Privacy policy

As a registered federal 501(c)3 and California charity, the San Francisco Beekeepers Association (hereafter, SF Beekeepers) strives to protect your privacy by following the Policy outlined below. If you find anything on the SF Beekeepers website or in our communications that you believe violates this Privacy Policy, please contact us immediately.

— We don’t ask you for personal information unless we actually need it.

— We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to operate or improve our offerings and services, comply with the law, or protect our rights.

— We don’t store personal information unless required for the on-going operation of services.

SFBee.org

SF Beekeepers operates a website with home page at www.SFBee.org and servers associated with that domain and other related domains that handle specific operations such as membership management, discussion forum, and the like. It is our policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating this website. If you have questions about deleting or correcting your personal data, please contact us here.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, SF Beekeepers collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. SF Beekeepers’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how visitors use the website. From time to time,

For visitors who purchase or register for events with us, or become members, SF Beekeepers asks for and stores certain personally-identifying information such as name, email address, phone number (if available), etc. The volunteer members who operate the website or our services access this information in order to fulfill those roles. For example, we may send an email to everyone registered for a particular class, or pull a list of members who have bought bee packages and share it with the volunteers who handle package pickup day. We also use your information to inform you of club news, upcoming events, services and the like, as well as to encourage members to renew when their membership is due to expire. However, we try not to disclose your information to other members. So, when you get an email it is typically addressed only to you, not to a huge collection of people. And our website does NOT include a member directory where members can look up information on each other.

Aggregated Statistics

SF Beekeepers may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its website. For instance, SF Beekeepers may monitor the most popular pages and articles on the SF Beekeepers.org site or use spam screened by the Akismet service to help identify spammers. SF Beekeepers may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, SF Beekeepers does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Business Transfers

If SF Beekeepers or its assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that SF Beekeepers goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that could be transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of SF Beekeepers may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy. Please note that SF Beekeepers has operated as a volunteer organization by and for beekeepers ever since its founding in 1976, and – barring some truly unusual and unforeseen circumstances — we do not anticipate any change in that method of doing business in the future.

Ads

SF Beekeepers does not carry paid advertising on its website or in its communications. We have occasionally used online advertising, like Google Ads, to inform members of the public about our mission and services, but we do not share member information with those outside services, and most of our “marketing” is done to our own email lists collected over the years, which are subject to this Privacy Policy.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, SF Beekeepers may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and at SF Beekeeper’s sole discretion. SF Beekeepers encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

Protection of Information

Other than the circumstances described above, SF Beekeepers would disclose potentially personally-identifying only in response to a subpoena, court order or other valid governmental request, or when SF Beekeepers believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of the organization, third parties or the public at large.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. SF Beekeepers uses cookies to help track usage of the website and our services. Cookies may also used to keep track of whether, for example, a member is signed into the website or not. That is so that members and those who have purchased services from us in the past do not have to log in again each time they visit. However, if you wish not to remain logged in when you are away from the website, just log out before leaving. Then, when you return, you will be unable to reach member-only content and services until you log in again.

Members and visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using our websites, with the drawback that certain features of SF Beekeeper’s site may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us here. Thank you for your support for this organization and for honeybees and other pollinators in San Francisco!

(Portions of this privacy policy were adapted from that of MediaCause, which offers its policy for sharing under a creative commons license.)