Privacy Policy

The Friends of the Santa Cruz Public Libraries (FSCPL) respects your right to personal privacy.  FSCPL collects and uses information only as disclosed in this Privacy Policy.  

Online Privacy Policy

Any visitor to the site can access and browse all publicly available pages of our Website without providing any Personal Information. If you choose to sign up to be a volunteer through our website, you must provide the following information: First Name, Last Name, Email, Address, City, State, Zip Code, Phone Number, Emergency Contact Name, Emergency Contact Phone Number, so that we can communicate with you by email about volunteer opportunities.

Personal Information is collected in the following ways:

Online Volunteer Registration

We use volunteers’ personal information to contact them about volunteer opportunities.

Answering Questions

We use Personal Information provided by visitors to answer any questions/concerns you might have expressed.

Email

For our mutual convenience, when you register as a Volunteer you will receive an email confirmation, as well as one or more emails which will facilitate your volunteering for the Friends. From that point on, you will receive periodic communications that are intended to provide Volunteers with information about the Friends. Because these communications are vital to our relations with Volunteers and the services we provide, no “unsubscribe” function is provided with regard to this kind of communications.

Personal Information

The Friends may share your Personal Information with companies that help us to process credit card payments and newsletter subscriptions. We never provide your Personal Information to other organizations without your permission. 

Disclosure Under Legal Duty

If compelled to do so by valid subpoena or court order or other governmental process, we may disclose your Personal Information as we are legally required to do. We may also use or disclose your Personal Information if necessary to protect the interests of The Friends.

How You Can Control the Use of Your Personal Information

There are several methods to contact us listed in this section. If you would like to change your Personal Information in our records or remove your name from our mailing list, contact us using one of the methods set out below. 

Email us using the friends@fscpl.org email address and include your name, address, telephone number, email address, and a note of instruction

Call us at: 1-831-427-7716

Write to us at: Friends of the Santa Cruz Public Libraries, P.O. Box 8472, Santa Cruz, CA 95061, and include your name, address, telephone number, and a note of instruction.

Our Use of Cookies

We collect information on thousands of visits to our site about how users navigate through our website. For example we use “cookie” technology to track which pages on our site our visitors view and which web browsers they use. We analyze this information in aggregate – that is, we collect this information and analyze it as a whole. We use this information to improve our site by making it more responsive to the needs and preferences of our users. Note: this aggregated information will not identify you or any other user of our web site.

We use cookies to help us understand our web site traffic patterns to determine our visitors’ interests and needs. This helps us identify ways to improve our site by adding products and services that visitors have indicated by their preferences will benefit them. These cookies identify your computer and not your email address.

Security

How We Strive to Protect Personal Information

We use Secure Socket Layer technology (SSL) to keep others from intercepting your information while it is being transmitted across the Internet. SSL technology is the industry standard method of communicating secure online transactions and is built into most major browsers. All pages that handle sensitive information are secure. All information, once on our server, is protected from any external intrusions. Once your donation is processed, we will not retain your credit card number in our online systems. Only Friends employees who require your Personal Information to serve you have access to your data, which is password protected. Employees who have access to Personal Information are trained in the privacy policy and security practices of this Statement.

Email Abuse

There are many unscrupulous individuals operating on the internet today who would think nothing of fabricating an email to make it appear that it comes from the Friends. These individuals may be engaging in a practice known as “phishing” in which they attempt to trick unwary recipients of email into divulging Personal Information. The Friends will never request Personal Information in an unsolicited email message to you.

If you have any question about the genuineness of an email you receive that appears to be from the Friends, contact us at friends@fscpl.org and do not furnish Personal Information in response to the email unless its authenticity can be verified.

Transaction Security

Secured communications on the web require attention to authentication, encryption and data integrity. All three are addressed by the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol. Authentication is the process of establishing that you are communicating with our web server, as opposed to another server assuming our identity. The SSL certificate confirms that we are the recipients of your communication. Encryption is the process of scrambling data (through the use of keys and mathematical encoding algorithms) to prohibit anyone from understanding it if they intercept the data while it is on its way from your browser to our server. Encryption protects communications between your browser and our system. Data Integrity ensures the data passed between your browser and our server is not being tampered with while in transit. SSL protects information en route to us, and as mentioned, the SSL certificate confirms that we are the recipients of this information. We strive to protect your data with the utmost care at all points in the process. However, no data transmission over the Internet or any wireless network can be guaranteed to be absolutely secure. Therefore, we do not warrant or ensure the security of any information sent to us online. If you have questions, comments or concerns please contact us via email at friends@fscpl.org or call us at 1-831-427-7716.

To ensure you are in SSL (Secure Socket Layer) or secure mode for your transactions, look at the address of the page. Secure pages will usually appear with an address that begins with https:// rather than the standard http://. They may also include a lock symbol. 

Age Requirements

You must be 18 years of age to volunteer with the Friends; we do not work with persons under age 18. If you are under 18 years of age, please do not submit any Personal Information to the Friends.

Links

From time to time, we may decide to provide links to affiliated entities or other sites outside of fscpl.org we think visitors may enjoy or benefit from. These sites operate independently of the Friends and have established their own security privacy policy. For the best online experience, we encourage you to review these policies before submitting any Personal Information through these sites. The Friends are not responsible for the privacy, terms of use or other policies of any other web site or their management of your Personal Information.

Changes to Our Policy

We reserve the right to make changes at any time to our policies and/or alter the look and functionality of our web site. However, if we change how we use your Personal Information, we will post the policy change notification on the web site. and we will update this Statement accordingly. We encourage you to periodically review this Statement for the latest information on our Privacy Policy.

Our current Statement was last updated October 1, 2021. For further information, about any of the information in this Statement, please send an email to friends@fscpl.org.

If we change our privacy policy, we will post those changes here.

Contact Info:

  • The Friends of the Santa Cruz Public Libraries
  • Phone: 831-427-7716
  • Mail: P.O. Box 8472, Santa Cruz, CA 95061
  • Email: friends@fscpl.org

 

Adopted by the FSCPL Board of Directors on 10/19/2021