We at the WSDF completely respect and honor your privacy. The information that we collect and the sharing practices that we employ are aimed only at the betterment of the knowledge-sharing services provided by our website, by the extended channels of communication used by the WSDF, such as contemporary social media, or by any and all collaborations with other organizations for the purposes of stating our mission, objectives and action-plans before the global and diverse audiences of the world, including the organization of our activities, such as conferences or festivals on the multi-dimensional themes that come under the purview of climate action. While we welcome the responsibility of storing any personal information that you may wish to share on our website, and also deploy considerable security measures for its safety, we do not ever record your personal information unless you explicitly choose to share it with us, and reserve the right to deny any claims for damages caused in cases of data thefts or losses. The rights to use or share information about you, as collected over the phone, through this website, via e-mail or by face-to-face interactions, are together governed by this Privacy Policy, and by accessing or using this website, you agree to abide by the practices, rules, norms, and conditions laid out in this Privacy Policy, which may be updated from time to time without providing you with any prior notice.

1) The Private Information that we may collect can include your name, age, date of birth, gender, location, postal addresses, pin codes, telephone and mobile-phone numbers, e-mail addresses, your occupation, the name of your organization, your bank details including information about your credit or debit cards, billing information, payment processing details, and your user ID and password. The Private Information thus collected exists to ensure that we are able to update you regularly, respond to your queries, inform you about new opportunities in the realms of climate action and sustainability, get informed of the same, and invite you, and others through you, to join our global campaigns and to stay updated on the global agendas of adapting to and mitigating climate change by signing up for the different activities and initiatives invented or discovered by the WSDF from time to time. The collection of Private Information also exists to ensure that we maintain clear and accurate records of any and all of the donations we receive, monetary or informational, and to find out more about you along with all the people who are visiting our website who wish to donate to us, join us, or volunteer for us in any and all potential ways. The WSDF also collects Personal Information to ensure that the users of the website are receiving the most appropriate and relevant information, such that it is tailored specifically for changing habits-of-thought, lifestyles, and other individual choices and behavior that could potentially impact or alter the impending negative effects of climate change. We may further use and apply the Private Information collected from the website for sending you e-mails, features, promotional material, surveys, brochures, catalogues, or even reminders for donations, including regular updates about the utilization of donations by the WSDF.

2) You may browse the website without identifying yourself but you may not access or interact with some of the sections or provisions of the website that require you to submit personal information prior to active engagements, such as for the transactions carried out in the section on donations, or for applying to a subscription of our newsletter. The operating system of the website may also collect General Information about you, such as the date and time at which you have visited the website, the time that you have spent on the website or within its different sections, the address of the previous website that you have linked to us from, the IP address of your system, and your location if it is revealed by the default settings on your browser. The operating system of the website may also collect data about the type and version of the internet browser that you have used to access our website .

3) The collection and use of General Information about you and your behavior on this website  may be related, but not limited to, the processing of your donations, the creation of receipts, and the provision of tax-exemption certificates. Other General Information collected about you may be subject to comprehensive statistical quantitative and qualitative analyses that translate your data into direct inputs for the processes of modification that we apply to our organizational structure, communications, and outreach strategies, in a way that is meaningful to the WSDF’s primary mission of protecting our planet. For example, we may use the General Information to track the underlying traffic patterns on our website or to identify and gauge public interest in the WSDF, and then adapt, re-form or re-cast our communication strategy accordingly.

4) We may also take into account your keystrokes as you write or comment on the website, the timing of-and-between your keystrokes, the words used by you and their meanings, their semantical placements, the subjects and predicates of your sentences, the images visited by you, the amount of time spent on a particular image, the fluidity of your navigation, and of course, your feedback, to ultimately re-formulate this information into a system of inference that yields outputs in the form of applicable knowledge regarding viable interactions with visitors from a wide variety of socio-economic, cultural, and political backgrounds, with our attention mainly focused on instigating actions on the issues of climate change at a collective level, and what we can do to aid future visitors who come seeking knowledge on our website. We may also, for example, employ the outputs thus generated from the General Information gained about you to fine-tune both the material we display on the website and the manner in which we display it. The ultimate idea is to provide or generate inspiration as soon as possible, so that you, the visitor, can start acting sustainably for the climate, right away.

5) The WSDF uses several layers of security protocols and an advanced firewall system to protect personal data submitted by you on the website, for example encrypting your credit or debit card details, and using and maintaining a secure server for all online transactions carried out under our management and jurisdiction. Furthermore, information provided by you for monetary transactions is encrypted using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) along with a Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). If you are using the Gravatar service, then in addition to your IP address, we may collect the profile picture of the account of your email-id, and the browser user agent string to help spam detection and deter potential infringements of our own privacy. 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/.

6) Cookies are pieces of electronic information which will be sent by the WSDF when you use our website. These will be placed in your computer’s hard disk and enable us to recognize you as a user when you visit next.

A cookie may enable the site holder to track how a visitor navigates through its site and the areas in which they show interest. This is similar to a traffic report: it tracks trends and behaviors, but does not identify individuals. Information gathered may include date and time of visits, pages viewed, time spent at the website, and the website visited just before and right after the WSDF’s website.

Also, for instance, if you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

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.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

Cookies can be set to expire on a specified date after a specific period of time when a transaction has been completed or when a user turns off his/her browser. A cookie that is erased from memory when a visitor’s browser closes is called a “session” cookie. Cookies that expire based on a time set by the Web server are called “persistent” cookies.  Persistent cookies may be used in some cases, for example, to recognize when a visitor returns to a website. The web browser will send the cookie information from the initial visit back to the website. This is useful to the visitor if he or she has established a password at a particular website and wants to be identified by that site to perform a function or transaction.

To browse anonymously, you may set your browser to disable cookies or delete cookies. Please note that disabling cookies for some services will impact ability to use that service. You can configure your browser so that it responds to cookies the way you deem fit. For example, you may want to accept all cookies, reject them all or get notified when a cookie is sent. Please check your browser’s settings to modify cookie behavior as per your individual behavior. Also note that if you disable the use of cookies on your web browser or remove or reject specific cookies from our website or linked sites then you may not be able to use the website as it is intended.

7) Individuals who join our mailing lists via our website or through our campaigning engagements are added to our email database. We do not sell, rent, loan, trade, or lease the addresses on our lists to anyone. The website also contains links to other websites for the benefit of its visitors. This Privacy Policy does not apply to such other websites. The WSDF is not expressly or impliedly responsible for, or liable to any loss or damage caused to you by the collection, use and retention of Personal Information by any such website in any manner whatsoever. It is important that you review the privacy policies of all the websites that you choose to visit before you disclose any information to such websites.

8) After approval of your comments, if any on the website, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time. The website administrators can also see and edit your Personal and General information.

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

If you have an account on this website, or have left comments, 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 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.

Furthermore, articles on this website 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

9) We use a number of external web services on our website to display content within our webpages. For example, to display videos, we use YouTube. As with the social media buttons, we cannot prevent these sites, or external domains, from collecting information on your use of the content that we have embed on our website.