The Land Portal Foundation is committed to respecting your privacy and protecting your personal data
- We want to be completely transparent regarding the data we collect and what we do with it;
- We will use the data you provide for the purposes described in this Policy exclusively;
- If you do not want us to collect your data anymore, you are welcome to opt out. Contact us to let us know which Land Portal services you would like to opt out of;
- We will always respect your data protection rights and we will endeavor to give your full control of your own information.
For questions about what data we have about you personally, how we use it or any other general question about our approach to personal data, please feel free to contact the Land Portal's Data Protection Officer (erik.bennema@landportal.info), anytime.
What information does the Land Portal collect?
Every time you visit a web page, you send information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of which web pages are popular, which other sites link to this one, and which web browsers people are using.
It is not the intention of the Land Portal to use this information to keep track of legitimate users. These logs are used to produce the site statistics. The raw log data is not made public and is discarded after six months.
Identification of an author: Simply browsing the web site does not expose your identity publicly. If you only read Land Portal pages, the only data that is collected is an anonymized version of your IP address. We use that to trace website statistics, mainly which countries our visitors are from. This is reported in our Annual Reports and donor reporting, reducing the information to percentages coming from particular countries. If you contribute to the Land Portal, you are publishing everything that you write, edit or post on any page. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly as the author of that edit. Only registered users who are logged in may publish on the Land Portal, in which case you are identified by your user name. If you would like your personal profile to be hidden from the public, please contact us.
Cookies: The Land Portal will set a temporary session cookie whenever you visit the site. You may choose to deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session. More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. Additionally, the Land Portal uses external services from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Addthis that track user activities as per the features offered through them (for example, the Facebook “like” button, or Google analytics to capture site statistics). These sites also place cookies on your web browser. Google analytics cookies are anonymized, meaning that we can only register the country that you are from, but nothing more detailed than that.
Additional information is provided here for specific Land Portal services:
Email: You must provide your email address to create an account on the Land Portal. Your email address will not be shared with third parties but may be used by the Land Portal team to communicate with its users on a wider scale. Please contact us if you would prefer not to receive such messages anymore.
Newsletters: If you subscribe to a Land Portal newsletter, your address will be exposed to the managers of these newsletters. Another mandatory field to subscribe to our newsletter is the country you reside in. We use these statistics in our Annual Reports and reports to our donors. The countries our subscribers live in are reduced to percentages per country. Other information that you can provide are your first name, surname, title and organization. That information will never be shared with third parties and is only accessible to the Land Portal Team for informative purposes. We will maintain that information until you have indicated you would like to unsubscribe.
MailChimp: An external service called MailChimp is used to send newsletters and news digests. Within MailChimp, the Land Portal Foundation has enabled all settings to comply with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation to protect your personal data. Please consult the Mailchimp Privacy Policy to see what information that system automatically stores. Please contact us if you would like to unsubsribe to these emailing services. We will remove your information immediately and it will not be stored anywhere.
Informational email addresses: Some email addresses forwards mail to the Land Portal team to respond to feedback and questions from users. Mail sent to the system is not publicly visible, but is visible to the Land Portal team. By sending email to one of these addresses, your email address may become public within this group. The team may discuss the contents of your email with other contributors in order to best answer your query. This information will be stored in the Land Portal team's email inboxes for no longer than 6 months.
User data: Data users share, such as the content and comments they have posted are available to visitors of the Land Portal.
How long is your information kept?
When you write something on the Land Portal, assume that it will be retained forever. This includes resources, discussions, user pages and status messages. Some limited exceptions are described below.
Removal of user accounts: Once created, user accounts will generally not be removed, though users have the option of deleting their accounts. Users can also change their usernames. The Land Portal team reserves the right to deny access to the site and remove user accounts at their sole discretion without notice, particularly for any users who are deemed to have violated any of the Land Portal policies and terms and conditions of use.
Deletion of content: Removing text from any part of the Land Portal does not automatically delete it. Unless the whole node (e.g., a piece of content, such as a discussion, resource, or organization) is deleted, the part that was removed will be accessible by users with administrative rights to view and restore previous versions. Information can be permanently deleted by those people with access to the servers. This will be done every six months. Please contact the Land Portal's Data Protection Officer if you would like to have this done sooner than that time frame.
Sharing of information with third parties
The Land Portal will not sell or share personal information, such as email addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information, or it is required by law to release the information.
Policy on release of data derived from page logs: It is the policy of the Land Portal that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database, may be released by the system administrators or users with access rights, in the following situations:
- In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
- With permission of the affected user
- For investigation of abuse complaints, to the Land Portal Foundation, his/her legal counsel, or his/her designee, when necessary
- Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
- Where the user has been vandalizing articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
- Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of any of the Land Portal partner organizations, its users or the public.
The Land Portal does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.
What If I Don't Want to Share My Information? What additional steps can I take to safeguard my privacy online?
Registering on the Land Portal is optional. If you choose not to register or provide personal information, you can still use the Land Portal. However, you will not be able to contribute information, participate in debates, access products and services like news digests or email, or view full user profiles.
If you are very concerned about privacy, you may take the following steps to further safeguard your privacy online:
Cookies/cache: If you are using a public machine and don’t wish to expose your username to future users of the machine, you may clear cookies and the browser cache after use.
User names: When you register for a Land Portal account, you may choose to log in and publish under a pseudonym instead of your real name.
Passwords: The strength of the Land Portal community and interactions between users depends on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user’s edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. No one shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.
Security
The Land Portal has implemented policies and procedures to safeguard your data against unauthorized access and to maintain data security in accordance with this privacy policy. However, the Land Portal makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information may be available to anyone with access to the servers. The Land Portal Foundation can provide a list of those people on request. Please contact us here if you have any questions about this.
How to contact us
If you have any questions or complaints, please email our Data Protection Officer at erik.bennema@landportal.info.
Last updated March 10th 2020