Privacy Policy
Last Updated: November 19, 2024
Who we are
The Capitol Region Council of Governments (CRCOG) leads as a catalyst to enhance the quality of life, vibrancy, and vitality of the Greater Hartford region. CRCOG provides planning, programs, and services to its member municipalities and is the region’s designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO). CRCOG is a strong advocate for the region and regional solutions. It is a voluntary Council of Governments formed to initiate and implement regional programs and initiatives to benefit the member towns and the region.
To ensure the trustworthiness of our website and the quality of user experience, we may collect and process information about our users. We are committed to respectfully handling your information because user privacy is important to us. We provide this notice to explain how we collect and use information from users of our website at https://crcog.org (“Website”) and related services, including, but not limited to, our social networking features (collectively, “Services”). This notice does not apply to websites or services that do not display or link to this notice or that display or link to different privacy statements.
By using our Services, you consent to this notice. If you object to the collection, use, and disclosure practices described in this notice, you may not use our Services.
Information Users Provide to Us
We do not request or actively collect personal information from users. However, you may choose to provide certain personal information to us voluntarily. Personal information is information from which you can be directly or indirectly identified, such as username, address, email address, phone number, payment card and financial account information, billing information, driver’s license number, Social Security number, and certain online identifiers.
Comments. If you provide us feedback or contact us via email or chat, we will collect your name and email address, as well as any other message content, to reply, provide customer and technical support, improve and optimize our Services, satisfy our legal obligations, enforce our contracts and legal rights, and address any existing or anticipated disputes.
For example, when you leave comments on the Website, we collect the data in the comments form, including your name and email address, IP address, and browser user agent string to help detect spam.
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, if available, is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Location. If you tell us where you are (e.g., by allowing your mobile device to send us your location or by otherwise permitting us to geolocate you), we may store and use that information to verify your eligibility to use certain Services, comply with relevant laws, and detect and prevent fraud.
Media. If you upload images to the Website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Location data may be extracted from the images you upload to the Website, and we cannot guarantee the privacy of your location.
Cookies. If you leave a comment on the Website, you may opt-in to save your cookies, such as your name, email address, and IP address. These cookies are for your convenience, so you do not have to fill in your details again when you return to the Website to provide additional comments or use our Services. These cookies will expire within one year from the opt-in date.
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, expires, and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will set up several cookies to save your login information and screen display choices. Login cookies expire within two days, and screen options cookies last 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 expire and 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 indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. This cookie expires within 24 hours.
Surveys, Contests, and Social Media. When you participate in one of our surveys, we may collect additional information about your Profile, activity, usage, and preferences related to the Website and other Services so we can evaluate your interest in and quality of our Services and provide you with customer and technical support.
If you participate in a sweepstakes, giveaway, contest, promotion, or game through our Services, we may collect your email address, username, and phone number(s) to notify you in the event you win. We may also ask for your name and address to verify your identity and fulfill any applicable prizes. In some situations, we may need to collect other information about your preferences as part of the entry process, such as a prize selection or the award of prizes valued over a certain dollar amount. Such sweepstakes, giveaways, contests, promotions, and games are voluntary. Before entering, we recommend reading the rules associated with sweepstakes, giveaways, contests, promotions, or games.
In the event you use our social networking features, we may collect, and other CRCOG users may be able to see your Profile information, including your username, real name, photo, location, the content you post on your social feed, and the social feeds of other CRCOG users, and any other information you choose to upload or share. We may also collect, and other users may also be able to see, information about the contests, sweepstakes offerings, and transactions you participate in.
In the event you elect to sync, upload, or import data about your contacts from your device’s address book, we may collect and use that information to provide you and your contacts with our Services, including, but not limited to, helping you find and connect with your contacts and helping the contacts connect with you. In general, the information you choose to provide when using our social networking features is public, and you should exercise caution and good judgment before posting, uploading, syncing, importing, or otherwise sharing information with us and others to avoid disclosing sensitive, harmful, or unlawful information.
When using our social networking features, you are solely responsible for the content you post, upload, or share and other information you provide, whether by syncing, importing, uploading, or otherwise. You may control the information you share or upload through the social networking platform features by using its social privacy settings. The social privacy settings allow you to determine who can see your Profile and activities through the social networking features, who can add you as a friend, who can find you in a username search, who can see your real name and friends lists, whether you will receive notifications of replies and reactions to posts, whether you will receive notifications that someone has posted content to your feed or posted about you, and who can see your posts.
Information Collected from Technology
To improve, personalize, and optimize our Services and meet our legal obligations, we may automatically track certain information about your visits to and usage of our Website and other Services, including your browser type, operating system, Internet protocol (IP) address, device identifier, domain name, clickstream data, referring/exist pages, geolocation data, and a date/time stamp for your visits. We also use this information to analyze trends, administer the Services, gather demographic information about our user base, deliver advertising, perform research, provide technical and customer support, inform our product development efforts, protect our legal rights, address disputes, and prevent our Services from being used to commit harmful or unlawful activities, including fraud. Some of this information may also be collected so that when you use the Website or other Services again, we will be able to recognize you and optimize your experience accordingly.
Interaction with third-party sites and services. Certain products, services, or other materials displayed on the Website and other Services may integrate with, be integrated into, or be provided in connection with certain third-party services and content. We do not control those third-party services and content, and our various terms of use and this notice do not apply to those services and content. You should read the third-party terms of use agreements and privacy policies for such services and content. We are not responsible for the practices used by any third-party websites or services linked to or from our website, including, but not limited to, the information or content contained within them. By using our website or other Services, you acknowledge and agree that we are not responsible for and do not have control over any third-party services and content that you authorize to access the information you provide to them. In the event you are using a third-party website or service and allow it to access your personal information, you do so at your own risk.
For example, Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the same way as if the visitor has visited another 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. These websites do not share, nor do we request, the information they collect about you with CRCOG.
Cookies. As described above, like many online services, we use “cookies” to collect technical information. Cookies are small pieces of information that a website sends to your computer’s hard drive while you are viewing a website. We may use both session cookies (which expire once you close your web browser) and persistent cookies (which stay on your computer until you delete them) to provide a more personal and interactive experience of our Website and other Services. We may use cookies to collect information about your IP address, browser type, operating system, device type, identifiers, and platform type, as well as your usage of and activity on our Website and the performance of our Services. These types of information are collected to make the Website more useful and tailor your online experience to meet your interests and expectations. You can use the options in your web browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, or you may change your cookie preferences on your internet browser or with third parties. You can control and/or delete cookies used by our Services at any time. You can delete all existing cookies on your computer and adjust settings for most browsers to prevent cookies from being received.
Social Media. Our Website and other Services may enable you to post content on social networking services (e.g., Facebook) (“SM”). If you choose to do this, we will provide information to such SM in accordance with your elections. In such an event, you acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for using those SM and that it is your responsibility to review the terms of use and privacy policy of the SM and/or companies providing such SM. We will not be responsible or liable for: (i) the availability or accuracy of any SM’s terms of use or privacy policy; (ii) the content, products, or services on or availability of such SM; or (iii) your use of any such SM.
SECURITY AND RETENTION
The security of your information is important to us. We use reasonable administrative, technical, and physical procedures, practices, and safeguards to protect the personal information you share from unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction. We will keep your information as long as it is needed to achieve its purpose or meet our legal obligations, including, but not limited to, any legally required retention periods, after which we will make reasonable efforts to dispose of it under our records retention policy and schedule. We make concerted, good-faith efforts to maintain the security of your information. Although we work hard to ensure the integrity and security of our systems, it must be recognized that no information system is 100% secure. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee the security of such information. Outages, attacks, human error, system failure, unauthorized use, or other factors may compromise the security of user information at any time.
You can also play a role in protecting your personal information. To protect your personal information while using our Website and other Services, we strongly suggest that you do not share your Account information and that you adhere to the following password practices:
- Use a strong password that is at least ten (10) alphanumeric characters long and contains upper and lower-case characters, numbers, punctuation marks, and special characters such as !@#$;
- Use a password that is not easily guessed and is not a word in any language, slang, or is based on personal information such as a family name;
- Treat your password as confidential and do not disclose it to anyone else;
- Do not write down your password;
- Do not store your password online in unencrypted form;
- Change your password every three (3) months; and
- Choose a password that is unique, not one that you use for any other website or application.
If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This allows us to automatically recognize and approve any follow-up comments instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
We store the personal information provided by users who register on our Website (if any) in their user profiles. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information. You may request changes by emailing us as described in detail below.
CONNECTICUT PRIVACY RIGHTS
Residents of Connecticut have certain rights concerning their personal information under applicable state law. This section supplements the preceding sections of this notice by describing your additional rights to your personal information and explaining how to exercise such rights, all of which are subject to applicable exceptions. Please note that for purposes of these rights, personal information does not include information about job applicants, employees, other personnel, or representatives of third-party entities we may interact with.
Sensitive Personal Information Processing. Again, we do not request or collect personal information from users. However, to the extent you share your personal information voluntarily, we and/or our service providers may process the following categories of sensitive personal information: username, email address, IP address, and/or geolocation.
Your data. If you have an account on this Website or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you provided. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we must keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Data sharing. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Right to Request Access, Deletion, and Correction. You have the right to request that we confirm whether or not we are processing your personal information and request access to, correction of, and deletion of your personal information. You may submit a request by emailing us at info@crcog.org. Please note that we may deny or fulfill a request only in part based on our legal rights and obligations. In the event we deny a request or part of a request, we will provide information about the reason for the denial. If you wish to temporarily or permanently close your Account, please email us at info@crcog.org.
When we receive a request, we will take reasonable steps to verify the requester’s identity under applicable law. If the requester has a password-protected Account with us, we may verify their identity through our existing authentication practices and require the requestor to re-authenticate themselves before disclosing, correcting, or deleting the Account holder’s data. If a requestor does not have a password-protected Account, we will take reasonable steps to verify their identity under applicable law before responding to a request. The verification steps may vary depending on the sensitivity of the personal information and the region where the requestor is located. We may use an appropriate third-party verification service if we cannot verify a requester’s identity using these methods.
Targeted Advertising and the Sale of Personal Information. We do not use personal information for targeted advertising or the sale of personal information.
HOW TO CONTACT US
Any inquiries or comments regarding your personal information and privacy rights, our data privacy practices, this privacy notice, or any reports regarding suspected or actual security violations or harmful or unlawful activity, including, but not limited to, fraud on your Account should be directed to our privacy team via email to info@crcog.org.
CHANGES AND UPDATES TO THIS PRIVACY NOTICE
This privacy notice may be revised periodically at our sole discretion, and any changes will be effective upon the revised privacy notice being posted to our Website. You are solely responsible for reviewing this notice for any changes. If we make material changes to this notice, as determined by us at our sole discretion, we will notify you and/or request that you accept our updated privacy notice. You are solely responsible for updating your personal information so that you can provide us with your most current email address. If the last email address you provided is not valid or, for any reason, cannot deliver notifications to you, then, in the event we provide you notification via email, our dispatch of the email containing such notification will constitute effective notification of the changes made to the notice. If you do not wish to permit changes in our use of your personal information, you must notify us that you want to deactivate your Account. Your continued use of our Services following any changes to this privacy notice will indicate your acknowledgment of and consent to such changes and to be bound by such changes, with the understanding that the updated privacy notice applies to all of your personal information, including the personal information collected before the changes went into effect.
