We at Death Penalty Focus (DPF) want this Website to be a safe and private place for users. DPF will do its part by not requiring you to register or provide any information at all to use most of the basic features of our Website. We also provide opportunities for greater personalization of content and offerings to enhance your experience if you choose. In turn, you can do your part by reading this policy, making your own informed decisions, and taking the precautions outlined below.

There are certain actions and areas of the site that will require you to provide personal information, such as:

1. taking an action through our Death Penalty Focus Action Center or one of our campaign or other sites
2. registering for our e-newsletters or other emails
3. making a donation

We will update this privacy policy as we deem necessary, so please be sure to re-read it from time to time. By submitting your personal information to us, you are agreeing that Death Penalty Focus may use the information in accordance with this privacy policy.

If you have questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us by sending an email to information@deathpenalty.org or through the address at the end of this privacy policy below.

Personal Information You May Choose to Provide:
In order to utilize certain features of our site or receive information from DPF, you may choose to provide information. If you do submit information to us, we will use that information for the purposes for which it was submitted. We may also use your information in other ways, such as to contact you about other DPF activities and/or fundraising campaigns or as otherwise disclosed to you at the point of collection. For example:

1. If you make an online donation to DPF, your information will be added to our donor list and database, and you may be contacted about other DPF activities, news, action alerts, and/or fundraising campaigns.
2. If you join or opt-in to our activist network or subscribe to our e-mail list, you will receive informational updates and action alerts. You also may be contacted about other DPF activities, news, action alerts, and/or fundraising campaigns. Our activist network and e-mail subscriber list are an electronic networks, and therefore we need an e-mail address to contact you. We also need your full postal address in order for our systems to match you to the correct state and federal districts, thereby ensuring that you are primarily sending targeted messages to your elected officials among other similar requirements we deem necessary for effective advocacy. In no circumstance will DPF rent or sell mailing addresses of our activist list to other organizations.
3. When you take an action such as sending a message to your elected representatives, government officials, or other targets of DPF advocacy, we will send your message to these recipients, along with the contact information you provide on the input form, typically including your name, address, and email address. DPF is not responsible for what these recipients may do with your information. Please note that officials receiving these emails may choose to contact you. In addition, sometimes government agencies add the names of people who submit comments on government proposals into public documents, thereby recording the names of people who’ve commented in favor or opposed to a given proposal. This is often a part of the governing process for receiving and recording feedback from the public. Government agencies typically have strict guidelines around not misusing information provided to them by the public for other purposes. However, you should review the policies of the appropriate government body if you are concerned, and DPF cannot be held responsible for data shared through its forms for this purpose.
4. We will receive any other information you choose to provide. For example, we may manage blogs or allow you to post stories or photos from time to time. By submitting such information to us, you give us permission to post it in the designated area on our website, edit it, or remove it if we deem that the content is not appropriate, outdated, etc. To protect your privacy, please do not include any identifying information you would not want to be public when submitting blog entries or stories. By submitting such content, you also allow DPF to post such website content to its social media channels, including, but not limited to, Facebook and Twitter.

You should be aware that we use third-party vendors to provide services on this site and in our offline business operations. The information that you submit on this site may be provided to those vendors on a confidential basis so that those vendors can provide services (such as maintaining our database, facilitating our e-mail messages to activists, facilitating our fundraising activities and campaigns, or processing credit card transactions) on our behalf. DPF currently uses Salsa Labs for email list management and ActBlue for donation processing. We occasionally use Universe for event management, and we are active on social media including, but not limited to, Facebook and Twitter. Each third party vendor has its own privacy policy over which DPF has no control, although we take the steps laid out above to protect your data.

DPF occasionally partners with third-party petition sites in order to facilitate advocacy actions, but in such circumstances, your active opt-in is required to participate. Such sites will be typically be evident in a domain (URL) other than deathpenalty.org or an org.salsalabs.com domain that is not affiliated with DPF. They may include popular vendors such as Care2, Change.org, MoveOn.org, or others. DPF intends to make it clear when you participation in such actions constitutes providing your data with third-parties, but DPF cannot be held responsible for what such third parties do with data with which you voluntarily provide them. Please read and understand the privacy policies of such partners before choosing to share you information with them.

Other than as described in this privacy policy, or as may be necessary to protect the rights, property, and safety of our organization or others, or as may be necessary to comply with applicable law, Death Penalty Focus will not give or sell the personal information you provide online.

Financial Information You May Choose to Provide:
If you choose to make an online donation to Death Penalty Focus, you will have to provide your credit card billing information. As this information is collected and transferred over the Internet to our secure server, it is encrypted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, the industry standard security technology that is designed to protect sensitive information. If you are making a donation, the credit card information that you provide at the time of donation is used only to process your donation and will not be used by us for any other purposes. For more information on our security policies, please see the “Security” section below.

Information We Automatically Collect and Store:
As is true of most websites you enter, we automatically collect and store some information about your computer and your visit and store it in log files. This information includes information such as your computer’s (or your Internet Service Provider’s) Internet Protocol (IP) address (this is not your e-mail address); the domain from which you access the Internet (e.g., ” AOL.com” or “Princeton.edu”); the name, version, and specifications of your computer and your computer’s operating system; the Internet address of the website, if any, from which you came to our site; the date and time you arrived at our site and how long you spent on the site; and which pages you visited.

We primarily use this information to formulate statistics that show the number of visitors to the different sections of our site and to help us make our site more useful to visitors. For example, we use the browser information to help us design our website so that as many people as possible will be able to view the pages correctly. These statistics do not reveal personal information.

Use of “Cookies”:
Cookies are small text files that are either placed on your computer’s hard drive (“persistent cookies”) or in your computer’s Random Access Memory (“session cookies”). We use both persistent cookies and session cookies on our Websites. By using the DPF website, you agree to our use of cookies.

Session Cookies: We use session cookies to make it easier for you to navigate certain sections of our Websites. If you choose to provide personal information by using an interactive application on our site, such as by joining our activist network or making an online donation to Death Penalty Focus, we place a session cookie on your computer so that you will be recognized as you move around the web pages. For example, if you join our activist network and then navigate through different pages of our websites, the cookie may maintain the information you entered when you filled out the activist registration page. As you move through the site, any fields requiring information about you that has already been captured may automatically appear. However, when you close your browser, the session cookie is removed. If you return to our website later, your personal information fields will not be filled automatically.

“Keep Me Logged In” Persistent Cookies: We use “Keep Me Logged In” persistent cookies-only if you opt-in to them-to enhance your experience while visiting any of our websites. A Keep Me Logged Inpersistent cookie remains on your hard drive for up to two weeks and may contain a reference to your personal information such as your name and address stored in a secure database. Keep Me Logged In and other cookies do NOT contain reference to your credit card number / financial information. Keep Me Logged In cookies enable us to perform functions such as:

1. Prefilling your personal information into forms such as registration forms, take action forms, or donation forms.
2. Displaying information relevant to actions you have taken. For example, in our Action Center we can show you your action and donation history.
3. Providing you with actions, events, or other information that is relevant to you or will enhance your user experience. For example, in our Action Center, we may display actions for California activists only to those who have California addresses.

Death Penalty Focus only will use Keep Me Logged In persistent cookies on your computer if you opt-in to their use. No Keep Me Logged In cookies will be placed on your computer unless you opt-in. Death Penalty Focus also may use other types of persistent cookies that do not contain a reference to your personal information for limited tasks such as ensuring that a user cannot take a survey more than once from a given computer.

See “Your Help is Needed” section below for more information on protecting your information.

Disabling Cookies: Persistent cookies leave a record on your computer that you have visited our sites. However, you have the ability to remove cookies from your computer. Your internet browser’s “Help” section will give you information on how to delete cookies. In addition, there are many websites that provide browser- and operating system-specific information on how to delete cookies. When thinking about whether you want to delete cookies, you should be aware that some sites require cookies to function properly. After you delete cookies, you may have to re-register with some sites or you may notice difficulty in browsing some sites.

Clear Gifs (Web Beacons):
We may choose at some point to employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons) that can help to better manage content on our sites by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

Security:
This website has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. The security measures used on this site include, but are not limited to, industry-standard Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, Verisign certificates, firewalls, and internal policies to maintain the security of stored data. While we follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure. Therefore, while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

When you take action and opt-in to our activist network through our Action Center or donate, you will have a personal subscription management page, where you will be able to edit your personal information and edit what email lists you wish to subscribe to. Access to your personal subscription management page is controlled to protect the privacy of your data – our Website requires that you log on with your e-mail address and personal password to access your personal subscription management page.

Remember, many breaches of security occur when users are not vigilant in protecting their own information. The next section of our privacy policy suggests some actions you can take to help control the security of your personal information.

Your Help Is Needed:
Although Death Penalty Focus does its best to protect your privacy on this and our other Websites, we need your help. You can help in the following ways:

1. You have control over your own privacy. Think carefully before providing any personal information.
2. Although this site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control, no email or Web transmission is completely secure against interception. If you are worried because your communication is very sensitive, do not send it via email or submit it online. See below for additional ways to contact us.
3. Remember that we cannot protect your privacy once you leave our sites, such as by “hyperlink.” So when you visit other Websites, check each site’s privacy policy yourself, and be careful about the information you offer up.
4. We may send you personalized information via email or provide personalized links in emails that allow data fields to be automatically populated with certain personal information. Therefore, you should always keep your email account information secure and not allow others to access your email account.
5. You should only forward our email messages to others through the “Tell A Friend” buttons or links provided within the email. When you use your email system’s forwarding capabilities (i.e., not “Tell a Friend”), others may be able to see your personal information in that email. Likewise, others may be able to take actions in your name and/or access your personal information by clicking on links personalized to you.
6. You may be given the option to opt-in to a Keep Me Logged In persistent cookie on your computer (see Use of Cookies above). Remember that once you have set a Keep Me Logged In persistent cookie that contains a reference to your personal information, anyone can access your personal information by using your computer. Hence, you should not opt-in to Keep Me Logged In persistent cookies on a public computer.
7. In addition to the records left on your computer by cookies, your browser and operating system contain other records of your web browsing and other actions (e.g., browser history). As with cookies, you can find information about how to clear these history trails in your browser’s “Help” section or through other websites that provide detailed information for each browser and operating system. See Use of Cookies – Disabling Cookies above.

How to Unsubscribe or Contact Death Penalty Focus About Your Information:
If you do not want to receive any email from us in the future, please email information@deathpenalty.org to unsubscribe or click the unsubscribe link found in all of our email list communications.  Or our can manage your email subscriptions here. Note that your donation and action history will remain in DPF’s databases, but we will not send you email. If you would like to permanently remove such records, please contact information@deathpenalty.org.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of this website, or your dealings with this website, you can contact:

You can send an email to: information@deathpenalty.org

You also can contact us via mail at:
Death Penalty Focus
5 Third Street, Suite 725
San Francisco, CA 94103

You can call us at 415-243-0143