Privacy Policy
PLEASE BE ADVISED
The names and contact information for all individuals listed on this site is privileged, confidential information and intended for specific purposes. No one (individual or company) may use any contact information on the AFCNA website to contact, to distribute information to, or solicit anyone for any reason other than the intended purpose for which the name and contact information is available.
Privacy Policy
The www.AFCNA.org Web site contains links to other sites. Once you enter another Web site (whether through an advertisement, service, or content link), be aware that www.AFCNA.org
is not responsible for the privacy practices of these other sites. We encourage you to look for and review the privacy statements of each and every Web site that you visit through a link or advertisement on www.AFCNA.org.
We hope that reading our Privacy Policy helps you understand how we manage your information.
While you may use some of the functionality of www.AFCNA.org without registration, many of the specific tools and services on our website require registration. If you use our Web site without registering, the only information we collect will be Non-Personal Information through the use of Cookies or Web Beacons. If you choose to register with our Web site for certain Interactive Tools or other services, we require you to submit Personally Identifiable Information. Depending on the tool or service you have selected, we may also collect Personal Health Information. You are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information you submit to www.AFCNA.org
. Inaccurate information will affect the information you receive when using our site and tools and our ability to contact you as described in this Privacy Policy.
Non-Personal Information We Collect About You
Even if you do not register with www.AFCNA.org, we collect Non-Personal Information about your use of our Web site, special promotions and newsletters.
Cookies:
We collect Non-Personal Information about your use of our Web site and your use of the Web sites of selected sponsors and advertisers through the use of Cookies. Every computer that accesses a www.AFCNA.org
Web site is assigned a different Cookie by www.AFCNA.org. cookies store tracking codes to enable our system to locate information from past visits to the Web Site, but do not contain information that identifies you personally. The information collected by Cookies (i) helps us dynamically generate advertising and content on Web pages or in newsletters, (ii) allows us to statistically monitor how many people are using our Web site and selected sponsors’ and advertisers’ sites, (iii) how many people open our emails, and (iv) for what purposes these actions are being taken. We may use Cookie information to target certain advertisements to your browser or to determine the popularity of certain content or advertisements. Cookies are also used to facilitate a user’s log-in, as navigation aides and as session timers.
Personally-Identifiable Information We Collect About You
A. Registration Information
We collect Personally Identifiable Information, like your email address and zip code, you provide to us when you register as a member of www.AFCNA.org
and/or when you update your member profile. We use the Personally Identifiable Information that you provide to respond to your questions, provide you the services you select, to send you emails about the Web site, and to inform you of material changes to this Privacy
B. Newsletters & Emails to You
At registration, you will automatically be signed up to receive periodic informational newsletters via email from www.AFCNA.org
. These emails inform our members of new or upcoming features and partners. You can unsubscribe from the newsletters by following the instructions provided in the email.
When you participate in certain services and activities, you will have the option of signing up to receive emails from www.AFCNA.org
as reminders or notifications. You can change these notification and reminder settings in the Settings section of www.AFCNA.org
or within the individual service itself (for example, Trackers).
At registration and at various times as you use www.AFCNA.org
, you may be given the option of receiving recurring informational/promotional newsletters via email on specific health topics from www.AFCNA.org
and/or directly from third parties. When you sign up for our email newsletters or at any time, you can choose to opt-in to receiving additional promotional emails from www.AFCNA.org
or our Sponsors. In order to subscribe to www.AFCNA.org
newsletters via email, we need your contact information, including email address. You can unsubscribe from the newsletters by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of any email newsletter, or you may use our Contact Us Form to request www.AFCNA.org
Customer Service to manually unsubscribe you from the newsletter. In some cases, when you click on a link or an advertisement on our site, in an e-mail or newsletter, your browser may be momentarily directed to the website of a third party which, acting on behalf of www.AFCNA.org
(see Disclosure to Third Party Contractor Web sites, below), notes or “counts” your response to the e-mail or newsletter before re-directing your browser to your selected destination; this re-direction process may not be apparent to you.
C : Email a Friend
If you choose to use our Invite a Friend, Email This, or Share This service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for your name, your email address and your friend’s email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site using your name and/or email address as the from email address. www.AFCNA.org
does not use your name, your email address or your friend’s email information and the information you provide using this service for any other purpose. We will only use the information you provide to send the email you request. If you choose to automatically send updates to your friends through the Share This feature, www.AFCNA.org
will automatically send additional emails to the email addresses you specified when you update the page.
D : Suggestions You Make to www.AFCNA.org
This Privacy Policy does not apply to any content, business information, ideas, concepts or inventions that you may elect send to www.AFCNA.org
by email or post anywhere on the www.AFCNA.org
site, including the www.AFCNA.org
communities and forums. If you want to keep content or business information, ideas, concepts or inventions private or proprietary, do not send them in an email to www.AFCNA.org
or post them in the www.AFCNA.org
Suggestions Community.
E. Message Boards and other Public Forums
As a service to our users, www.AFCNA.org
features journals, personal pages, message boards and other public forums where users with similar interests or medical conditions can share information and support one another or where users can post questions for experts to answer. Any information shared (including Personally Identifiable and Personal Health Information) that you reveal in a journal, personal page, message board, Ask A Doctor posting or online discussion is by design open to the public and is not a private, secure service. Some features, such as Journals, Photos, and Personal Pages allow you to set the privacy setting for each item you create. You can set the privacy setting to Private, Public, or Friends Only. Public information can be seen by everybody without limitation. Viewers do not have to be members of
in order to view this data. Friends Only information can be viewed by other www.AFCNA.org
members that you have elected to add as a friend. Private information can only be seen when logged in under your user name or by www.AFCNA.org
Administrators. You should think carefully before disclosing any Personally Identifiable or Personal Health Information in any public forum. What you have written may be seen, disclosed to or collected by third parties and may be used by others in ways we are unable to control or predict, including to contact you for unauthorized purposes. As with any public forum on any site, this information may also appear in third-party search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.
does not control the information indexed and cached by search engines. At your request, www.AFCNA.org
can remove Personally Identifiable Information from the www.AFCNA.org
site, but cannot remove this information from search engines. Once the data has been indexed by a search engine, that information cannot be retrieved, deleted or modified by www.AFCNA.org
F. Website Registration and Interactive Tools on www.AFCNA.org
After you have registered as a member of www.AFCNA.org
, you may choose to use certain www.AFCNA.org
interactive content, tools and services that may ask you to voluntarily provide other types of information about yourself including Personal Health Information. Some of the tools (like calculators) do not retain your Personal Health Information, while others (like Trackers and Personal Health Records) store and display your Personal Health Information in accordance with the privacy setting you choose.
Children:
Neither www.AFCNA.org
nor any of its services are designed or intended for children under the age of 13. We do not collect Personally Identifiable Information from any person we actually know is under the age of 13. A parent or guardian, however, may use www.AFCNA.org
to establish a personal health record and/or Personal Page for a minor. The parent or guardian is solely responsible for providing supervision of the minor’s use of www.AFCNA.org
Personal Page and PHR. The parent or guardian assumes full responsibility for ensuring that the registration information is kept secure and that the information submitted is accurate. The parent or guardian also assumes full responsibility for the interpretation and use of any information or suggestions provided through www.AFCNA.org
for the minor.
Aggregate Data:
may combine any public information you provide with information from other users to create Aggregate Data to display on the www.AFCNA.org
site. This information may also be disclosed to third parties. Aggregate data does not contain any information that could be used to contact you, identify you, or associate any health condition with you personally. For example, www.AFCNA.org
may use information gathered to create a composite profile of all the users of a particular third party site. These third party Web sites may use this information to understand community needs and to design appropriate programs and activities on their site.
Aggregate Data: https://afcna.org/
Interactive tools within www.AFCNA.org
gather self-reported Personal Health Information. In addition, certain of these tools can store Personal Health Information coming from third party data interchange agreements between your employer, health plan, pharmacy benefits manager and other third parties that provide data interchange services. We maintain and limit the use of that information to the Opt-in permission you have provided at the time you use the tool.
We do not provide registered users with downloadable software that collects or uses any PII or PHI without and Opt-in consent.
Information Collected by Third Parties Not Acting on Behalf of www.AFCNA.org
Sponsors/Advertisers
Sponsors or advertisers on www.AFCNA.org
may use their own Cookies or other online tracking technologies in the banner advertisements served on www.AFCNA.org
and in emails, special promotions or newsletters we send you. Some advertisers use companies other than www.AFCNA.org
to serve their ads and to monitor users’ responses to ads, and these companies (“Ad Servers”) may also collect Non-Personal Information through the use of Cookies or Web Beacons on our Web site. In certain situations, information collection may be facilitated by momentarily directing your browser to the Web site of an Ad Server or other third party acting on behalf of the sponsor, partner, or advertiser before re-directing your browser to its selected destination (e.g., back to www.AFCNA.org
to show the ad, or to the advertiser’s website); this re-direction process may not be apparent to you.
We do not control these third parties’ use of cookies or how they manage the non-personal information they gather through them. For example, in connection with “Ad links” furnished by Google, non-personal information sent by your browser to Google when you click on a sponsored link or submit a query may be used by Google as described in its privacy policy. You should review the privacy policy of other sites you visit or link to from our site to understand how these other sites use cookies and how they use the information they collect through the use of cookies on their own sites. Certain Ad Servers allow you to prevent them from collecting data through the use of cookies. In order to do so, you must Opt-out of such data collection with each individual site.
Disclosure of Your Information
In addition to disclosures that you specifically authorize, www.AFCNA.org
may disclose personal information as follows: We may release Personally Identifiable or Personal Health Information to third parties: (1) to comply with valid legal requirements such as a law, regulation, search warrant, subpoena or court order; (2) in response to a physical threat to you or others, to protect property or to defend or assert legal rights, or (3) in connection with a transaction or proceeding involving the transfer of all of part of our business relating to the information, or involving the transfer of control of those assets involved in such business. In the event that we are legally compelled to disclose your Personally Identifiable or Personal Health Information to a third party, we will attempt to notify you unless doing so would violate the law or court order. In addition, we may disclose Personal Information as described below.
A. Disclosure to https://afcna.org/
Staff and Moderators
staff and moderators sometimes have limited access to your Personally Identifiable Information in the course of providing products or services to you and other members, to troubleshoot problems or resolve complaints. Access to your Personally Identifiable Information is limited to the information reasonably necessary for the employee to perform the function needed to resolve the issue or to improve the service.
B. Disclosure to https://afcna.org/
Operations and Maintenance Contractors
operations and maintenance contractors sometimes have limited access to your Personally Identifiable Information in the course of providing products or services to www.AFCNA.org
. These contractors include vendors and suppliers that provide us with technology, services, and/or content for the operation and maintenance of our Web site. Access to your Personally Identifiable Information by these contractors is limited to the information reasonably necessary for the contractor to perform its limited function for https://afcna.org/
C. Disclosure to Third Party Contractor Websites
Certain content and services offered to you through our website are served on Web sites hosted and operated by a company other than www.AFCNA.org
(“Third Party Contractor Web sites”). www.AFCNA.org
does not disclose your Personally Identifiable Information to these Third Party Contractor Web sites without your consent, but you should be aware that any information you disclose once you access these other Web sites is not subject to this Privacy Policy. www.AFCNA.org
does not endorse and is not responsible for the privacy practices of these Third Party Contractor Web sites. You should review the privacy policy posted on the other Web site to understand how that Third Party Contractor Website collects and uses your Personally Identifiable Information. www.AFCNA.org
makes an effort to make it obvious to you when you leave our website and enter a Third Party Contractor Web site, either by requiring you to click on a link or by notifying you on the site before you visit the third party site. In addition, if you see a phrase such as “Powered by” or “in association with” followed by the name of a company other than www.AFCNA.org
, then you are on a Web site hosted by a company other than www.AFCNA.org
D. Disclosure to Third-Party Advertising Companies
uses technology provided by a third-party advertising company to serve ads when you visit this Web site. This technology may use information about your visit to this Web site in order to provide advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest to you. In the course of serving advertisements to this Web site, such third-party advertising technology may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used to target ads to you, please visit Doubleclick Privacy Policy. In addition, you have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser.
may also use a third party ad network provider to help present advertisements on this Web site. Third-party ad serving enables www.AFCNA.org
to target advertisements to you for products and services you might be interested in. These third party network advertisers, along with other advertisers and sponsors on the Web site, may use cookies, web beacons (also called single pixel gifs or action tags) or similar technologies (and, in the case of cookies, access them on your computer if you choose to have cookies enabled in your browser) to serve you advertisements tailored to interests you have shown by browsing on this and other sites you have visited, to determine whether you have seen a particular advertisement before and to avoid sending you duplicated advertisements. In doing so, the provider collects non-personal data such as your browser type, your operating system, Web pages visited, time of visits, content viewed, ads viewed and other clickstream data. The use of third party cookies, web beacons and similar technologies by these ad network providers is governed by each third party’s specific privacy policy, not this one.
E. Links Provided
also provides links to sites provided by Third Party Contractor Websites that have business arrangements with www.AFCNA.org
to pay commissions based on sales of products or services generated through www.AFCNA.org
. An example of this would be “Ad links” from Google on our Search pages.
F. Disclosure to Linked Sites
In addition to the Third Party Contractor Web sites that you may access as described above, for your convenience there are links to Third Party Web sites operated by companies that are not affiliated with the www.AFCNA.org
Web site and that do not have contracts to provide content or services through the www.AFCNA.org
Web site. These links may be found in advertisements, referenced within content, or placed beside the names or logos of sponsors. www.AFCNA.org
does not disclose your Personal Information to these Third Party Websites without obtaining your consent. www.AFCNA.org
does not endorse and is not responsible for the privacy practices of these sites. If you choose to link to one of these Third Party Web sites, you should review the privacy policy posted on this other website to understand how that Third Party Web site collects and uses your Personally Identifiable Information.
G. Disclosure of Aggregate Information
may provide Aggregate Information to third parties. For example, we might inform third parties regarding the number of users of our website and the activities they conduct while on our site. We might also inform a pharmaceutical company (that may or may not be an advertiser on our site) that “30% of our users live east of the Mississippi” or that “25% of our users have tried alternative medicine.” Depending on the circumstances, we may or may not charge third parties for this Aggregate Information. We require parties with whom we share Aggregate Information to agree that they will not attempt to make this information personally identifiable, such as by combining it with other databases.
Handles Privacy and Security Internally
Here are some of the security procedures that www.AFCNA.org
uses to protect your privacy:
Requires both a personal username (log-in name) and a password in order for users to access their Personally Identifiable Information or Personal Health Information.
Uses firewalls to protect information held in our servers.
Limits the number of www.AFCNA.org
employees who have potential access to your Personally Identifiable Information.
Limits access to Personally Identifiable Information to authorized users. www.AFCNA.org
enables you to have full control over who has access to your Personal Health Information. For example, you may decide to permit your physician or other health care professional access to the personal health information you maintain within our tools. Only the person who creates a record can grant access to other users.
Despite www.AFCNA.org’s
efforts to protect your Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information, there is always some risk that an unauthorized third party may find a way around our security systems or that transmissions of your information over the Internet may be intercepted. If you provide your user name and password to other people or if you use a public computer that does not log you off www.AFCNA.org
, your data is no longer protected. Please do not share your www.AFCNA.org
credentials and always log off public computers.
There are additional security procedures that www.AFCNA.org
uses to protect the privacy of information stored in the www.AFCNA.org
Personal Health Records (PHR) detailed below.
A. Updating Your Personally Identifiable Information
www.AFCNA.org tools that collect and store self-reported data allow you to correct, update or review information you have submitted by going back to the specific tool, logging-in and making the desired changes.
B. Removing your Personal Information
If you have a complaint or problem, please use our Customer Support Form (Contact Us.) Our customer service department will forward your complaint to the appropriate internal www.AFCNA.org department for a response or resolution.
If you do not receive adequate resolution of a privacy related problem, you may write to www.AFCNA.org’s Privacy Office at:
American Foot Care Nurses Association
Attn: Office of Privacy
4 – 168th Ave NE
Bellevue, WA 98008
We will notify you within 30 days of receipt of your letter to confirm your personal identifiers have been removed.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
Personally Identifiable Information and Personal Health Information – We will inform registered users of a material change to the Privacy Policy, which means a change that expands the permissible uses or disclosures of Personally Identifiable Information allowed by the prior version of the Privacy Policy. Your continued use of the www.AFCNA.org
Web site will be subject to the revised Privacy Policy. You may of course choose to Opt-out of continuing to use the www.AFCNA.org
Web site. Please exit the site immediately if you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy or any revised policy. www.AFCNA.org
reserves the right to discontinue or limit functionality in all its products including www.AFCNA.org
Non-Significant Changes – www.AFCNA.org
may make non-significant changes to the Privacy Policy that do no affect Personally Identifiable Information or Personal Health Information. For these instances, www.AFCNA.org
may not notify you of such non-significant changes.
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement and other places appropriate throughout our site so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, and on the What’s New page.
Definitions
Aggregate Information or Data: As a website gathers individual pieces of Non-Personal Information (see definition below) from its users, it may combine similar data from many or all the users of the website into one big “batch”. For example, the site may add up the total number of people in Peoria, Illinois, (but not their names) who are seeking information about weight loss and compare that to the number of people in Petaluma, California seeking the same information. This sort of statistical information is called aggregate data because it reflects the habits and characteristics of a large group of anonymous people. Web sites may use aggregate data or share it with their business partners so that the information and services they provide best meet the needs of the users. Aggregate data also helps advertisers and sponsors on the Web know how effectively they are reaching and meeting the needs of their target audience.
Browser: Short for web browser, a browser is a software application used to locate and display web (Internet) pages. The most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. In addition, most modern browsers can present multimedia information, including sound and video, though they require plug-ins for some formats.
Channel Partner Web site: A third party Web site to whom www.AFCNA.org
provides content and services for that web site’s health channel.
Cookie: A small data file that is stored on the hard drive of the computer you use to view a Web site. Cookies are placed by that site or by a third party with a presence on the site, such as an advertiser and are accessible only by the party or site that placed the Cookie (i.e. a Cookie placed on your computer by
isn’t accessed by any other site you visit but a Cookie placed on your computer by an advertiser may be accessed by any site on which that same advertiser has a presence). Cookies can contain pieces of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). These Cookies often are used to make the site easier to use. For example, if you check a box to ask that we store your user name on your computer so that you don’t have to enter it each time you visit the site, it’s stored in a Cookie on your computer.
Encryption: The translation of data into a secret code. Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security. To read an encrypted file, you must have access to a secret key or password that enables you to decrypt it. This is typically done by secure computer systems.
Firewall: A system designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a public or private network. Firewalls can be implemented in both hardware and software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private portions of public networks. All messages entering or leaving the network pass through the firewall, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria.
Non-Personal Information: Information that is not traceable back to any individual and cannot be used to identify an individual. For example, Click Stream Information is Non-Personal Information, as is information such as gender, age, city and state when not linked with other Personally Identifiable Information.
Opt-In: Means you are actively indicating your preference to participate in a program, email, feature, tool, or enhancement on a Web site. Typically, if you “Opt-in” you must provide certain information, usually Personally Identifiable Information, to the Web site or otherwise actively indicate your choice or preference to participate in the Web site program. For example, if you wish to use a tracker, you must select the tracker you want to add, enter in information about yourself or your condition, and select how often you wish to receive reminder notifications. Examples of opt-in emails include the watchlist and reminders to update your tracker.
Opt-Out: Means that if you do not take some action you are indicating your preference to participate in a program, email, feature, tool or enhancement on a Web site. Typically, if you “Opt-out” you must uncheck a box next to a stated preference or otherwise take some action to indicate your preference not to participate in a program. For example, if you do not wish to receive the www.AFCNA.org
Newsletter or emails notifying you that someone has invited you to be a friend, you must uncheck the corresponding box in your email notification preferences.
Password: A secret series of characters, typically alphanumeric (meaning it consists of both letters and numbers) that enables you to access a file, computer, or program. You must enter your password before the computer or system will respond to commands. The password helps ensure that unauthorized users do not access the system. In addition, data files and programs may require a password. Ideally, the password should be something that nobody could guess. In practice, many people choose a password that is easy to remember, such as their name or their initials. This is one reason it is relatively easy to break into many computer systems.
Personal Health Information (PHI): When your Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is combined with known health characteristics. For example, if you indicated that you have a certain disease or condition, when that information is combined with your PII, it becomes Personal Health Information.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) (also called Personal Information): Information that can be traced back to an individual (contrast with Non-Personal Information and Aggregate Information). Examples of PII include your name, home address, telephone number, email address, and Social Security number. If other pieces of information are linked to PII, they also become PII. For example, if you use a nickname to chat online and give out your real name while chatting, your nickname becomes PII when linked with other PII.
Server: A computer that provides services to other computers. A “web server” stores web site files and “serves” them to people who request them.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer): A security protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private information via the Internet. SSL works by using a private key to encrypt data that’s transferred over the SSL connection. Many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers. By convention, URLs that utilize an SSL connection start with https instead of http.
Username: A name used to gain access to a computer system or program. Usernames, and often passwords, are required in shared systems, such as the Internet. In most such systems, users can choose their own usernames and passwords. On www.AFCNA.org
, as part of your registration, you will be required to provide a username in addition to your email and a password. The www.AFCNA.org username is the name that will appear on any of your public forum postings. Usernames are also required to post a reply on message boards. This public nickname should not include any personally identifiable information, such as your name. NOTE: Once you establish a username on www.AFCNA.org
, you cannot change it without registering with a new account.
Virus: A program or piece of code that is loaded onto your computer without your knowledge and runs against your wishes. Viruses can also “replicate” themselves by copying their code to other computers. All computer viruses are man-made. A simple virus that can make a copy of itself over and over again is relatively easy to produce. Even such a simple virus is dangerous because it will quickly use all available memory and bring the system to a halt. An even more dangerous type of virus is one capable of transmitting itself across networks and bypassing security systems. There are numerous virus protection programs available.