Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

AFM PRIVACY POLICY

The American Federation of Musicians (“AFM”) has created this privacy policy to explain how information is used that you may provide while visiting this website (“Website”) and to demonstrate our firm commitment to Internet privacy.  By using or accessing the Website, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy applies only to information collected online through the Website and does not describe the ways in which we may collect or use information obtained offline or through any means other than our Website.

HOW AND WHEN WE COLLECT INFORMATION

Activity That Doesn’t Require Registration.  You can view content on the Website without registering or providing any personal information. When you visit in this manner, we automatically obtain information from you about the name of your Internet service provider, the browser and type of computer you are using, and the website that referred you to us.  In addition, we use a “session” cookie to identify you while you are on the Website, if cookies are enabled on your computer.  This session cookie terminates once you finish using the Website and close your browser.

Activity Requiring Registration.  Certain activities on the Website require you to register. To become a registered user, we ask you to provide your name, last 4 digits of your SSN (3 for SIN) and your home Local. If you decide to register, we use a persistent cookie that stores certain information to make it easier for you to login when you come back to the Website. However, none of your personal information is stored in that cookie. 

Usage Information. We may record information about your usage of the Website, such as when you use the site, the areas of the site you click on and/or participate in. If you are logged in, we may associate that information with your account.  A persistent cookie may be used to track this information.  We may use pixel tags and/or trackable links in HTML-based emails sent to our users to track which emails are opened and/or clicked on by recipients.

Comments Posted to Site. Any personal information or content that you voluntarily disclose online becomes publicly available and can be collected and used by others. Your user name (not your email address) is displayed to other users when you post comments.  When posting comments, you should exercise caution not to provide any personally identifying information or other information that you would not want seen by others.  Use of the community functions on the Website is at your own risk. 

Polls and Surveys. From time to time, we may conduct polls and surveys.  Information collected through our polls, surveys, and questionnaires is used in the aggregate, unless we contact you to request permission to use your individual responses for a particular purpose.

Financial Information and Payments. We use a secure server for processing payments and financial information. AFM staff log in to the secure site, retrieve the information and process it using our in-house credit card processing equipment. The AFM does not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes.

If you choose to make an online donation, you will have to provide your credit card billing information. As this information is collected and transferred over the Internet to our secure server, it is encrypted using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology, the security technology that is designed to protect sensitive information. Our donation pages display the Verisign Secure Site Seal to assure you that our Website is authentic and that all transactions are secured by SSL encryption. If you are making a donation, the credit card information that you provide at the time of donation is used only to process your donation and will not be used for any other purposes.

We do not knowingly collect any information from children under the age of 13. We encourage you to talk to your children about safe and responsible use of their personal information while using the Internet. If you have any reservations, questions or concerns about your child's access to this site or how information that your child provides is used by us, please contact us.

Uses of Personal Information

• The personal information that we collect on the Website helps us, our state and local affiliates and related organizations to efficiently and effectively represent AFM members, to pursue our advocacy agenda, and to provide valuable member benefits.
 
• In order to advance these goals and activities, we may share the personal information that we collect about you with our state and local affiliates and other AFM-related organizations, as well as third parties that perform services on our behalf.  Additionally, subject to applicable law, we may share any of the personal information that we collect about you with certain third parties that share our interests.

• We will use your email address to communicate with you about our activities and offerings, unless you opt-out from receiving such messages.  We will also use your email address for administrative purposes, such as notifying you of major Website changes, sending messages related to actions you have taken on the site or for customer service purposes.  Although we hope you'll find these communications informative and useful, you may opt out of receiving future information via e-mail by using the unsubscribe procedures specified on the e-mail message. 

• When you send email or other communications to us, we may retain those communications in order to process your inquiries, respond to your requests and improve our services.

• We use both your personally identifying information and certain non-personally-identifying information (such as anonymous usage data, IP addresses, browser type, clickstream data, etc.) to improve the quality of your user experience and the design of the Website and to create new features, functionality, and services by storing, tracking, and analyzing user behavior, preferences, trends, and actions.

Other Disclosures
We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws.  If we receive a subpoena requesting information about you and if you have provided us with your email address, we will attempt to notify you of the subpoena at the email address that you have provided.  Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with the law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Website or using our name, to prevent bodily harm, to enforce our User Agreement, or to protect the rights, property or safety of visitors to our site, our members, the public or our union.  In the unlikely event that we merge with another entity, information on our visitors would be among the transferred assets.

Information Security and Data Integrity

We take security measures to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data. These measures include internal reviews of our data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures, as well as physical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to systems where we store personal data.

It is important for you to protect against unauthorized access to your password and to your computer. Be sure to sign off when finished using a shared computer. If you send us an e-mail, you should know that e-mail is not necessarily secure against interception. So, if your communication includes sensitive information like your bank account, charge card, or social security number, and you prefer not to use one of our secure online complaint forms, contact us by mail or by telephone rather than by e-mail.

More Information

Our Website may also permit you to access non-AFM sites. It is important to remember that, if you link to a non-AFM site from our Website, that party's privacy policy and its user agreement apply to you. We encourage you to learn about each third party's privacy policy before giving personal information to them.

We reserve the right to change this Privacy Policy at any time. We will post any changes to this Privacy Policy on this page, so we encourage you to check this page regularly.  Your continued use of this Website following any changes to this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such changes.

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Effective Date: March 10, 2008