RAU -- Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

We live in an age where a lot of personal information is accessible over the Internet. Unfortunately, we also live in an age where unscrupulous and unethical people may try to use other people's personal information for financial gain or for other illegal or immoral purposes. Every day, we hear of yet another Internet scam where people have had their money or identity stolen. Some sites which people visit are known to sell lists of collected email addresses to advertisers, who proceed to fill their mailboxes with unwanted spam.

In light of the above, visitors to your site are justifiably concerned about what you intend to do with information that you collect from them. To answer these concerns, it has come to be regarded as good practice for web sites that collect personal information from visitors to post a privacy policy. In some countries, the posting of such a statement may be required by law. (An example would be the USA's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, concerning the collection of information from children under age 13.)

Your awards program, by definition, will have to collect some personal information from visitors. Regardless of whether or not it's legally required, the posting of a privacy policy on your site is considered to be good ethical practice for an award site. It also shows courtesy and respect to your site's visitors.

Simply stated, your privacy policy should tell the viewer what you intend to do with all personal information collected by your program or site. They also need to know if third parties could access any of the information. It's also a good idea to talk about any security procedures you use to guard the information that you collect.

Your policy should also provide an easy means of contacting you if the viewer wishes to know what information you may have about them, or if they wish to have their personal information erased or destroyed.

Here are examples of personal information which you may collect in the operation of an awards program:

An applicant's name;

Their email address;

Anything else you require on an awards application;

Guest book entries.

Here are a few items regarding the collection of personal information which may not occur to you:

Does your site use cookies? If so, what kinds of information is stored on them?

If your site carries advertising, do the ads use cookies or download software to the viewer?

Do you use off-site resources, such as mail forwarders, guest books, image galleries, site counters or trackers, etc.?

Note that last item. Be careful to consider resources that you use off-site as you write your privacy policy. (As an example, the site you are reading does not use cookies, but the site that hosts our guestbook does.)

Also consider the practices of sites to which you link. It is good to suggest to the viewer that they consider the privacy policies of the sites they visit if they follow links from your site.

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