Cookie and Tracking Policy
Revised November 16, 2023
This cookie and tracking policy describes the ways The Academy for Small Membership Church Ministries (TASMCM) (https://www.tasmcm.org and https://tasmcm.moodlecloud.com/) uses cookies and other tracking technologies and your options for limiting tracking.
Overview
The sole purpose of the cookies, web beacons, or other tracking technology that we use and control is to inform us of how our websites and newsletter are performing so we may continually improve our content for our visitors. We do not use such technology to sell or serve advertising on our websites or to follow you across the Internet.
Other sites to which we link may set third-party cookies on your browser.
Your options for limiting tracking are described below.
What are cookies?
Cookies are small bits of data that are saved on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. Cookies are widely used by online service providers to make their websites or services work and to provide statistics and reporting about the use of the websites.
Cookies set by the website owner or service provider are first-party cookies. Cookies set by websites and services other than the website owner are third-party cookies.
Cookies we use
We use cookies on our websites as part of our legitimate business interests to enable website functionality, understand how the websites are used, and improve your website experience.
Cookies used on our websites may be session cookies, which expire when you end your browsing session and/or persistent cookies, which store information on your computer or device so when you return to the websites later, the cookie information is still available.
Necessary cookies
Necessary cookies enable core functionality and are required for the operation of our websites. They include cookies that enable authorized users to log in to secure areas of the websites.
Analytics cookies
We use Google Analytics to analyze, understand, and improve traffic to our websites. We encourage you to review these resources from Google: Safeguarding your data, the Google privacy policy, and How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services for more information.
All analytics data collected on this site is anonymized. It may include, but is not limited to, information about the visitor's type of computer or device and operating system, browser and version, pages visited, date and time of visit, sources of traffic to the website, approximate geographic location, and search queries. This data does not include any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and cannot be traced back to a specific individual.
Analytics data is stored by Google Analytics on a server based in the United States. Reports generated from Google Analytics may be shared with and stored by our authorized staff and volunteers as they seek to understand use of the websites, improve the way they work, and ensure visitors can find what they are looking for easily.
Do Not Track
Our websites do not respond to Do Not Track (DNT) signals set in your browser. There is currently no accepted industry or legal standard for how to recognize or respond to DNT signals and no agreed-upon definition of tracking.
We follow the practices described in this Cookie and Tracking Policy and our Privacy Policy.
Third-party sites and embedded content
Our websites may include links to other websites, embedded media controlled by third parties, and social media buttons, content, or widgets.
When you interact with these third-party services they may collect information from and about you and your interaction with our content. They may track additional activity by you on our websites and as you visit other websites.
Social Networking Service (SNS) Cookies
When you share information on our websites using a social media sharing button, or you link your account or engage with our content on or through a social networking service such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or a video or media sharing service such as YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare, that third-party service will record that you have done this.
We do not control, and are not responsible for, the privacy and security practices of third parties. We recommend that you review the privacy and security policies of these third parties to determine how they handle the information they collect from or about you.
Other tracking technology
Your browser, browser extensions, smartphone, and smartphone apps may use cookies to track your visits to our websites and elsewhere on the internet and share or sell that information to others. We have no control over data they collect or how they use it.
Web beacons and other tracking technologies
Our websites and emails sent to you may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (a small, transparent image) or other tracking technologies.
Data collected by web beacons on our websites is anonymized and contains no PII. They enable us to track how many times a web page is accessed, as well as the times it was accessed, and the approximate geographic locations of visitors who accessed it.
Data collected by web beacons in email newsletters is not anonymized and contains PII including your name; email address; the date and time you open the email; and the date, time, and destination of links you click on in the email message. This information is used to evaluate and improve our communications to you and is visible only to authorized staff and volunteers of our organization.
We use Constant Contact to send our email newsletters. We encourage you to review the Constant Contact Privacy Notice.
Your options
If you are concerned about tracking by us or third-party sites, you have several options.
Websites
You can control the use of most cookies in your browser. Go to your browser's “Help” menu and look for instructions on privacy and how to manage or disable cookies or tracking. If you disable or refuse cookies, some parts of this and other websites may be inaccessible or not function properly.
You can review and change the privacy settings of your mobile device to control collection of precise device location data.
You can install and use the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, designed to prevent web browsing data from being used by Google Analytics. Using this will prevent your visit to our sites from being counted. It will not affect tracking by third-party sites.
You can install and use Privacy Badger, a browser add-on from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers as you visit websites across the Internet. Using Privacy Badger may prevent some content served by third-parties from displaying on our websites.
Browsers, extensions, and smartphone apps
Review the privacy and tracking policies of your browsers, the permissions of browser extensions you download and install, and the policies and permissions of apps you install on your smartphone. If you are concerned about their access to your data or how they use it, adjust the settings, if possible, or uninstall and don't use them.
You may be able to limit web beacon tracking of the date and time you open email by setting your email client to not display images or by changing your newsletter subscription preferences to plain text rather than HTML. This means you will miss out on the photos and images we include in our newsletters.
You can avoid click tracking of links in both plain text and HTML email newsletters by not clicking on any links in the newsletter. This means you may miss out on information we are sharing with you.