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Privacy Policy

Last Modified: February 9, 2022

Massachusetts de jure Assembly ("MDJA", “we” or “us”) understands that security and privacy are important issues for users of our services available at www.maassembly.info (the "Site"). The following Privacy Policy (the "Policy") describes how we collect, use and share the information that we gather about the users of our Site.

Please read this Policy carefully to understand our policies and practices regarding your information and how we will treat it. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, your choice is not to use our Site. By using our Site, you consent to our collection, use and disclosure of your information, including Personal Information (defined below), as described in this Policy. Your use of our Site is subject to this Policy and our Site Terms and Conditions. This Policy may change from time to time; please return to this Policy page periodically on  www.maassembly.info  to review. Your continued use of our Site after we make changes is deemed to be acceptance of those changes, so please check this Policy periodically for updates.

 

Information we collect

We may collect information directly from you, automatically through your use of our Site, and from third parties. We may combine all of the information we collect about you from these various sources.

  • Information we collect directly from you. Depending on how you use our Site,

  • you may provide us with certain information that can identify you as an individual, such as your name, email address, phone number, credit or debit card information and shipping or billing address (collectively, "Personal Information"). We will also collect any other information that you choose to provide to us through our Site (e.g., contents of messages you send to us through our Site).

  • Information we collect about you from third parties (we don’t.) We do not collect information about you from third parties. 

  • Information we collect automatically through your use of our Site. We may automatically collect information about your use of our Site, including but not limited to your Internet protocol (“IP”) address; the type of web browser you are using; the website that led you to our Site; the website you visit after leaving our Site; the pages you view on our Site and the dates and times you access our Site.

How we use your information

MDJA may use your information, including Personal Information and/or Content, for the following purposes:

  • Providing our services. To facilitate and respond to your questions or requests; to provide you with news or other information we think may interest you; to communicate with you about your use of our Site or for other informational purposes; to improve our services; and for other customer support-related purposes. 

  • Marketing and advertising. To provide you with marketing or promotional communications from MDJA or from other third parties. We may provide marketing or advertising to you in a variety of ways, including through our Site, via email or on other third-party websites. 

  • Research and analytics. To analyze how users use our Site and services; to analyze how users interact with marketing or other communications we send to them; and for other research, analytical and statistical purposes. 

  • Protecting rights and interests. To investigate, protect or defend the rights, safety or property of MDJA, our users or the public; to investigate or enforce perceived violations of our Site Terms and Conditions or this Policy; as evidence in litigation in which we are involved; and for fraud protection and credit risk reduction purposes.

How we share your information

MDJA may share your information, including Personal Information and/or Content, with the following types of third parties:

  • Service providers. MDJA may share your information with third-party service providers, vendors, agents, contractors or others who perform functions on our behalf. For example, we may use service providers to send mail. We will obtain consent for such sharing with service providers where legally required. We enter into written agreements with these third-party service providers requiring them to provide the same level of protection for your Personal Information as provided under this Policy and limiting their use of your Personal Information to the specified services provided on our behalf.

  • Corporate affiliates. MDJA may share your information with any current or future parent company, affiliate or subsidiary.

  • Other unaffiliated third parties.  MDJA will not share your information with unaffiliated third parties. 

MDJA may also share your information, including Personal Information and/or Content, in the following contexts:

  • Protecting rights and interests. MDJA may share your information with law enforcement agencies and others as we deem appropriate to investigate, protect or defend the rights, safety or property of MDJA, our members or the public; to investigate or enforce perceived violations of our Site Terms and Conditions or this Policy; as evidence in litigation in which we are involved; and for fraud protection and credit risk reduction purposes.

  • Sale or acquisition of assets. MDJA may share your information if we become involved in a transaction involving the sale of our assets, such as a merger or acquisition, if we are transferred to another company, in the event of a bankruptcy, or as part of any other business transfer. If the surviving entity in such a transaction is not MDJA, the surviving entity may use your information pursuant to its own privacy policies, which may be different from this Policy.

  • Legal compliance. MDJA may share your information to comply with laws, regulations, legal process (e.g., a warrant or subpoena) or guidance; and to respond to state assembly requests (e.g., requests from a regulator).

  • Aggregate or anonymous information. MDJA does not share anonymized or aggregated information about MDJA users to third parties.

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Cookies and other tracking mechanisms

We may automatically collect information about you through the use of common information-gathering tools, as well as new tracking technologies that develop as technology evolves. The tools that we or our service providers may use to track you include the following:

  • Cookies. A cookie is a small string of text that a website can send to your browser to help the website remember and customize your visit. For example, we use cookies to help us to tailor our Site to you, remember your orders, keep you logged into your account, and compile statistics about Site usage. With most Internet browsers or other software, you can erase cookies from your computer hard drive, block or disable cookies or receive a warning before a cookie is stored. Please refer to your browser instructions to learn more about these functions. If you reject cookies, functionality of the Site may be limited, and you may not be able to take advantage of many of the Site's features (e.g., you may not be able to stay logged into your account).

  • Web beacons/clear GIFs. Clear graphics interchange format images (“GIFs”) are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, that are embedded invisibly on web pages or in emails. We or our service providers may use clear GIFs (also known as web beacons, web bugs or pixel tags) in connection with our Site to track the activities of visitors to our Site, help us manage content and compile statistics about usage of our Site. We or our service providers may also use clear GIFs in emails to our users, to help us track email response rates, identify when our emails are viewed and track whether our emails are forwarded.

  • LSOs. We may also use local storage objects (“LSOs”) to store your Site preferences and to personalize your visit. LSOs are different from browser cookies because of the amount and type of data stored. Typically, you cannot control, delete or disable the acceptance of LSOs through your web browser. For more information on Flash LSOs, or to learn how to manage your settings for Flash LSOs, please click here. We may use applications, servers and other technology provided by third-party companies, such as Google Analytics, to help us improve our Site, performance and user experiences. These entities may use cookies and information-gathering tools, such as web beacons or LSOs, to perform their services.

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California do not track disclosure

Our Site does not respond to do not track signals (e.g., the Mozilla Firefox Do Not Track feature), though you may be able to disable certain tracking as discussed above (e.g., by disabling cookies). There is still no universally accepted standard regarding tracking, but for more information about do not track signals, please click here.

Online advertising

We do not use third-party marketing or advertising companies for serving advertisements on our Site. 

Your choices

  • Account information. If you ever wish to access your Personal Information, please contact us at maassembly@protonmail.com. Please note that we may maintain copies of your information and content.

  • Communications from MDJA. We may send periodic promotional or informational emails to you, about MDJA and other third-party information and offers. In the event you do not wish to receive such emails from MDJA, you may opt out of such communications by following the opt-out instructions contained within the body of any email message you receive or by emailing us at maassembly@protonmail.com and requesting that you no longer receive communications from us. It may take us up to ten (10) business days to process your opt out request. Even if you have opted out of receiving marketing and promotional emails from us, we may still send you transactional emails, such as emails about the services you have requested from us.

  • Communications from Third Parties. We do not share your information with third parties; therefore, you will not need to opt out from receiving third-party marketing messages.  

  • Online advertising. Please see our Online advertising section above for more information about your choices regarding online interest-based advertising.

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International transfers

Our Site is maintained in the United States of America. The information we collect from you through our services may be transferred to, stored at, and processed in the USA and other destinations outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”) or other country in which you are located. This includes processing by us, our affiliates, our third-party service companies and other third parties as described in this Policy. You explicitly consent and agree to such transfer, storing and/or processing of your Personal Information outside the EEA or other country in which you are located. You understand that data stored in the USA may be subject to lawful requests by the courts or law enforcement authorities in the USA. The USA may not have data protection laws that are as comprehensive or protective as those in your country of residence; however, our collection, storage and use of your Personal Information will at all times be in accordance with this Policy.

Your European privacy rights

If you are a resident of the European Union, you have certain additional rights with respect to your Personal information under the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) (the “GDPR”), including the following:

  • The right of access to your Personal Information.

  • The right to rectify your Personal Information if it is incorrect or incomplete.

  • The right to have your Personal Information erased (“right to be forgotten”) if certain grounds are met.

  • The right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your Personal Information at any time (if our processing is based on consent).

  • The right to object to our processing of your Personal Information (if processing is based on legitimate interests).

  • The right to object to our processing of your Personal Information for direct marketing purposes.

  • The right to receive your Personal Information from us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, and the right to transmit your Personal Information to another controller without hindrance from us (data portability).

If you are located in the European Union and you are or have been our customer, we may send you marketing communications based on our legitimate interests, subject always to your right to opt out of such communications. Further, if you are located in the European Union, we will never share your personal information with a third party for such third party’s marketing purposes, unless you have specifically consented to us doing so.

You may contact us at maassembly@protonmail.com to exercise any of the above rights. We may request specific information from you to confirm your identity, and in some circumstances, we may charge a reasonable fee for access to your Personal Information.

Furthermore, if you believe that our processing of your Personal Information is inconsistent with your data protection rights under the GDPR and we have not adequately addressed your concerns, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the data protection supervisory authority of your country. For purposes of the GDPR, we are a “controller” and you are a “data subject.”

Your California privacy rights

If you are a California resident, California law provides you with additional rights regarding our use of your personal information. 

California Shine the Light Law: If you reside in California, you have the right to ask us one time each year if we have shared personal information with third parties for their direct marketing purposes. To make a request please submit an inquiry to the following address: MA Assembly, P.O. Box 166, Erving, MA 01344.  In your request, please specify that you want a "Massachusetts de jure Assembly California Shine the Light Notice." Please allow 30 days for a response.

 

If you are a minor under 18 and have a profile on www.maassembly.info, you may ask us to remove reviews or other content that you posted on the site by writing to maassembly@protonmail.com.  We will begin to process your request within 30 days. Please note that processing your request does not ensure complete or comprehensive removal of the content that you posted.

 

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018. Effective January 1, 2020, if you reside in California then you have the following rights:

 

1. You have the right to opt-out of the MDJA sale of your Personal Information.

2. You have the right to request the deletion of your Personal Information.

3. You have the right to request us to disclose to you the following, no more than twice in a 12-month period:

  • Categories of Personal Information we collected about you during the preceding 12 months.

  • Categories of sources from which we collected the Personal Information during the preceding 12 months.

  • Business or commercial purpose(s) for collecting or selling your Personal Information during the preceding 12 months.

  • Categories of third parties with whom we share the Personal Information during the preceding 12 months.

  • Specific pieces of Personal Information we collected about you during the preceding12 months.

  • Categories of Personal Information we have sold and categories of third parties To whom the information was sold to during the preceding 12 months.

  • Categories of Personal Information we disclosed about you for a business purpose during the preceding 12 months.

We will not discriminate against you because you exercised your rights under this section of our Notice.

 

For purposes of exercising your rights above, please note the following regarding how we collect and use your Personal Information as described in this Notice:

  • We collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers; payment information; commercial information; internet or other electronic network activity information; geolocation data; audio, electronic or visual information.

  • We disclose the following categories of personal information for a business purpose: Identifiers; payment information; commercial information; device information; demographic information and driver’s license number.

  • We sell the following categories of personal information: None.

 

Do Not Sell My Information

You may submit your request through the following methods:

  • E-mail us to submit access and deletion request and/or opt-out of sale of Personal Information at maassembly@protonmail.com

 

Children’s privacy

Our Site is not targeted to children under thirteen (13) years of age and we do not knowingly collect Personal Information from children under 13. If we discover that we have inadvertently collected Personal Information from a child under 13, we will promptly take measures to delete that Personal Information from our systems. In the case of residents of the European Union, we do not collect Personal Information from anyone under the age of 16 except with parental consent, subject to an EU member state providing by law for a lower age (not below 13 years).

External links

Our Site may contain links to other websites. Your use of an external website is subject to and governed by the terms and policies of that website. MDJA is not responsible for the privacy practices of such other websites. We encourage our users to read the privacy statements of each and every website they visit.

Security

We have implemented technical and organizational measures, appropriate to the risk, to protect your information against accidental or unlawful destruction, loss or alteration and unauthorized disclosure or access. For example, we limit internal access to our servers and have physical, electronic, and administrative safeguards in place that are designed to protect your information. However, the transmission of information via the Internet is not completely secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted through our Site. We cannot ensure or warrant the security of any such information, and you provide such information at your own risk.

You can also take steps to help protect your information. For example, if you have an account with us, you should take steps to protect against unauthorized access to your account by, among other things, choosing a robust password that nobody else knows or can easily guess and keeping your log-in and password private.

Data Retention

We retain your Personal Information, if provided by you through our Site, for as long as your inquiry is active (as determined by us) and for a reasonable time thereafter, or if applicable, for as long as you remain on our marketing list. We also may retain your Personal Information for a longer period of time on the basis of our legitimate interests in providing our Services to you or as necessary to comply with our tax and legal obligations, to resolve disputes, and to enforce our agreements. Even if we delete some or all of your Personal Information, we may continue to retain and use aggregated or anonymous data previously collected so that it can no longer be used for personal identification and/or anonymize or aggregate your Personal Information. Please note that we will not be liable for disclosures of your data due to errors or unauthorized acts of third parties.

Changes to this Policy

This Policy was last updated as of the “Last Modified” date above. MDJA may modify this Policy at any time and will post any updates to our Site. We therefore encourage you to review this page frequently for any changes.

Contacting MDJA

If you have any questions or comments about this Policy, or to exercise your rights under this Policy, please contact us using the information below.

MA Assembly

P.O. Box 166

Erving, MA 01344

maassembly@protonmail.com

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