Privacy Policy

This Policy is updated as of May 24, 2018.

Global Voices (GV) believes in the power of free speech to build bridges between people. To encourage uninhibited and direct connections between individuals, we seek transparency in our privacy policies. We know that you care about how your personal information and content is shared, and we take those concerns seriously.

We have established this Privacy Policy to explain what information we collect through our website and how we use it. In this policy, “GV” refers to GV staff and contractors, all of whom are bound by law or contract to keep confidential information they receive as part of their work for GV.

This policy applies to visitors to globalvoices.org and subdomains such as https://advox.globalvoices.org/ and https://es.globalvoices.org/, contributors, and to subscribers of GV’s mailing list.

We hope that this Privacy Policy is easy to understand. If you have any questions or concerns about this policy or about how GV handles your information, please send them by email to webmasterremove-this-anti-spam-measure@globalvoices.org.

Key Points of our Privacy Policy

  • We will never sell, rent, share, or distribute your user information without your permission unless compelled by law.
  • While Global Voices may link or provide access to third-party websites and services, this Privacy Policy does not apply to any third party’s practices, and Global Voices is not responsible for any third party’s policies.
  • You can withdraw your consent to share data at any time. In order to do so, see the section ‘Your rights’ below.

Information Collected by Global Voices

User Comments

Global Voices users may post comments about articles through the WordPress native application. We require a name and email address in order to submit a comment, and these are held in our system indefinitely as metadata of the comment. This metadata submitted to our comment forms is used to display the comment and any Gravatar that may have been set up for the submitted email address. Data submitted to our comment forms is stored indefinitely as part of the comment itself, and continues to be used to display the comment and its metadata.

Gravatar: 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. For more details please see the Gravatar service privacy policy. After approval of your comment, your Gravatar profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. Gravatars are not hosted by Global Voices and can be changed or removed by the user via. Gravatar’s website.

Akismet: Akismet is an anti-spam service for web comments. Your comment, including comment text, your Name, Email Address, Website (URL), IP Address and User Agent, are shared with the Akismet service to determine whether or not your comment is spam. Please see the Akismet service privacy policy for more information.

Recaptcha: Recaptcha is a service by Google which validates the “humanity” of users to avoid spam and intrusion attacks by bots. Global Voices uses Recaptcha on many forms including the comment forms and the login form. All interactions with reCAPTCHA are subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Contact Forms

Contact forms exist throughout the site, allowing site visitors to send email to an administrator or user via a web form. Contact forms collect the name and email of the sender as well as the message content so that it can be sent to the intended recipient, who will receive all information entered in the form as an email.

Information submitted to contact forms, including IP address, user-agent and other traffic-related information about your submission, may be logged for a limited period of time for spam analysis purposes. Information submitted through forms may be stored as long as necessary for processing requests related to the form.

Contact forms may require users to solve a Recaptcha test before submitting. See Recaptcha section above for more information.

Other Forms

Other forms exist throughout the site, which share the properties of Contact Forms, and also request specific information for various purposes. All forms state their reasons for collecting information and indicate how that information will be handled.

In all cases, notification emails containing form submissions may be sent to the appropriate Global Voices administrators, and data collected may be copied and stored locally by Global Voices administrators for the purpose of organizing and making use of this data.

Some forms on Global Voices use an embedded Google Form powered by Google Docs, in which case the embedded form will be clearly labeled as “Google”. Data collected via. Google Forms is stored on Google servers and subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Global Voices does not publish the data submitted to the Google Forms unless this is explicitly stated on the form itself.

If you wish to submit information to Global Voices over an encrypted service, please contact webmasterremove-this-anti-spam-measure@globalvoices.org directly to discuss your needs.

Contributor Recruitment Forms

Global Voices asks prospective authors and translators to submit an application form with information about themselves as part of the recruitment process, including various personal details needed to process your application and create a user account for you in our website.

Contributor User Accounts

Individuals with access to our WordPress CMS have personal user accounts which may store information, including email, avatars, social media accounts, and biographical data. This user-entered information is stored indefinitely and used to populate the public user profile which also displays public posts. WordPress user accounts are manually created by administrators.

Email addresses stored in WordPress user accounts are never exposed to the public, but are used to create a personal contact form on the user profile page. Emails sent using this form are forwarded to the user’s account and also stored temporarily for anti-spam analysis purposes as described in the Contact Forms section above.

Personal user information stored within WordPress may be edited by the user at any time. The name and email fields of the user profile are mandatory for the system to function and display published articles accurately, so they may not be removed.

The user email address is necessary for logging in and resetting passwords, so an email is always required as part of the user account. If an inactive author wishes to have their email changed, they may either switch it to another email address they control, or ask for it to be changed to one that points to Global Voices administrators.

Information stored in WordPress user accounts may be used for internal administrative and managerial needs, including but not limited to: generating lists of “active users” for election voter lists, collating matching user accounts across sites to link profiles, and displaying author credits on translation posts. Global Voices also reserves the right to transfer user profile data into a new CMS for the purpose of displaying previously published content, in which case means would be provided for all users to log in and edit this information, under the same principle of consent.

Traffic and error logging

As a self-hosted website, Global Voices generates detailed logs about all traffic to our servers, including the timing of requests, URLs requested, IP addresses, user agents and other data provided by the requesting browser or bot. These logs are used by automated firewall systems as well as manual analysis to block malicious and misbehaving agents and IPs for security and performance purposes. System logs are automatically rotated and removed on a regular basis, and are never accessible to agents outside Global Voices.

Google Analytics: Global Voices integrates the Google Analytics tracking service across our sites. Google Analytics collects anonymized data about all visitors on their servers so that we can analyze traffic and audience behavior. Visit the Google Privacy Policy to learn more.

Third Party Services

Various services on the Global Voices website link to, provide access to, or utilize the following third-party services: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Google Analytics, Google Invisible Recaptcha, Gravatar, Akismet, Mailchimp, Tumblr, Instagram, Soundcloud, and Paypal. Any information collected by these third-party services is subject to the terms and policies of those third parties. Global Voices is not responsible for any third-party terms or policies. In the event that Global Voices is integrated with any third-party service, your decision to use such a service in connection with Global Voices is voluntary.

Newsletter

Global Voices maintains email lists for subscribers to receive announcements about our work and stories published on our websites. We use Mailchimp to manage our mailing lists, as well integrating list signup forms that access the Mailchimp API into our site. When you subscribe to the mailing list, Mailchimp collects and stores the information that you provide, including your email address, first and last name (optional), and email subscription preferences (optional). It also collects your IP address.

We also use Mailchimp’s analytics to understand how people view and interact with our mailing list communications and to learn about what types of updates subscribers are most interested in. Mailchimp records information such as: open rate, number of opens, click rate, total clicks, bounce rate, number of unsubscribes, frequency of email forwarding, spam, and geolocation.

See Mailchimp’s Privacy Policy and About Email Campaign Reports documentation for more information.

Database and storage

Global Voices may store contact information given to us with consent by contributors, donors and subscribers of newsletters in our WordPress websites and/or our private cloud-based file-syncing software and personal computers, which run on private, secure servers. Information collected includes email, phone, mailing address, professional status, and preferred method of contact.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files that some websites may send to your browser for storage on your computer. Cookies are used for various services, including data collection, content delivery, registration, and personalization. Global Voices reserves the right to read and create user and contributor cookies.

Global Voices websites use cookies to respect your wish to close promotional and informational boxes within the site. Our integration of Google Analytics also employs cookies to record anonymized data about your behavior on our site. Our integration of social services and embeds, such as those from Facebook and Twitter, may also employ cookies created by those services

Sharing of Information with Third Parties

Global Voices typically does not share user information with third parties without the user’s consent. However, Global Voices may share user information when we believe in good faith that release is necessary to comply with a governmental or court order; to comply with applicable law; to comply with a subpoena from a third party; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of Global Voices, our staff, our users, or others.

Organizational information, such as user email addresses, are shared only between the Global Voices Board of Directors and Core Management Team and relevant Editors, and only on a need-to-know basis.

Changes to this Policy

Global Voices may amend this Policy from time to time. If we make changes to this Policy, we will notify users so that you will always remain aware of Global Voices’ privacy policies.

Your rights

We will take steps in accordance with applicable legislation to keep your personal data accurate, complete and up-to-date. You are entitled to have any inadequate, incomplete or incorrect personal data corrected. You also have the right to request access to your personal data and to obtain a copy of it as well as request additional information about the processing and to request us to erase the personal data we hold about you.

The following rights apply to European residents in addition to the above:

Right to restriction

You have the right to obtain a restriction of processing, for example in case we no longer need your personal data in view of the initial purposes, but they are required by you for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.

Right to object

You have the right to object to our processing of your personal data which is based on our legitimate interests. We will no longer process your personal data upon your request, unless we have compelling legitimate grounds for the continuation of the processing which override your interests, rights and freedoms, or for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims. You may also object against our use of your data for direct marketing purposes. To that end, you may also use the unsubscribe button provided for in every e-mail we send.

Right to withdraw consent

In cases where we rely on your consent for using your personal data, you can withdraw such consent at any time by sending an email to webmasterremove-this-anti-spam-measure@globalvoices.org.

Right to data portability

Under circumstances, you have the right to have your personal data transmitted to another data controller in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format; If you require assistance contact webmasterremove-this-anti-spam-measure@globalvoices.org.

Right to lodge a complaint

In case you have a question or complaint about how we process your personal data, you can send an email to webmasterremove-this-anti-spam-measure@globalvoices.org.

Alternatively, you could consider to lodge a complaint with a supervisory data protection authority.

Effective Date of this Policy

We may change this Privacy Notice from time to time. If a fundamental change is involved that requires us to inform you about this, or if the change is in any other manner relevant to you, we will ensure that information is provided to you well in advance of the change actually taking effect.