Privacy Policy

Last modified: May 15th, 2019

INTRODUCTION

Hidalgo County GOP (“Campaign” or  “We”) is working on behalf of the campaign to elect Candidates (“Candidate”) to the office of County Party. This Campaign is committed to protecting the privacy of our online guests, users, campaign staff, members, and friends through our compliance with this policy (collectively, “our users” or, as applicable to yourself, “you”).

We believe that maintaining privacy on the internet is very important and hope you will read this Privacy Policy carefully so that you will clearly understand both our commitment to you and your privacy and our method of collecting and using information.

This Privacy Policy describes the types of information we may collect from you or that you may provide when you visit the website hidalgocountygop.us (our “Website“) and our practices for collecting, using, maintaining, protecting, and disclosing that information.

This Privacy Policy only applies to transactions made, and data gathered, on this Website and associated email and SMS messaging services and does not apply to any other website. By using the Website, communicating with us by email, or by otherwise submitting personal information to us, you agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy; you give your consent to the collection, storage and use of personal information as explained in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy may change from time to time (see Changes to Our Privacy Policy).

This Privacy Policy applies to information we collect:

  • On this Website.
  • In email, text, and other electronic messages between you and this Website and the Campaign.
  • When you interact with our advertising and applications on third-party websites and services, if those applications or advertising include links to this policy.

It does not apply to information collected by:

  • Us offline or through any other means, including on any other website operated by the Campaign or any third-party; or
  • Any third party (including our affiliates and subsidiaries), including through any application or content (including advertising) that may link to or be accessible from or on the Website.

CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF 13

Our Website is not intended for children under 13 years of age. No one under age 13 may provide any personal information to or on the Website. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you are under 13, do not use or provide any information on this Website or through any of its features, use any of the interactive or public comment features of this Website, or provide any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, email address, or any screen name or user name you may use. If we learn we have collected or received personal information from a child under 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us at 956-803-0111.

INFORMATION ABOUT YOU WE COLLECT AND WHY WE GATHER SUCH INFORMATION

We collect several types of information from and about users of our Website, including information:

  • That personally relates to or identifies you, such as your name, password, postal address, e-mail address, home/mobile telephone number, or any other identifier by which you may be contacted online or offline (“personal information“);
  • That is about you but individually does not identify you, such as political and religious affiliation and leaning, age, or gender; and/or
  • About your internet connection, the equipment you use to access our Website, including but not limited to, website pages viewed, sites visited before visiting this Website, frequency of visits, clickstream data, browser type, operating system, organization name, articles, internet connection speed, presentations viewed, time spent viewing pages of our website or using certain features of our website, demographic data such as server locations, clickstream data, location services, server location, cookies existing on your computer, search criteria used and results, date and time of access or visits to our website, frequency of visits to our website, connection speed, and other information which does not specifically identify you.

We collect this information:

  • Directly from you when you provide it to us.
  • Automatically as you navigate through the site. Information collected automatically may include usage details, IP addresses, and information collected through cookies, web beacons, and other tracking technologies.
  • From third parties, for example, our business partners.

Email Communications.

We regularly send email newsletters to our registered users. Registered users may subscribe or unsubscribe to an email newsletter at any time by changing their email preferences. On occasion, we may send emails to individuals such as Website visitors who have provided us with their email address, informing them of events, developments, and various other campaign activities we think might be of interest to them. Email recipients may always opt out of any email category at any time by following the unsubscribe instructions included in the email message.

  • Emailing Us: We try to respond to email messages requiring a response in accordance with our internal policies. If you email us, your message and email address will be forwarded to the appropriate department within our business. We may choose to save this information. We are pleased to hear from you. However, any message, material, business information, ideas, concepts or other information sent to us by email will be treated as non-confidential and non-proprietary, and we will not be liable for delays or omissions in receiving or responding to email.

Information You Provide to Us  

The information we collect on or through our Website may include:

  • Information that you provide by filling in forms on our Website. This includes information provided at the time of registering to use our Website, signing up for newsletters or email notifications, making a donation to the Campaign, posting material, or requesting further information. We may also ask you for information when you report a problem with our Website.
  • Records and copies of your correspondence (including email addresses), if you contact us.
  • Your responses to surveys that we might ask you to complete for research purposes.
  • Details of campaign donations, merchandise orders, and other transactions you carry out through our Website and of the fulfillment of your orders. You may be required to provide financial information before placing an order through our Website.
  • Your search queries on the Website.

Information We Collect Through Automatic Data Collection Technologies  

As you navigate through and interact with our Website, we may use automatic data collection technologies to collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns, including:

  • Details of your visits to our Website, including traffic data, location data, logs, and other communication data and the resources that you access and use on the Website.
  • Information about your computer and internet connection, including your IP address, operating system, and browser type.

The information we collect automatically may include personal information, or we may maintain it or associate it with personal information we collect in other ways or receive from third parties. It helps us to improve our Website and to deliver a better and more personalized service, including by enabling us to:

  • Estimate our audience size and usage patterns.
  • Store information about your preferences, allowing us to customize our Website according to your individual interests.
  • Speed up your searches.
  • Recognize you when you return to our Website.

The technologies we use for this automatic data collection may include:

  • Cookies (or browser cookies). When you visit the Website, whether or not you register for an account, we may send one or more cookies. “Cookies” are small text files containing a string of alphanumeric characters that may be placed on your web browser. Cookies make it easier for you to navigate our Website by, among other things, “remembering” your identity so that you do not have to input your password multiple times as you navigate between webpages on the Website and/or as you access certain services we may provide. This use of cookies for authentication (i.e., verifying that you are who you say you are) is an essential component of site security. You can set your web browser to inform you when cookies are set or to prevent cookies from being set.
  • Flash Cookies. Certain features of our Website may use local stored objects (or Flash cookies) to collect and store information about your preferences and navigation to, from, and on our Website. Flash cookies are not managed by the same browser settings as are used for browser cookies. For information about managing your privacy and security settings for Flash cookies, see Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information.
  • Web Beacons. Pages of our Website and our e-mails may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs, pixel tags, and single-pixel gifs) that permit the Campaign, for example, to count users who have visited those pages or opened an email and for other related website statistics (for example, recording the popularity of certain website content and verifying system and server integrity).

THIRD PARTY USE OF COOKIES AND OTHER TRACKING TECHNOLOGIES

Some content or applications, including advertisements, on the Website are served by third-parties, including advertisers, ad networks and servers, content providers, and application providers. These third parties may use cookies alone or in conjunction with web beacons or other tracking technologies to collect information about you when you use our website. The information they collect may be associated with your personal information or they may collect information, including personal information, about your online activities over time and across different websites and other online services. They may use this information to provide you with interest-based (behavioral) advertising or other targeted content.

We do not control these third parties’ tracking technologies or how they may be used. If you have any questions about an advertisement or other targeted content, you should contact the responsible provider directly. For information about how you can opt out of receiving targeted advertising from many providers, see Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information.

HOW INFORMATION HELPS BOTH YOU AND US

Information about you plays a key role in our ability to succeed in this mission. Amongst other things, it also helps us service your accounts and effectively promote the Campaign. For example, we use information about you to:

  • Present our Website and its contents to you;
  • Establish and set up your account, issue an account number, and maintain your transaction history;
  • Respond more accurately and efficiently to your requests;
  • Identify opportunities to give you more convenience and control by developing new services that may benefit you;
  • Provide you with information you request from us;
  • Fulfill any other purpose for which you provide;
  • Notify you about changes to our Website or any products or services we offer or provide though it.
  • To allow you to participate in interactive features on our Website.
  • In any other way we may describe when you provide the information.

We may also use your information to contact you about certain topics, issues, campaigns, and political candidates, services that may be of interest to you. If you do not want us to use your information in this way, please adjust your user preferences in your account profile. For more information, see Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information.

We may use the information we have collected from you to enable us to display advertisements to our advertisers’ target audiences. Even though we do not disclose your personal information for these purposes without your consent, if you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement, the advertiser may assume that you meet its target criteria.

SOCIAL MEDIA FEATURES

You can log in to the Website using services such as Linkedin or Facebook Connect. These services will authenticate your identity and provide you the option to share certain personal information with us such as your name and email address to pre-populate our sign up form. Services like Facebook Connect give you the option to post information about your activities on this Website to your profile page to share with others within your network.

Our Website may also include Social Media Features such as the Facebook Like button, Twitter, and share buttons. These Features are interactive mini-programs and may collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our site, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our Website. Your interactions with these Features are governed by the Privacy Policy of the company providing them.

HOW AND WHY WE DISCLOSE YOUR INFORMATION TO THIRD PARTIES

We may disclose aggregated information about our users, and information that does not identify any individual, without restriction.

We may disclose personal information that we collect, or that you provide as described in this Privacy Policy:

  • To our subsidiaries and affiliates.
  • To contractors, organizations, campaign staff, service providers, and other third parties we use to support our campaign operations.
  • To a buyer or other successor in the event of a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of our assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation, or similar proceeding, in which personal information held by us about our Website users is among the assets transferred.
  • To third parties to better and more accurately identify, market, and promote issues, causes, campaigns, political candidates, and political organizations, if you have not opted out of these disclosures. For more information, see Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information.
  • To fulfill the purpose for which you provide it. For example, if you give us an email address to use the “email a friend”, or similar feature of our Website, we will transmit the contents of that email and your email address to the recipients.
  • For any other purpose disclosed by us when you provide the information.
  • With your consent.

We may also disclose your personal information:

  • To investigate and help prevent potentially unlawful activity or activities that threaten the integrity of our website or network; to protect and defend our rights or property or the rights or property of others; as required by courts or administrative agencies; and in connection with a financing, sale, merger, or reorganization of our business or assets. Any successor in interest to our business would acquire the information we maintain, including personally identifiable information, and may alter the terms of this Privacy Policy-
  • To investigate and defend against any third-party claims or allegations, to assist government enforcement agencies, to protect the security or integrity of the services, or to protect the rights, property or personal safety of our Campaign, the Candidate, our Campaign staff, our users, or others.

CHOICES ABOUT HOW WE USE AND DISCLOSE YOUR INFORMATION

We strive to provide you with choices regarding the personal information you provide to us. We have created mechanisms to provide you with the following control over your information:

  • Tracking Technologies and Advertising. You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when cookies are being sent. To learn how you can manage your Flash cookie settings, visit the Flash player settings page on Adobe’s website. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this site may then be inaccessible or not function properly.
  • Disclosure of Your Information for Third-Party Advertising. If you do not want us to share your personal information with unaffiliated or non-agent third parties for promotional purposes, you can opt-out by checking the relevant box located on the form on which we collect your data (e.g., the registration form, donation page, newsletter, or email alert signup). You can also always opt-out by checking or unchecking the relevant boxes or by sending us an email with your request to hidalgocountygop.us/contact-us/
  • Promotional Information from the Candidate. If you do not wish to have your contact information used by the Campaign, you can opt-out by checking the relevant box located on the form on which we collect your data (e.g., the registration form, donation page, newsletter or email alert signup). You can always opt-out by at any other time by checking or unchecking the relevant boxes or by sending us an email stating your request to hidalgocountygop.us/contact-us/. If we have sent you a promotional email, you may send us a return email asking to be omitted from future email distributions.

We do not control third parties’ collection or use of your information to serve interest-based advertising. However, these third parties may provide you with ways to choose not to have your information collected or used in this way. You can opt out of receiving targeted ads from members of the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI“) on the NAI’s website.

YOUR CALIFORNIA PRIVACY RIGHTS

California’s “Shine the Light” law (Civil Code Section § 1798.83) permits users of our Website that are California residents to request certain information regarding our disclosure of personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. To make such a request, please send an email to hidalgocountygop.us/contact-us/

SECURITY

We have implemented measures designed to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers behind firewalls. Any payment transactions will be encrypted using SSL technology.

The safety and security of your information also depends on you. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password for access to certain parts of our Website, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone. We urge you to be careful about giving out information in public areas of the Website like message boards. The information you share in public areas may be viewed by any user of the Website.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information transmitted to our Website. Any transmission of personal information is at your own risk. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Website.

OPT-OUT POLICY

We may at times send you e-mail communications with informational or promotional materials. If you prefer not to receive such marketing or promotional e-mails from us, you may unsubscribe completely by emailing us at: hidalgocountygop.us/contact-us/

Please note that opt-out requests may take up to twenty-four (24) hours to process. Please also note that at times we may need to send you e-mail communications that are transactional in nature such as service or termination announcements or payment confirmations which are communications you will not be able to opt-out of.

If you would like us to remove your Personally Identifiable Information from our database, please send a request to: hidalgocountygop.us/contact-us/

We are not responsible for removing your personal information from the lists of any third-party services or other third party who has previously been provided your information in accordance with this notice.

APPLICABLE LAW AND JURISDICTION

This Privacy Notice shall be governed by, construed and entered in accordance with the laws of the State of Texas applicable to contracts deemed to be made within such state, without regard to the choice of law or conflict of law provisions thereof. All disputes with respect to this Privacy Notice shall be brought and heard either in the Texas state or federal courts of proper jurisdiction located in McAllen. You consent to the in personam jurisdiction and venue of such courts. YOU HEREBY WAIVE YOUR RIGHT TO A TRIAL BY JURY WITH RESPECT TO ANY CLAIM, ACTION OR PROCEEDING, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, ARISING OUT OF, OR RELATING TO, THIS AGREEMENT TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

We may revise our Privacy Policy at any time. In the event of a change in this Privacy Policy, a revised Privacy Policy will promptly be posted to our Website, and the “Updated” date will be changed. Please revisit this page to familiarize yourself with the changes to the Privacy Policy. You agree to accept posting of a revised Privacy Policy as described herein as actual notice to you of such revised Privacy Policy. Your continued use of our website after such posting constitutes consent to the collection and use of your information as described in the then-current Privacy Policy.

CONTACT INFORMATION

To ask questions or comment about this privacy policy and our privacy practices, contact us at:

hidalgocountygop.us/contact-us/

or via our toll-free number:

956-803-0111

To register a complaint or concern, please email our privacy officer at:   hidalgocountygop.us/contact-us