This privacy statement was last revised on February 5, 2008. To contact us, please go to “How To Contact Us” in the table of contents below.
Table of Contents
Welcome to Votenet
Privacy
Who We Are
How To Contact
Us
What This Document Is
Our Commitment to Privacy
Our Commitment to Children’s
Privacy
How We Collect
Your Information
Information We Collect
Election Results
Election Content
Refer A Friend
Program
Technologies We Use
How We Use Your
Information
The Way We Use Information
Sharing of Your Information
Links to Third-Party Web Sites
Customer Testimonials
Live Chat With A Sales Associate
How We Keep Your
Information Safe
Vote Secrecy
Hosting Privacy
Our Commitment to Data Security
Certification Programs We Participate In
TRUSTe
Certification
EU Safe Harbor
Certification
How You Can Make
Changes and How We Make Changes
How To Access
Or Correct Your Information
Opt-Out Policy
Enforcement of This Statement
Changes To
This Statement
WELCOME TO The
VOTENET SOLUTIONS PRIVACY POLICY
Who We Are
Votenet Solutions, Inc. provides online voting software. In
this privacy statement, we may refer to ourselves as “Votenet,”
“we,” or “us.” In each case, we are referring to
Votenet Solutions, Inc. We maintain a website a www.votenet.com, which we use
to present information about ourselves to the public, and communicate with
clients and people or organizations interested in our software, and we sell
several versions of our online voting software (eBallot,
eduBallot and Voting on Demand). When we talk about
the website in this policy, we will use the term “our website.”
When we talk about any of the voting software that we offer, we will use the
term “our software.”
How To Contact Us
We welcome your comments
regarding this privacy statement, and our privacy practices. If you have
questions about this statement or believe that we have not adhered to it,
please contact us. You can contact us by email, by phone, or by regular mail.
email: privacy@votenet.com
phone: 202.737.2277
mail: Votenet Solutions, Inc.
1420 K Street NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC
20005
What This Document Is
This document is our Privacy Statement. It states
what information we collect from users of our website and our software, how we
use that information, who we share it with, how you can access or change your
information, how you can contact us, and other important information about how
we safeguard our users’ privacy. This statement is
incorporated into our “terms of use,” which is the contract that
governs our relationship with you, whether you are a visitor to our website, or
a user of our software. PLEASE NOTE: There are very important terms and
conditions governing our relationship that are found in our “terms of
use,” that are not repeated here in our privacy statement because they do
not relate to data collection or privacy. To see the terms and conditions that
govern our relationship with you, go to http://www.votenet.com/termsofuse.html.
Our Commitment to Privacy
We take privacy seriously. As a leading provider of online voting
software, we are committed to establishing and maintaining policies and
procedures which protect the privacy of personal information gathered from our
customers, prospects and other visitors to our website.
Our Commitment to
Children’s Privacy
We believe that protecting the
privacy of children is especially important. Therefore we do not knowingly
collect or maintain personal information from children under the age of 13, and
no part of our website or software is structured to attract anyone under 13. If
you believe that we have stored personal identification about a child under the
age of 13, please contact us so that we can investigate, and delete any
personal information we may inadvertently have stored about a child under the
age of 13.
HOW WE COLLECT YOUR INFORMATION
Information We
Collect
We collect different types of
information from different people, depending on their role and how they use our
software. The types of people we collect information from are website visitors,
election administrators, and election participants/voters.
Election
Administrators
A person or organization that has
purchased our software is known as an Election Administrator. You can purchase
our eduBallot and Voting on Demand software over the
web from our website via an order form. To facilitate the transaction, we request personal information necessary for billing or
shipping, such as: name, email address, address, telephone number, and credit
card number. This information
will be transmitted using a secure 128-bit encrypted connection.
Election
Participants
A person using our software to
participate in an election/vote conducted by a
Election Administrator is known as a Election Participant. Election
Administrators, as required by their ballots, may collect personal information
from Election Participants, such as names, addresses, telephone numbers, email
addresses, , membership status/ID or other identifying
numbers, passwords or other personal codes or information which can be used in
combination to collect information of a personal nature, and may provide this
information to Votenet in a list of eligible voters prior to the start of an
election/voting event. Election Administrators using Votenet software are forbidden
from collecting financial information such as credit card numbers, credit card
PIN numbers or other critical information which enables financial transaction
authority or privileged security access to any other system.
When you access a ballot created on
Votenet as a Election Participant, we record
information such as the date, time and name of the ballot your computer
accessed. We will also collect your computer’s IP address.
Election Administrators or
authorized Votenet technicians may upload spreadsheets that include personal
information to generate Participant records in the Votenet
system to create user accounts. Such information might include a student number
or membernumber, or other personal information such
as a birth date or email address to serve as a username or password. We require Participants to login
to our site with login codes that are provided via email, mail or other
communication methods by either Votenet Solutions, Inc. or the Election
Administrator. This login
requirement is to ensure the visitor is a valid Participant and to determine
which valid Participants have submitted a ballot.
All Voting Software
Users and Website Visitors
We also collect certain technical
information about every visitor to our website, and both Administrators and
Participants who use our software. This information is standard information
that a visitor’s browser sends to every website the user visits, such as
the computer’s IP address, browser type and language, access times, and
the address of the website the browser left to come to our site.
Election Results
We will not attempt to access
your election results at any time, unless you explicitly instruct us to do so
during a training session or during a customer service inquiry or unless we are
required to do so by judicial or administrative subpoena, warrant or order, or
to protect the safety of our employees, customers, or the public, or to protect
our legal rights. We may disclose
general turnout statistics about your election in a case study or marketing
document if this information has been provided by the Election Administrator
and approved for publication.
Election Content
Customers are solely responsible
for the content of the elections or votes, and we do not control the theme or
questions asked. We do not
own the contents of your election/vote.
When you publish your ballot on our servers, we will provide you with a
unique URL. We will not provide
this URL to any other individuals or parties unless they are authorized
business partners who require this information to service your account. In
order to enhance response rates, we record (i) if and
when a Participant has completed their ballot, and (ii) if and when a
Participant has received an email reminder.
Refer A Friend Program
As a Customer, you may use the
Refer A Friend Program to tell a friend about our site
and our service. If you use this service, we will ask you to provide your
friend’s name and email. We use this information to send an email to your
friend describing our services. Once we have sent the email, we delete this
information from our systems. We do not store Refer A
Friend names or emails.
Technologies We Use
Our software uses log files to
allow you to sign into our services, and to customize your user experience, as
well as to ensure the security of our voting software. Our website also uses
cookies and log files to allow us to customize your user experience there.
A log file is a file we maintain
on our servers, that lists technical information about people who visit our
site. It is in the log file that we store the technical information we
described above, that is, IP address, browser type, language, and referring web
page.
A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a user's computer for record-keeping purposes. We use cookies on this site. If you are an Election Administrator, we link the information we store in cookies to the personally identifiable information you submit while on our site.
We use session ID cookies. We do not use persistent cookies. We use session ID cookies to identify you while you are using our software, and to ensure that if you cast a vote in our software, that vote is recorded correctly. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser.
If you reject persistent cookies, you will still be able to use our site. If you reject session ID cookies, you will be able to view our public website, but will not be able to use our voting applications.
HOW WE USE YOUR
INFORMATION
The Way We Use
Information
We never sell information about
Election Participants or information provided by Election Administrators or
Website Visitors. We also do not
use or share the personal information you provide to us online other than as
described below without first giving you a chance to opt out, or otherwise
prohibit such unrelated uses. We will not sell any of your personal
information. We do not supplement
personally identifiable information with information from any other sources.
We use the personal information you provide to us online:
- To ensure our website and our software are relevant
to your needs by evaluating the effectiveness of our products and
services.
- To
deliver services, such as newsletters, training or software.
- To
help us create and publish content.
- To alert you to product upgrades, special offers,
updated information and other new services.
- To
allow access to limited-entry areas of our site as appropriate.
- To send important status and service messages
regarding any software you may have purchased.
For any of the uses of your information that we
describe above, you may opt out, and forbid our use of the information for that
purpose, by calling, mailing, or emailing us. To find our contact information,
please see the “Contact Us” section of this statement. The only
information a user cannot opt out of is service updates, which are important
notices about the status of the software.
Sharing of Your
Information
We do not sell personal
information. We also do not share
your information with any third parties except under the following very limited
circumstances:
(a)
Voter
Information with Election Administrator: Our business is to provide tools
allowing you and your organization to perform online voting. Accordingly, we
allow Election Administrators to view information about participation and
turnout gathered in response to the elections/votes conducted.
(b)
As you
Explicitly Allow: We may view information about Election Participants as
you provide it prior to the election/vote or explicitly allow us to.
(c)
Agents Acting on
Our Behalf: We may share some of your information with other business
partners who provide us with technical services. They will be granted access to
only that information which is necessary for them to do their jobs. Any agents
to whom we grant access to Participant or Customer Information are
contractually barred from using or releasing that information outside of the
specific task we have asked them to perform. We have various agreements, policies,
safeguards and certifications to ensure that these agents do not sell, distribute
or use this information.
(d)
For Legal
Reasons: We may disclose your information pursuant to judicial or other
government subpoenas, warrants, or orders. We may also disclose your
information if it is required to comply with the law, or with legal process served
upon us, defend our legal rights or our property, or to act in urgent
circumstances to protect the personal safety of our clients, employees,
partners, or members of the public.
(e)
Acquisition:
We may share information in the event of an acquisition of our company, merger
of our company with another, or acquisition by our company of another. We will
notify you if your information becomes subject to a different privacy
policy. We will not share Election
Participant or Election Administrator Information during a potential
acquisition or potential merger.
Links to Third Party Sites
Our website contains links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by our website or our software.
Customer Testimonials
We post customer testimonials on our web site which may contain personally identifiable information such as the customer's name. We obtain the customer's consent to post their name along with their testimonial prior to posting the testimonial.
Live Chat With A Sales Associate
We offer users of our public website who may be interested in purchasing our on-demand voting software the opportunity to chat live over the internet with a sales associate. The live chat feature is hosted by a third-party provider, and not by Votenet. Any information disclosed in that live chat may be subject to that provider's privacy policies.
HOW WE KEEP YOUR
INFORMATION SAFE
Vote Secrecy
All votes are encrypted. When a election is set to “anonymous,” no one can see
how you vote. Elections/votes that are set to “not anonymous” will
allow the Election Administrator to see how you vote. Information about how a
participant voted will never be provided to any person or entity outside of
Votenet Solutions, Inc. and its business partners unless otherwise provided by
the Election Administrator.
Election Administrators will be
able to see whether you have voted or not in any election/vote, including
anonymous elections, where no one will be able to see how you have voted.
Hosting Privacy
Votenet may host its software
with a highly secure third party data center that provides hardware, operating
system software, and connectivity. All hosted environments meet or exceed
physical security requirements, including:
- A
single point of entry to hosting areas
- A monitored main point of entry, with additional
points of entry for emergency use only
- Surveillance cameras in the hosting facility to
monitor access to and use of the facility
- Access
validation with biometric identity check
- Access
to Votenet’s hardware by Votenet
authorized persons only
Additionally, Votenet allows
access to its software and databases only to Votenet personnel or authorized
agents of Votenet who have a demonstrated need to access the software or
databases for a particular task.
Our Commitment to
Data Security
Our website and our software both
have security measures in place to help protect against the loss, misuse, and
alteration of the data under our control. Our software complies with the
Information Security Controls standard designated SAS 70, meaning that we use
industry best practices to secure your information, including technology,
internal processes and controls, and management processes and controls that
ensure that your information is kept as secure as possible. We use Secure
Socket Layer (SSL) technology to protect information using both server
authentication and data encryption to help ensure that your information is safe,
secure, and available only to you. We also implement an advanced security
method based on dynamic data and encoded session identifications, and host our
website, and our software, in a secure server environment that uses firewalls,
passwords, and other advanced technology to prevent interference or access from
outside intruders. Finally, we provide unique user names and passwords that
must be entered each time a Participant or Administrator logs in to our
software. These safeguards help prevent unauthorized access, maintain data
accuracy, and ensure the appropriate use of your information.
CERTIFICATION
PROGRAMS WE PARTICIPATE IN
TRUSTe Certification
We are a member of the TRUSTe
Privacy Program. TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit
organization whose mission is to build trust and confidence in the Internet by
promoting the use of fair information practices. Because we want to demonstrate
our commitment to your privacy, we have agreed to disclose our information
practices and have our privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe. This privacy statement covers the websites www.votenet.com, www.eduballot.com, eballot.votenet.com and www.votingondemand.com. For more information about the TRUSTe
certification process, and what TRUSTe certification
means, please look at the TRUSTe website at
www.truste.com.
EU Safe Harbor
Certification
We comply with the E.U. Safe
Harbor Framework as set
forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use and
retention of personal data from the European Union. The Department of Commerce
Safe Harbor certification program is a way for U.S. based companies to ensure that
they comply with E.U. regulations regarding the safekeeping of private data.
You can see our Department of Commerce certification at http://web.ita.doc.gov/safeharbor/shlist.nsf/webPages/safe+harbor+list
HOW YOU CAN MAKE
CHANGES AND HOW WE MAKE CHANGES
How To Access Or Correct Your Information
Your can change your password by
selecting “manage account” on the menu for your particular software application, and setting a new password there. To get a complete record of the personal information associated with your account, to change any of that information, or to request that we delete your account, please contact us by email at support@votenet.com. If you request a change to your personal information, or you request us to delete your account, we will make the change or delete your account within 30 days after we receive your request.
Opt-Out Policy
We offer our visitors and customers a means to
choose how we may use information provided. If, at any time after registering
for information or ordering our software, you change your mind about receiving
information from us or about sharing your information with third parties, send
us a request specifying your new choice. Simply email, call or write us. You can
find our contact information in the “Contact Us” section at the end
of this statement.
From time to time we send promotional materials
or newsletters by email, as described above in “The Way We Use
Information.” Any email you receive from us will include an
“unsubscribe” link that you can use to prohibit us from sending any
additional information, and our postal address.
Enforcement of This
Statement
We are a member of the TRUSTe Web Privacy dispute resolution system. If you have
questions regarding this statement, you should first contact us by email at privacy@votenet.com. If we do not
acknowledge your question, or you are not satisfied with our response to your
question, you should then contact TRUSTe directly, by
going to http://www.truste.org/consumers/watchdog_complaint.php.
TRUSTe will act as a liaison with Votenet to resolve
your concerns.
Changes to This
Statement
We will occasionally update this
privacy statement to reflect changes in our services and customer feedback.
When we post changes to this statement, we will revise the “last
revised” date at the top of this statement. If there are material changes
to this statement, or material changes in the way we use your personal
information, we will notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such
changes prior to implementing them, and giving you the option to opt-out of the
new policy or procedures, or by sending you a notification of the changes
directly, prior to implementing them. We encourage you to periodically review
this statement to stay informed about how Votenet collects and uses your
private information.
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