Privacy Policy updates

[Guest]

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[AccountAbility]

Even as I expressed my preference, I realized that there are legal reasons for each--although I don't know that there is any prohibition against making one document having a part one and a part two.  One part can clearly be labeled Privacy Policy and the second part can be labeled Terms of Use.

Alternatively, if they literally have to be stand alone documents, then it would really help to have at least some form of index for finding various aspects of importance. 

Even now (and these documents are undoubtedly going to get longer) it takes a fair amount of time to go through the whole thing to see if they/it say(s) anything about (____??)

Dan

[YowieFreak]

I just looked up how Google Analytics works, and it looks like they've built in a series of safeguards here: Additionally, Google Analytics uses only first-party cookies. This means that all cookies set by Google Analytics for your domain send data only to the servers for your domain. This effectively makes Google Analytics cookies the personal property of your website domain, and the data cannot be altered or retrieved by any service on another domain.

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.html#HowGAUsesCookies

From the Functional Overview page:
Analytics also sets and reads first-party cookies on your visitors' browsers in order to obtain visitor session and any ad campaign information from the page request. When all this information is collected, it is sent to the Analytics servers in the form of a long list of parameters attached to a single-pixel GIF image request.

So the information might be collated on the user's computer using cookies which aren't accessible to anyone but Kiva (and obviously Google), but it is then sent to Google for them to do various things with it.  One of them, as we have seen, is to serve up Kiva ads when we visit other sites after having been at Kiva.  But what other usage do you permit Google to use that info for?

[JohnAtKiva]

So the information might be collated on the user's computer using cookies which aren't accessible to anyone but Kiva (and obviously Google), but it is then sent to Google for them to do various things with it.  One of them, as we have seen, is to serve up Kiva ads when we visit other sites after having been at Kiva.  But what other usage do you permit Google to use that info for?

We did some small ad buys earlier this year with Retargeter.com (not Google), which showed Kiva ads to people who had visited Kiva previously.  But we are winding those down and just to clarify: the small amount of retargeting we did was achieved through a totally separate cookie than Google's.

My understanding is that Google Analytics cookies are just for analytics.  Google Analytics are used by 57% of the top 10k most popular websites (according to Alexa), so it's been vetted by a lot of top sites.  I'lll dig into this a bit more though!

Thanks,
John

[Ali]

Hi everyone,

I hope you're all enjoying the holidays! Some of you may have noticed that we updated our privacy policy again, and the new version went live last week on 12/21. 

Our main goals in revising the privacy policy were twofold:  1) To bring it more in line with industry standards, which as you know, will continue to be an ongoing process as regulations in the web space change so frequently; and 2) To make the policy more user friendly by including category headings, and providing more complete and detailed information around how we use our data. 

Although overall the changes are relatively minor, I wanted to highlight a few examples on how we added details and went a step further in explaining how data is stored, used and/or accessed. 

- We included more detailed information about third parties who might access your data with your permission (most specifically in section 5e). 
- We added a section on disclosure of non-personally identifiable data (Section 11)
- We added more clarity around how we use your information (Section 13). 
- We added a new section about how we keep your data secure (Section 16). 
- We added a section about the location of your data (Section 17) to explain where your data is accessed and used. 
- We added a section about how long we retain your personal information (Section 18)

If you have any questions about this, please let me know, and I will do my best to answer them for you.

Ali

[Peter S]

I see that Kiva yesterday published a major update to its Privacy Policy...  http://www.kiva.org/legal/privacy  - now including independent compliance verification by TRUSTe.

P

[Amy-in-PHX]

There is also an updated Terms of Use, dated March 2, 2012.  The primary changes appear to be (1) Kiva is offering, or is about to offer, a Free Trial Loan to new users, and (2) Kiva put in a new paragraph about third-party applications developed using Kiva's API.

[Ali]

Peter and Amy,

We highlighted all of the additions to the privacy policy, so you should be able to pull out the changes easily (although the highlighting is really light and hardly shows up on my screen!). Most of the changes were made as recommended by TRUSTe to be more in line with industry standards.

Amy, you're right about the updates to the Terms to include information about Free Trial (which we just launched) and API standards.

If either of you has any specific questions about the changes, just let me know and I'll be happy to talk through it with you.

Ali