OpenLetter.net

Privacy Policy

Effective Date: 11/15/23

Survival and Flourishing .Com, PBC (“SFC”) operates the OpenLetter.net website (our “Site”) and related service (the “Service”), which lets users sign Open Letters. This Privacy Policy describes SFC’s privacy practices for personal information it collects from Users of our Site and Service.

Key Privacy Points

We hope you read this entire Privacy Policy for full detail, but here are some key points:

  • Definitions:
    • An “Open Letter” is an open letter, petition, or statement available for signing or viewing through the Service.
    • An “Organizer” is the individual or entity that uses our Service to start and manage an Open Letter. SFC itself may act as an Organizer for some Open Letters.
    • A “User” is a member of the public that signs or views an Open Letter or otherwise interacts with our Site or Service, other than in their capacity as an Organizer.
  • SFC may host Open Letters on its own sites, such as the OpenLetter.net Site. The Service may also allow certain Open Letters to be hosted or usable through a third-party site or online service, such as through its Organizer’s site. Some Open Letters may be visible and signable on several of these locations at once.
  • When you sign an Open Letter, your name and certain profile information you provide will be visible to the world in the list of people who signed the Open Letter. This includes the domain of your email address (such as “gmail.com”) and the profile URL for any accounts you’ve linked (such as your account with Twitter, or LinkedIn). For your convenience, our Service will remember this information and display it with your signature on all Open Letters.
  • To enhance the reliability and usefulness of Open Letters, we may give Users the ability to rate the authenticity of other User’s claimed identities and to rate other Users’ notability. We may take this input into account when determining the order in which to display signatures, and whether to hide or display particular signatures, on all Open Letters.

Information We Collect

Information You Provide to Us:

You may provide the following types of information to us:

  • Name and contact information;
  • Social media profile information;
  • Other information you include when signing an Open Letter (such as organizational affiliation).

Cookies and Other Technology

We use certain technologies for fighting fraud and improving our Site and Service. For example, through our Site and Service, we and third parties may collect information from your computer or other device by automated means such as cookies, web beacons, local storage, JavaScript, mobile-device functionality and other computer code. This information may include unique browser identifiers, IP address, browser and operating system information, device or browser identifiers, other device information, Internet connection information, as well as details about your interactions with the relevant website, email or other online property (for example, the URL of the third-party website from which you came, the pages on our website that you visit, and the links you click on in a website). In some cases (such as cookies), the tools described here involve storing unique identifiers or other information on your device for later use.

Information From Third Parties

We may also receive personal information from third parties, including our vendors, service providers, affiliates, Organizers, and OpenLetter.net Users. We may combine the information we collect about you from these various sources.

Use of Information

We and our service providers use the information described above for the following purposes:

  • Manage and improve our Site and Service;
  • Protect against, identify, investigate, and respond to misuse of our Site or Service or other unlawful behavior;
  • Customize content on our Site and Service, across the Internet and elsewhere;
  • Send you confirmations, updates related to Open Letters, alerts, and support and administrative messages;
  • Conduct business operations such as auditing, security, fraud prevention, invoicing and accounting, analytics, and research and development;
  • Address legal requirements;
  • Establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights; and
  • Create aggregated or de-identified information.

Disclosure of Information

We may disclose your information as follows:

  • To other Users, Organizers, the public, and Open Letter recipients.
  • To our vendors and service providers: We disclose information to companies that provide services to us, such as providers that host or operate our website or app, analyze data, or provide customer service, data storage, marketing, analytics, security, or fraud prevention.
  • To affiliates: We may disclose information to current or future parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, and other companies under common control or ownership with SFPBC.
  • In connection with legal matters: We may disclose information when we believe disclosure is appropriate due to a subpoena or similar investigative demand, a court order, or other request from a law enforcement or government agency; or as otherwise required by law.
  • For the protection of SFC and others: We may disclose information when we believe disclosure is appropriate in connection with efforts to investigate, prevent, or take other action regarding illegal activity, suspected fraud or other wrongdoing; to protect and defend the rights, property or safety of our company, our employees, our Users, our Organizers, or others; and to enforce our contracts.
  • In connection with corporate transactions: We may disclose your information as part of, or to take steps in anticipation of, a sale of all or a portion of our business, a divestiture, merger, consolidation, asset sale, bankruptcy, or other significant corporate event.
  • In other situations: We may also disclose your information in other situations where legally permitted.

We may use and disclose appropriately aggregated or de-identified information for any purpose.

Your Rights and Choices

Marketing Communications

You can unsubscribe from OpenLetter.net marketing emails by clicking the unsubscribe link in a marketing email or contacting us at privacy@openletter.net.

Cookies and Other Similar Technologies

You may be able to set your browser to refuse certain types of cookies, or to alert you when certain types of cookies are being used. Some browsers offer similar settings for HTML5 local storage and other technologies too. However, if you block or otherwise reject all cookies, local storage, JavaScript or other technologies, certain websites may not function as expected.

We may use Google Analytics on our Site and Service. You can limit Google’s collection of data through Google Analytics by visiting our Site and Service only with a browser on which you have installed the Google Analytics opt-out plugin available here.

Our own Site does not respond to browser-based do-not-track signals, but we may work with vendors on our Site that do, or who may do so in the future, so we encourage you to activate the Do Not Track signal in your browser as a method of possibly reducing our vendors’ and service providers’ collection of data, if this is your wish.

Rights Regarding Your Information

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the right to make certain requests related to your personal information. For example, you may have the right to ask us to:

  • Provide you access to or a copy of certain personal information;
  • Correct or update personal information;
  • Delete certain personal information;
  • Restrict or opt you out of certain uses of your information (right to object), such as for direct marketing;
  • Withdraw any consent that you previously provided; and
  • Provide you with certain details regarding the processing of your information.

Please note that certain information may be exempt from such requests under applicable law. For example, we need certain information in order to provide the Service to you, so we can’t delete it while still providing you with the Service.

We may take reasonable steps to verify your identity before responding to certain requests, which may require verifying your name and email address. If we are unable to verify your identity, we may be unable to respond to your requests.

If you wish to exercise any privacy rights, or raise a complaint about our handling of your personal information, please contact us as described at the end of this Privacy Policy.

Depending on applicable law, you may have the right to appeal our decision to deny your request. We will provide information about how to exercise that right in our response denying the request. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

International Data Transfer

We are headquartered in the United States. When we disclose personal information as described in Section 3, the recipients could be in the United States or another country. They might be in a location where privacy laws don’t require as much protection as the laws of the country where you live.

We or entities to whom we disclose your personal information may become legally required to provide it to the governments, courts or law enforcement or regulatory agencies of any of the countries where we or they operate. However, this Privacy Policy applies to OpenLetter.net’s operations worldwide. We will take appropriate measures to comply with rules relating to transfers of personal data to countries outside the source country. Where appropriate, these measures include signing Standard Contractual Clauses in accordance with EEA and UK data protection laws to govern the transfers of certain data. For more information about these transfer mechanisms, please contact us as set out below.

Data Retention

We keep your information until after we determine it is no longer necessary for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy and we are not legally required to retain it for longer.

Protection of Information

To help protect personal information, we have put in place physical, technical, and administrative safeguards. However, we cannot guarantee that data that we collect under this Privacy Policy will never be used or disclosed in a manner that is inconsistent with this Privacy Privacy.

Children Under 18

The Site and Service are not intended for use by persons under the age of 18. If you are under 18 years of age, you are not authorized to use the Site or Service.

If you are a parent or legal guardian and think your child under 18 (or a different age threshold where applicable) has given us personal information, please contact us at privacy@openletter.net so that we can delete it.

Updates and Changes to this Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time, such as to reflect changes in our practices or for legal reasons. We will post those changes here or on a similarly accessible page.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions or comments regarding our privacy policy and practices, or to submit a request or complaint, please email our privacy team at privacy@openletter.net.