IWRC Privacy Policy

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Who we are

The International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council (IWRC) provides training and resources on wildlife rehabilitation.

This privacy policy applies to information we collect on you when you use our websites (including theiwrc.org, edu.theiwrc.org, and cwrexam.org) or access any of our products or services via our websites. We’ll refer to all of this as “Services” for the remainder of this policy.

Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy.

What personal data we collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources such as third party analytics. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Contact and Customer Data

When you fill out a form on one of our sites we’ll collect your name, email, and some contact information. In addition, if you buy something from us we’ll collect your shipping and billing information, keep track of your purchase history, and in the case of subscriptions and certification, we’ll keep track of expiry dates. We’ll also keep track of additional details you provide us via forms or email if it might help us provide better service.

Professional Data

If you are a member or purchase certain services we’ll also keep track of some professional data, such as your degree(s), certifications, and areas of expertise.

Education and Training Data

Similar to purchase history, we keep track of the classes our students take with IWRC and their course results. We may also track continuing education as submitted by Certified Wildlife Rehabilitators.

Images

If you take a class or attend an IWRC event we may also retain pictures of you. But first we’ll ask you to first read and agree to our photo release policy.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Third party data

We may receive information about you and your activities from third-party partners, such as analytics services who provide us with information about your interest in, and engagement with, our Services and online advertisements.

Cookies

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

Note that embedded content and social media platforms are provided by third parties – cookies related to this content will be set based on those third parties policies. Learn more about cookies at aboutcookies.org or https://en.support.wordpress.com/cookies/

More information on cookies IWRC collects (An office poll says we are partial to chocolate chip)

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Why we collect this data

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

To provide our Services–for example, to deliver your membership benefits or send you homework for an upcoming course;
To further develop and improve our Services–for example by adding new content that we think our users will find useful;
To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition–for example, we may analyze how many individuals purchased a plan after receiving a marketing message or the features used by those who continue to use our Services after a certain length of time;
To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of Automattic and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services; and
To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered by IWRC and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on IWRC and our products.

Legal Bases for data collection and use

This section is primarily relevant to those of you residing in the European Union (EU).

The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account–for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or
The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or
We have a legitimate interest in using your information–for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or
You have given us your consent–for example you have asked us to inform you of upcoming classes.

Who we share your data with

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

Subsidiaries, Employees, Volunteers, Hosts, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, our volunteers, our hosts, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, volunteers, hosts, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g. by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), and companies that make products available on our websites (such as RAVEN), who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.
Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental requests.
To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of IWRC, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
With Your Consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, IWRC’s membership directory or the CWR Registry.
Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like your public profile, any comments you make, placement or job ads you post, or forum questions you ask or answer are publically available or in some cases available solely to IWRC members.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How long we retain your data

We retain information for so long as we have a contractual, legal, or legitimate business reason to do so. We discard information about you when we no longer need it for the purposes it was collected for (described in the Why We Collect This Data section) and when we are no longer required to keep it per our governance data retention policy.

In general we’ll delete your contact information from our database and remove your user information from our websites if we have not heard from you in three years, but we’ll keep your name, your dates of membership, and the classes you’ve taken longer, as we’ve had people request we confirm their membership or classes many years later! That said, you have a right to be forgotten and can request this at any time (baring information we are legally required to keep). We (privacy@theiwrc.org) are happy to talk to you if you have more questions on the data we keep and the time for which we do so.

How we protect your data

IWRC uses SSL encryption on our websites (https). Check our site status at GoDaddy Verified and Secured.

We are judicious in choosing third party vendors that may process your personal data, doing due diligence to confirm they meet or exceed industry standards in security.

What rights you have over your data

You can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can provide corrections to the data we hold on you or limit the processing of such data.. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

If you are located in the European Economic Area (EEA) you can object to processing of your personal information. You can also submit a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Choice

You can:

limit the information you provide to that strictly required for our services.
opt out of various communications
set your browser to reject cookies though this may limit some interactions with our services

Movement of data between countries

IWRC is an international organization based in the United States. Our volunteers, including our board members are located in multiple countries. We use third party vendors. For all of these reasons, data may be transferred outside of the EEA.

Age

IWRC does not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under the age of sixteen. If you are under the age of sixteen, you must ask your parent or guardian for permission to use this website.

Changes to this statement

IWRC will occasionally update this privacy policy to reflect current best practices and customer feedback. IWRC encourages you to periodically review this policy to be informed of how IWRC is protecting your information.