Privacy Policy

Website Privacy Statement

This Privacy Statement sets forth the Women of Color in Engineering (WCEC) practices regarding the collection and use of information relating to the WCEC website and other activities of WCEC.

WCEC created its policy with a fundamental respect for the rights to privacy of our members, customers, and visitors. WCEC does not sell the data of its members in part or whole to other customers, vendors, or any outside parties under any circumstances.

Information Collection and Use

When registering for our educational events or trade shows, using our website, ordering products, and signing up for certain selected services (such as free subscriptions), you may be asked for information about yourself, including but not limited to contact information (such as name, e-mail address, mailing address and phone number) or demographic information (such as job title and purchasing responsibilities, company information and professional certification).

If you sign up to become a member of WCEC or register for an event, you are asked for personal information such as your education level, interests, and years of experience. We also ask you to provide basic demographic and gender identity information voluntarily. This information is used to understand our membership better and is not disclosed to outside organizations.

For our services that require payment (such as certain events, products, and subscriptions), we collect credit card information (such as account name, number, and expiration date), which is used for billing purposes only and is not otherwise shared, except with a reputable third-party processing vendor. WCEC uses secure socket layer (SSL) technology when making purchases or sending credit card and login information to WCEC.

We have features through which you may submit information to us (such as our feedback forms). Requests for service, support, or information may be forwarded as needed to best respond to a specific request. Under some circumstances, we may retain e-mails and other information sent to us for our internal administrative purposes and to help us better serve customers.

From time to time, we may invite you to provide information via surveys or contests. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary. Therefore you have a choice whether to disclose requested contact information (such as name and mailing address) and demographic information (such as zip code or job title). In addition to other uses outlined in this policy, contact information collected in connection with surveys and contests is used to notify the winners and award prizes. It may be shared with sponsors of such surveys or contests.

Automatically collected data

Web servers automatically collect information about visitors, and ours does as well. This information includes the date, time, and navigation history of the session and your browser type and IP address. This information does not contain anything that can identify you personally. Automatically collected data may be used to deliver content specific to your interests and to honor your preferences.

We use “cookies” (a “cookie” is a piece of data stored on the user’s hard drive containing information about the user). Cookies make it possible for us to reduce the number of times you must log in or tailor the website to fit your interests. Most Internet browsers allow you to erase cookies from your computer hard drive, block cookies, or receive a warning before a cookie is stored. Please refer to the instructions or help screen of your browser to learn how it handles cookies.

Some of our business affiliates may use cookies on our sites in ads or promotions. We have no access to or control over these business affiliates’ cookies, so we urge you to read their privacy policies for information.

Information about you that may be stored in our database

We may check the information you have provided against any information about you in our customer database. We do this to ensure that we maintain the most current and accurate information about you as a valued member and/or friend of the organization.

Our database will contain your name and email address and include your title, affiliation, industry classification, address, phone and fax numbers, select demographic information if you provide this information to us voluntarily. We may also collect additional information about you, including but not limited to: site registration, member ID numbers, and your participation with WCEC (magazine subscriptions, offices you hold, committees, councils, boards, or task forces on which you serve or have served, membership status, meetings attended, products purchased, events attended, etc.).

How we use information about you

Automatically collected data such as cookies and log files help us understand our visitors’ interests to enhance their experience on our sites. We also use this information for our internal security audit log, trend analysis, and system administration and to gather broad demographic information about our user base for aggregate use.

We may use the information you have provided to process the transactions you request. We may also use this information to inform you of new products and upcoming events that may be of interest to you, based on your participation in WCEC activities, purchases of products, or interests in technologies you have indicated. You may choose not to receive these communications.

We may combine demographic information you have supplied with site usage data to produce general profiles, in aggregate form that cannot identify you personally, about our members, customers, and visitors and their preferences in the site’s content and advertising.

We use aggregate demographic information about our members, customers, and visitors to improve our service for marketing purposes and/or industry reporting purposes.

Shared data

WCEC does not sell the data of its members, customers, or vendors under any circumstances.

We partner with other third parties to provide specific services. For example, exposition registration services may be provided by a third party. These third parties are not allowed to use information about you except to provide these services.

We may share aggregated or composite information that does not identify you personally with our advertisers, researchers, exhibitors, and business affiliates. WCEC does not share demographic information about WCEC members unless it is provided in the aggregate.

WCEC may share basic contact information (name and email address) to a member’s employer that partners with WCEC for the employer to track a member’s participation in an employer-sponsored membership program or employer-sponsored event.

WCEC may share leadership information about WCEC members to various committees and nominating boards within WCEC to evaluate WCEC members’ eligibility for a WCEC position. WCEC only shares information that the WCEC member voluntarily provides.

WCEC may be required to provide information about any members or prospective members to law enforcement or government agencies.

Security

When our registration/order form asks users to enter sensitive information (such as credit card number and/or social security number), that information is encrypted and is protected with the best encryption software in the industry – SSL.

Links

The WCEC website contains links to other sites. Please be aware that WCEC cannot be responsible for the privacy practices of other sites. We urge you to read the privacy statements of websites that collect personally identifiable information.

Students and Children

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) protects children’s personal information under the age of 13. This applies to individually identifiable information about a child collected online, such as full name, home address, email address, telephone number, or any other information that would allow someone to identify or contact the child. COPPA also covers other types of information, for example, hobbies, interests, and information collected through cookies or other types of tracking mechanisms-when they are tied to individually identifiable information. You need to understand this law; we encourage you to read more about COPPA.

The Women of Color in Engineering Collaborative (WCEC) is committed to providing a safe, secure, and fun online experience for children who visit our site. We are dedicated to safeguarding personal information collected online and helping parents and children have positive experiences on the Internet. Consistent with COPPA, we will never knowingly request personally identifiable information from anyone under 13 without prior verifiable parental consent. Parents can revoke their consent and ask that information about their children be deleted from the site by contacting our offices by email at research@swe.org. To do this or to review personal information collected from children, we must verify the identity of the requesting parent. When a parent revokes consent, we will stop collecting, using, or disclosing information from that child.

As with our members, WCEC does not collect personally identifiable information from individuals unless they provide it to us voluntarily and knowingly. WCEC will not knowingly collect or store personally identifiable information from anyone under 13 years of age unless verified parental consent has been obtained. WCEC will not require any child under 13 to provide more personally identifiable information than is necessary for them to participate in the specific online activity. COPPA prohibits all sites targeted to children under 13 from conditioning a child’s participation in the site on the child, providing more personal information than is reasonably necessary to participate in the online activity.

Preferences, Permission, Opt-out

Individuals can opt-out of emails or update their email preferences by following links at the footer of all emails. If you wish to have your data removed from WCEC’s database, please email research@swe.org.

Rights of European Residents/European Union Data Subjects

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws about your Personal Data.

You have the right to:

• Request access to your Personal Data. This enables you to receive a copy of your Personal Data and verify that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of your Personal Data. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected. However, we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.
• Request erasure of your Personal Data. You may have the right to request that Personal Data we hold about you is deleted.
• Object to processing of your Personal Data. You may have the right to prevent or restrict the processing of your Personal Data.
• Request restriction of processing of your Personal Data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your Personal Data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful, but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your data, but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
• Request the transfer of your Personal Data. Where technically feasible, we will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your Personal Data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format.
• Withdraw your consent. However, if you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us.

How You Can Access and Change Information

WCEC acknowledges that you have the right to access your Personal Data. In case you request us to remove data, we will respond within a reasonable timeframe.

Upon request, we will provide you with information about whether we hold any of your Personal Data. Members can update or correct some Personal Data or remove it from our system by emailing us at research@swe.org. Requests typically receive a response within sixty (60) days. If access cannot be provided within that time frame, we will provide the requesting party with an estimated date by which the information will be provided. If access is denied for some reason, we will explain why access has been denied.

Updates to this privacy statement

WCEC may, in its sole discretion, update this statement at any time by posting the amended statement on the website, and it shall be effective upon posting. This statement was last updated on March 17, 2022.

Contact, questions, comments, complaints

If you would like to communicate with WCEC regarding privacy issues or have questions, comments, or complaints regarding this website or its policy practices, or if you feel that WCEC is not abiding by our privacy policy statement, please contact us at research@swe.org.

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