Privacy Policy

PRIVACY POLICY (effective November 6, 2017)

Introduction

The LivLyme Foundation (“LivLyme,” “we,” “our”) takes many steps to protect your privacy when you visit the LivLyme website (“Site”). In order to advance our outreach programs, and to provide you with a better experience while you are on the LivLyme Site, we do allow some tracking to take place. How and when we do so is explained below.

Our Collection and Use of Information About You

Passively Collected Data

Like most websites, we may automatically receive and record information in our server logs from your browser when you the Site. The information that we collect with these automated methods may include your IP address, cookie information, browser type, system type, and the referring URL. We use this type of information to measure and improve the performance of our site.  On occasion we also access this type of information to investigate or maintain the stability and security of our site.

Voluntarily Submitted Data

Certain pages on the LivLyme site may invite you to share personally identifying information, such as your name, address, email address, or telephone number.  Sharing that information will allow you to make a donation, join our email list, sign a petition, or participate in other similar online activities. We may use that voluntarily submitted data to:

  • Fulfill your orders or transactions.
  • Contact you about other LivLyme activities or news, or about opportunities to support LivLyme.
  • Deliver content to you on platforms such as social media, other websites, search results pages and mobile apps.

When We May Share Your Information With Other Organizations

When we give you an opportunity to voluntarily submit information about yourself, we may give you the option of indicating that you permit us to share that data with other parties such as coalition partners or specific legislators. We will not share your data with such parties unless you have indicated that you permit us to do so.

Our Email List

If you sign up for our email list, we may collect data by using an embedded image to track whether you open our email and by using a URL that enables us to identify that you have taken an action, such as clicking a link in an email or signing an online petition. This allows us to build a more effective educational program and to inform you about issues you care about most.

How We Work With Third-Party Vendors

We work with a variety of vendors who help us process data, facilitate the operation of the LivLyme site and deliver messages to you on other platforms.  For example, outside vendors may help us analyze traffic on our site, process credit card transactions, or facilitate activities such as the collection and delivery of petition signatures.  To the extent that any vendor has access to personally identifiable data about you, by virtue of the fact that it participates in the operation of the LivLyme site, we require that vendor to promise that it will keep that data confidential and use it only for the purpose of carrying out the functions we have engaged it to perform (with a limited exception for certain aggregated data, as described immediately below).  That is true both as to passively collected data and as to voluntarily submitted data, and also as to data from any cookie or other tracking device.

In some instances, we may agree to allow a vendor to take aggregated and anonymized data about activity on the LivLyme site, and use that data for other purposes such as improvement of the vendor’s products or benchmarking for the vendor’s other clients.  But we won’t agree to that unless we believe, in each instance, that the data won’t be recombined with other information to create any record about you as an identifiable individual.

Our Use of Cookies

We use cookies to improve website performance, to remember user preferences and settings, and to collect analytic data. By “cookies” we mean small text files placed on to your computer by websites you visit. “Cookies” may also refer to local storage, which is a mechanism similar to cookies where the information is stored within your web browser. In some instances we place these cookies ourselves.  In other instances we allow outside service providers to place these cookies, but only if those providers agree to the terms described above under “How We Work with Third-Party Vendors.” We use cookies as follows:

Website Performance

Website performance cookies allow us to make the website easier and more pleasant to use. For example, they may enable us to save you time when filling out a form by populating it with information you provided in previous visits.

Registration

If you are visiting our website as a registered user — for example, when you manage your subscriptions for our email lists — we place cookies in your browser that allow our website to recognize that you are logged in.

Analytics

We use analytics tools that place cookies, in order to give us a better understanding of how people engage with our website.  That in turn allows us to gauge the current performance of Website features, and to develop better content. Analytics cookies provide us with information like:

  • How many individual visitors we have
  • How many visitors are new or returning
  • How often visitors come to the website
  • What content they’ve visited
  • How visitors interact with particular pages or content

Security Measures and Data Transmission

We have taken physical, electronic, and managerial measures to safeguard the information we collect. We work to ensure data accuracy and protect against unauthorized access to, and improper use of, information we collect online.

Information that can be readily linked to you personally, such as your name and address, is stored on secure servers and is not publicly accessible (unless, as discussed above, you have chosen to have us disclose information about you when you have signed a petition or submitted a blog comment). Additionally, all data transmitted to and from our website, including credit card numbers, are encrypted using industry standard measures to provide an additional level of security.

Procedure When We Update This Statement

Our privacy statement may change from time to time. We will post privacy statement changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice on our website. We will also keep prior versions of the Online Privacy Statement available for your review in this section.

Procedure for Updating Your Personal Information or Preferences

If you wish to withdraw or change personal information you shared with us previously or adjust personal preferences — such as your preferences regarding email lists — you may contact us to update our records. You have the following options to do this:

  • Click on the link in the footer of any email you receive from LivLyme and use our preference center
  • Send e-mail to: info@livlymefoundation.org
200 children a day are diagnosed with Lyme disease. That is 4 school buses of children a day in the US.