1. What Information Does the Guild Collect?
We strive to keep the information we collect from members and website visitors to the absolute minimum, just the necessary details to provide our services as described below.
Member Registration
When you register with the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild on our website: chattanoogawritersguild.org; we collect data from you such as your name, your company name, author pseudonym, FaceBook name and contact email addresses for the orderly management of your membership record and providing membership benefits.
Membership Payment
To improve security of membership payments, which are paid by either a credit or debit card or a PayPal account, payment transactions takes place in a secure hosted payment gateway environment, currently provided by PayPal. No aspect of the payment is carried out in the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild environment. We neither store nor have access to your credit or debit card details. PayPal’s system processes the transaction and returns the appropriate transaction metadata to the Guild’s database for membership management and tracking purposes. A record of payment dates and amounts are securely kept for administration and query management purposes.
Member Profile
The Guild provides members the option to upload a personal and or a business profile which is made public for the purposes of promoting yourself and your books and/or your publishing services. The personal data you fill in will be stored in our systems for the purposes of this promotion.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
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. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
2. Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
3. Who we share your data with
Financial transactions relating to membership and services are handled by our payment services provider, PayPal. We share transaction data with them only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing your payments, refunds, and dealing with queries.
Personal data that we process will not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose. One year after your membership expires we will delete your membership information and profile. Members can delete their accounts at any time.
We do not store your financial details (credit or debit card numbers).
We work with trusted third parties to operate our website, conduct business and provide our services and only those who agree to keep information confidential.
Please Note: In a situation where a release of information is necessary to comply with the law, or to protect your, our or other’s legal rights, property or safety, we may release the necessary information to the authorities. In the unlikely event of such, all members would be immediately informed.
4. How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
Member information is retained for the duration of active membership.
5. What rights you have over your data
Members can delete their accounts at any time which will remove profile information from our system. You can request that we erase any other personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
6. Consent
By using our websites, you consent to our privacy policy. if we make any changes to our privacy policy, these will be posted on this page. This policy was last modified on November 11, 2021.
7. Questions
If you have any questions or concerns about our handling of data, please e-mail us using the contact form.