Online Privacy Statement for the ACLU of Florida

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal information that you may provide when using the ACLU of Florida website.  
The following statements detail the information gathering and dissemination practices of the ACLU of Florida.

User Tracking and Data Capture Practices
Our web site tracks information about the visits to our web site. For example, we compile statistics that show the number of visitors to our web site and what cities/states those visitors come from. These aggregated statistics are used internally to provide better services to our customers.  The  statistics contain no personal information and cannot be used to gather such information. 

E-Mail Subscriptions
By signing-up for the ACLU of Florida's Activist E-Mail List, you will receive periodic email informing you of action that you can take in the defense of civil liberties. You can join our activist list by visiting: http://www.aclufl.org/forms/?action=emailList. Both your email and your mail address will be used exclusively for the purpose of sending you email from the ACLU of Florida. You will not be contacted in any other way, nor will your information be offered to a third-party.  E-mail addresses of visitors and members are never exchanged with other organizations.

ACLU of Florida Web Purchases
The ACLU of Florida uses a service - provided by SPORG Internet Corp. - that allows us to securely process online memberships, purchases and event registrations. All of the forms by SPORG Internet Corp. are protected with the latest Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology. 

The ACLU of Florida does not collect any customer data prior to the completion of the order. E-mail addresses provided by customers are used only to communicate about the customer's order. Customer postal addresses will never be exchanged with other not-for-profit or advocacy organizations.

Exchange of ACLU of Florida Member Addresses
Direct mail appeals to our members and the general public provide opportunities to describe complicated legal and political issues in ways not possible in other media. They enable us to explain, in detail, the benefits and provisions of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the complex ways our rights can be protected in the modern world, and the costs of preserving those rights. We use the mail to inform people of the importance of our work and to solicit funds that enable us to continue our litigation, public education and legislative lobbying programs.

Like most other non-profit membership organizations, the ACLU obtains the names of potential new members by renting the membership lists or subscriber lists of non-profit organizations and publications. Sometimes, instead of paying the rental fee, ACLU exchanges its list with that of another organization. This helps defray the costs of our new member recruitment and allows us to allocate more of our resources to ACLU programs.  The ACLU never makes its list available to partisan political groups or those whose programs are incompatible with the ACLU's mission.

Whether by exchange or rental, the lists are governed by very strict privacy procedures, as recommended by the U.S. Privacy Study Commission. All exchanges are made on a "blind" basis, as follows: Lists are never given into the physical possession of the organization that has rented or exchanged them. This safeguard is necessary to prevent one organization from knowing who the members of any other organization are. Instead, the list is sent to a mail house that prepares the mailing without our ever seeing who is addressed. The only time we get possession of a name from one of these lists is when the person receiving our invitation to join responds by sending our return envelope back to us.

If you are receiving a burdensome amount of unwanted mailings, you may wish to consider writing to each of the organizations to which you belong and publications to which you subscribe, requesting that your name be eliminated from lists made available for exchange or rental. The ACLU always honors such requests, and we believe that the organizations with which we exchange or rent lists honor them also, although of course we can't guarantee the actions of outside organizations.

Opt-Out

If you do not wish to receive materials from other organizations, please e-mail Communications Director Brandon Hensler at bhensler@aclufl.org. Make sure to include your name and address in your e-mail communication.