(Effective September 14, 2018)
Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) is committed to protecting the privacy of visitors to our website. We have established this Privacy Policy to explain what information we collect through our website and how we use it. In this policy, “RDR” refers to RDR staff and consultants, all of whom are bound by law or contract to keep confidential information they receive as part of their work for RDR.
This policy applies to visitors to the Ranking Digital Rights website (www.rankingdigitalrights.org) and to subscribers of RDR’s mailing list.
We hope that this Privacy Policy is easy to understand. If you have any questions or concerns about this policy or about how RDR handles your information, please email us at info@rankingdigitalrights.org. We will respond within 14 days.
Key Points of our Privacy Policy
- We will never sell, rent, share, or distribute your user information without your permission unless compelled by law.
- The RDR website runs on WordPress. We also use an open-source tool called Matomo (formerly called Piwik) to automatically collect some information about users when they visit the website.
- We use the information Matomo collects to understand where our visitors are coming from and what they are most interested in. Matomo masks the IP addresses it collects by two bytes, which limits the ability to track individual users. Matomo’s privacy policy is here.
- The Ranking Digital Rights website collects and stores the user information that you provide if you subscribe to our mailing list through the Mailchimp plugin on WordPress. Mailchimp’s privacy policy is here.
Definitions: What do we mean by “user information”?
RDR defines “user information” as any data that is connected to an identifiable person, or may be connected to such a person by combining datasets or utilizing data-mining techniques. This includes any data that documents a user’s characteristics and/or activities.
For the purposes of RDR’s website, user information includes information collected by Matomo, and your email address, first and last name (optional), and email subscription preferences (optional) if you provide them for the purposes of our email list. See below for the types of information Matomo and Mailchimp collect.
Website Privacy Policy
The Ranking Digital Rights website collects user information through an open-source analytics platform called Matomo (formerly Piwik). We are still currently using Piwik 3.2.1 and none of our policies or settings have changed since the previous version of our privacy policy (published on March 21, 2017). We are considering updating to the next version of Matomo, and will update the privacy policy accordingly if and when we do so.
When you visit the RDR website, Matomo records the following information:
- 2 byte masked user IP address (see also: IP anonymisation)
- Date and time of the request
- Title of the page being viewed (Page Title)
- URL of the page being viewed (Page URL)
- URL of the page that was viewed prior to the current page (Referrer URL)
- Screen resolution being used
- Time in local user’s timezone
- Files that were clicked and downloaded (Download)
- Links to an outside domain that were clicked (Outlink)
- Pages generation time (the time it takes for webpages to be generated by the webserver and then downloaded by the user: Page speed)
- Main Language of the browser being used (Accept-Language header)
- User Agent of the browser being used (User-Agent header)
For the Ranking Digital Rights website, Matomo collects your device’s IP address and masks two bytes. According to Matomo, this means that an IP address shows up as 192.168.xxx.xxx in our website logs, which is not accurate for geolocation.
For more information, see Matomo’s website at: https://matomo.org/docs/privacy/#step-1-automatically-anonymize-visitor-ips.
We use the information that Matomo collects to understand more about how people visit and interact with our website and to learn about what materials visitors are most interested in. For example, Matomo collects information that enables RDR to assess which webpages are most visited, and how long visitors are engaging with materials on our site.
RDR’s website also respects your browser’s “Do Not Track” settings, which, if set, will exclude all data described above during your visit to our site.
We delete the visitor logs every 180 days.
Mailing List Privacy Policy
We maintain an email list for subscribers to receive announcements from RDR about our work and blog posts published on our website. We use Mailchimp to manage these communications, and we use the Mailchimp plugin on WordPress, which enables people to sign up for the mailing list through our website. When you subscribe to the mailing list, Mailchimp collects and stores the information that you provide, including your email address, first and last name (optional), and email subscription preferences (optional). It also automatically collects your IP address.
We also use Mailchimp’s analytics to understand how people view and interact with our mailing list communications and to learn about what types of updates subscribers are most interested in. If you are subscribed to the RDR mailing list, Mailchimp records the following information and shares it with us for this purpose:
- Open rate
- Total number of opens
- Click rate
- Total number of clicks
- Bounce rate (number of recipients that registered as a hard or soft bounce)
- Number of unsubscribes
- Number of times email was forwarded using Mailchimp’s “forward to a friend” form and subsequent forward opens
- Number of recipients that reported our email as spam
- Time most recently opened
- Time a URL within an email was most recently clicked
- Number of opens and clicks in first 24 hours an email was sent
- Email performance on social media platforms
- Email client used
- Subscribers with the most opens
- Geolocation and top locations for subscriber opens (more information on Mailchimp geolocation here)
See here for further information on Mailchimp analytics. Mailchimp’s full privacy policy can be found here.
You can subscribe to the RDR mailing list by submitting your email address on our website or by emailing us at: newsletter@rankingdigitalrights.org.
You may remove your name from our mailing list at any time by clicking the “unsubscribe from this list” link at the bottom of any email that you receive through the list.
We will maintain the information listed above for the duration that you are subscribed to the RDR mailing list. If you unsubscribe from the mailing list, we will delete and remove your contact information within 30 days.
If you send a request to Mailchimp to remove your data, they will notify us with an email. After we receive the email, we have 30 days to delete and remove your contact information from RDR’s mailing list.
Links
The RDR website provides links to other websites including the website of RDR’s host organization, New America (newamerica.org), that we rely on for logistics and communication purposes, such as event RSVP and live video streaming, which in turn use services such as CVent, and Salesforce. The privacy policy for newamerica.org can be found at the end of this page.
We may also link to other websites that serve similar functions. Your use of such linked sites is subject to the terms and conditions and privacy policies of the providers of those sites.
We encourage people to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy policies of each site they visit.
Comments
While commenting is currently disabled on the Ranking Digital Rights website, if a visitor previously left comments on the site, we collected the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. If you have left a comment in the past, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely.
Rights to your data
You can request to receive an exported file of any data we hold about you, which includes any data you have provided to us. In addition, you can also request that we delete any data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for legal purposes.
To make a request, send an email to info@rankingdigitalrights.org. The request will be fulfilled within 30 days.
Changes to Privacy Policy
RDR’s Privacy Policy may change. Any revised privacy policy will be consistent with RDR’s Core Principles (listed above). If we make any changes to our policies, we will post a notification about the upcoming changes on the RDR website at least two weeks before those changes come into effect. Individuals who are signed up for our mailing list will receive an email notification. We will also link to the notification at the top of this privacy policy page.
An archive of past versions of our privacy policy is accessible at https://rankingdigitalirghts.org/privacy-policy-archive.
Changes to Privacy Policy
RDR’s Privacy Policy may change. Any revised privacy policy will be consistent with RDR’s Core Principles (listed above). If we make any changes to our policies, we will post a notification about the upcoming changes on the Ranking Digital Rights blog at least two weeks before those changes come into effect. Individuals who are signed up for our mailing list will receive an email notification. We will also link to the notification at the top of this privacy policy page. We commit to keep an archive of past versions of the Privacy Policy, which will be accessible at https://rankingdigitalirghts.org/privacy-policy-archive from September 14, 2018.
Ranking Digital Rights
New America
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, D.C. 20005
