are used for playback.No sensitive data is collected unless you log in to your google account, in that case your choices are linked with your account, for example if you click “like” on a video.
elementor		never	This cookie is used by the website's WordPress theme. It allows the website owner to implement or change the website's content in real-time.
IDE		1 year 24 days	Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile.
test_cookie		15 minutes	This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the user's browser supports cookies.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE		5 months 27 days	This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website.
YSC		session	This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos.

 

Controlling Cookies

Visitors may wish to restrict the use of cookies or completely prevent them from being set. Most browsers provide ways to control cookie behavior such as the length of time they are stored – either through built-in functionality or by utilizing third-party plugins. If you disable cookies, please be aware that some of the features of our website may not function correctly.

To find out more on how to manage and delete cookies, visit aboutcookies.org. For more details on your choices regarding the use of your web browsing activity for interest-based advertising visit optout.aboutads.info. On a mobile device, you may also be to adjust your settings to limit ad tracking.

You can opt-out of Google Analytics by installing Google’s opt-out browser add-on.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to our website, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to our website and investigate issues if something goes wrong on our website.

As another example, when you delete a comment from our site, it stays in our trash folder for thirty days just in case you change your mind and would like restore that content–because starting again from scratch is no fun, at all. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged. These backups are retained for up to a year.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks, implementing firewall protection, maintaining PCI compliance, protecting forms with HoneyPot, and keeping our technologies updated and maintained.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the information that you provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our services–for example, the purchase and shipping of our products, may not be accessible.
• Opt-out of electronic communications: You may opt-out of receiving email messages from us. We will include instructions in every email we send to you for how to unsubscribe from our mailing list. Just follow the instructions in these messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.
• Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster does not respond to “do not track” signals. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using our website, with the drawback that certain features of the website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
• Close your account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our services you can close your account by logging into the account and closing it. You can also contact us directly to have your account removed. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above–for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster’s services are available locally in Lancaster, PA and are controlled by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster
538 West Chestnut Street
Lancaster, PA 17603

How to Reach Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about removing your information, please contact us.

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading)

Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others

Ads appearing on any of our services may be delivered by advertising networks. Other parties may also provide analytics services via our services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver advertisements that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster and does not cover the collection of information by any third-party advertisers or analytics providers.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lancaster may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. we encourage visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or sending you a notification through email. Your further use of the services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

That’s it! Thanks for reading.

Changelog

• July 15, 2021: Created privacy policy.