Welcome to PLANETCIVIC! We invite you to read this privacy policy, which describes our privacy practices, including how and when we handle the member and visitor information collected and created through your use of PLANETCIVIC.
PLANETCIVIC is a social network for residents of New Jersey. When you join with your address, you automatically become part of our Jersey-wide community, and any other town/hyperlocal communities established in PLANETCIVIC that your address corresponds to. Our services empower individuals to share and organize around what's most important to them for the betterment of the communities they live in. Any registered user of the PLANETCIVIC services can post feedback that is public by default and can include other content like photos, videos, and links to other websites.
This Privacy Policy ("Policy") describes how and when PLANETCIVIC collects, uses and shares your information when you use our Services. PLANETCIVIC receives your information through our various websites, SMS, email notifications, applications, buttons, and widgets (collectively, the "Services") and other third parties. When using any of our Services you consent to the collection, transfer, storage, disclosure, and use of your information as described in this Privacy Policy.
Irrespective of which community you reside in or supply information from, you authorize PLANETCIVIC to use your information in the United States.
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at [email protected].
Information Collection and Use
We collect and use your information below to provide our Services and to measure and improve them over time.
Basic Account Information:
When you create an account, you provide some personal information, such as your name, username, password, email address, place of residence, or phone number. On the PLANETCIVIC Services, your name is listed publicly, including on your profile page.
Contact Information:
You may use your contact information, such as your email address or phone number, to customize your account or enable Services, for example, for login verification. If you provide PLANETCIVIC with your phone number, you agree to receive text messages to that number from PLANETCIVIC. We may use your contact information to send you information about our Services, to help prevent spam, fraud, or abuse.
Additional Information:
You may provide us with profile information to make public on the PLANETCIVIC Services, such as a picture. You may choose to upload your Google contacts so that we can help you invite others to vote on initiatives you care about. We may later make suggestions to you and other users based on imported address book contacts. You can delete your imported address book contacts at any time. If you email us, we may keep your message, email address and contact information to respond to your request. If you connect your account on our Services to your account on another service in order to cross-post between our Services and that service, the other service may send us your registration or profile information on that service and other information that you authorize. This information enables cross-posting and helps us improve the Services. Providing the additional information described in this section is entirely optional.
Your feedback:
Our Services are primarily designed to help you share feedback and proposals with the members of your community and other PLANETCIVIC members who could benefit from your insights. Most of the information you provide us through the PLANETCIVIC Services is information you are asking us to make public. Your public information includes the messages you post and the metadata provided with your posts, such as when you posted your content and the client application you used to do so; and many other bits of information that result from your use of the PLANETCIVIC Services. We may use this information to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in, and to customize the content we show you. The PLANETCIVIC Services broadly and instantly disseminate your public information to a wide range of users. When you share information or content like photos, videos, and links via the Services, you should think carefully about what you are making public.
Links:
PLANETCIVIC may keep track of how you interact with links across our Services. We do this to help improve our Services and to be able to share aggregate click statistics such as how many times a particular link was clicked on.
Cookies:
Like many websites, we use cookies and similar technologies to collect additional website usage data and to improve our Services. A cookie is a small data file that is transferred to your computer or mobile device. PLANETCIVIC may use both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with our Services, to monitor aggregate usage by our users and web traffic routing on our Services, and to customize and improve our Services. Most Internet browsers automatically accept cookies. You can instruct your browser, by changing its settings, to stop accepting cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit. However, some Services may not function properly if you disable cookies.
Log Data:
When you use our Services, we may receive information ("Log Data") such as your IP address, browser type, operating system, the referring web page, pages visited, location, your mobile carrier, device information (including device and application IDs), search terms, and cookie information. We receive Log Data when you interact with our Services, for example, when you visit our websites or log in to our Services. PLANETCIVIC uses Log Data to provide, understand, and improve our Services, to make inferences, like what topics you may be interested in, and to customize the content we show you.
Third-Parties and Affiliates:
PLANETCIVIC uses a variety of third-party services to help provide our Services, and to help us understand and improve the use of our Services, such as Google Analytics. These third-party service providers may collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, such as cookies or your IP address.
Information Sharing and Disclosure
We do not disclose your private personal information except in the limited circumstances described here.
User Consent or Direction:
We may share or disclose your information at your direction, such as when you authorize a third-party web client or application to access your account. Other users may share or disclose information about you, such as when they mention you.
Service Providers:
We engage service providers to perform functions and provide services to us in the United States. We may share your private personal information with such service providers subject to obligations consistent with this Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures, and on the condition that the third parties use your private personal data only on our behalf and pursuant to our instructions.
Law and Harm:
Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Policy, we may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect PLANETCIVIC's rights or property. However, nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party's, including a government's, request to disclose your information.
Business Transfers and Affiliates:
In the event that PLANETCIVIC is involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, your information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. This Privacy Policy will apply to your information as transferred to the new entity.
Non-Private or Non-Personal Information:
We may share or disclose your non-private, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information, such as your public user profile information, or the number of users who clicked on a particular link (even if only one did).
Accessing and Modifying Your Personal Information
If you are a registered user of our Services, we provide you with tools and account settings to access, correct, or modify the personal information you provided to us and associated with your account, which does not require verification.
You can also permanently delete your PLANETCIVIC account. When your account is deactivated, your profile is not viewable on planetcivic.com but citizen initiatives and comments you may have posted may continue to be viewable to ensure the functioning of the platform and the right of other users' votes to be seen.
Keep in mind that search engines and other third parties may still retain copies of your public information, like your user profile information and and postings, even after you have deleted the information from the PLANETCIVIC Services or deactivated your account.
Our Policy Towards Children
Our Services are not directed to persons under 13. If you become aware that your child has provided us with personal information without your consent, please contact us at [email protected]. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we become aware that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, we take steps to remove such information and terminate the child's account.
Changes to this Policy
We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time. The most current version of the policy will govern our use of your information and will always be at https://development.planetcivic.com/privacy-policy. If we make a change to this policy that, in our sole discretion, is material, we will notify you via email to the email address associated with your account. By continuing to access or use the Services after those changes become effective, you agree to be bound by the revised Privacy Policy.
Date of Last Revision: May 30th, 2017