The team at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) believes strongly in the Internet as a vital tool for education, advocacy, and information exchange.
To help protect your online privacy, CMD has developed the following privacy policy and other guidelines.
First Principle
CMD does not sell or rent the names of visitors of this site to third parties.
Because of the ubiquitous use of cookies by search engines and other sites, CMD recommends that Internet users use Ixquick for searches because it provides greater privacy protections than most search engines, though CMD cannot warranty that independent search engine.
CMD also recommends that users consider using a Virtual Private Network or TOR when conducting Internet searches.
CMD also recommends that users abstain from using free WiFi at hotels and other public spaces due to the privacy risks posed but such access.
Information Gathered by this Site
Logging: For this website, CMD temporarily logs IP addresses for site testing, diagnostics, and protections against attacks, but such data does not contain what is known as personally identifiable information, like your name. We can view this information in aggregate form to identify trends in traffic to our site, and we do not disseminate this information to the general public.
Cookies: We do not use persistent ID cookies, and we do not use the cookies to monitor any particular individual’s activity.
Because so many data aggregators or their contractors use persistent cookies on other sites, we recommend that users routinely clear their cookies, Internet cache, and search histories. We also recommend that users consider an app like Ghostery to help limit the secret deployment of cookies by sites other than those you whitelist/approve.
Voluntarily Submitted Information: CMD collects and retains information you affirmatively submit to us, as with comments to our articles.
In the words of the New York Times, we ask that you “not submit any libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, abusive or otherwise illegal material [as with copyrighted material for which you have no valid claim of fair use]. Please use respectful language that does not abuse or discriminate on the basis of race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual preference, age, region, disability, etc.” Violators may be banned through the comment queue process.
CMD screens comments to protect against spamming, abuse, troll-like flaming, and the dissemination of false information, but we do not endorse the comments that are posted, except for our own comments we may post in response.
We reserve the right to delete or blocks comments for any reason but we will not edit someone’s comment in any way that alters its meaning. CMD will also make all reasonable efforts to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA).
It is up to you whether to submit information to us, and how much information to provide to CMD.
Please note: CMD does not maintain credit card information. Online donations are processed by “Salsa Labs,” which is committed to providing secure online transactions. Its privacy protections are available here. When a donation form ask users to enter sensitive information (such as a credit card number), that information is encrypted and is protected by Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption.
Mailing Lists: If you choose to subscribe to our free electronic news summaries or updates,we maintain your email address and other information you provide through a secure, third-party service provider we have relied on for many years to protect any personally identifiable information you provide.
Videos and Links: CMD provides links to videos hosted on YouTube and other third parties, and cannot control the privacy policies of such third parties, but as noted above CMD recommends that users deploy a VPN or other proxy protections to limit data aggregation about your Internet usage.
Disclosure
CMD will not disclose information about you without your consent unless required by a court order, and CMD will take all lawful measures to prevent any such disclosure, and we reserve the right to challenge or litigate any such requests and make public any such demand.
Changes
CMD may change these policies, which do not create any contractual obligation, but if we make any significant substantive change to these policies we will place a prominent notice on this site.