PRIVACY POLICY
Last updated December 26, 2024
WHO WE ARE
Trees&Circles is a registered Swiss nonprofit foundation with number CHE267.533.733
Address: Gerbestrasse 2, 9410 Heiden, Switzerland
Email: support@treesandcircles.org
Website: www.treesandcircles.org
This Privacy Notice for Trees&Circles (‘we‘, ‘us‘, or ‘our‘), describes how and why we might access, collect, store, use, and/or share (‘process‘) your personal information when you use our services (‘Services‘), including when you:
• Visit our website at www.treesandcircles.org, or any website of ours that links to this Privacy Notice
• Engage with us in other related ways, including any donations, fundraising, fundraising activities, marketing, or events
Questions or concerns? Reading this Privacy Notice will help you understand your privacy rights and choices. We are responsible for making decisions about how your personal information is processed. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our Services. If you still have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@treesandcircles.org
1. WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?
What personal information do we process? When you visit, use, or navigate our Services, we may process personal information depending on how you interact with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the features you use.
Personal information you disclose to us
In Short: We collect personal information that you provide to us.
We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you register on the Services, express an interest in obtaining information about us or our projects, events, activities, fundraising, and Services, when you participate in activities on the Services, when you subscribe to our newsletter or mailing list, when you donate to us, or otherwise when you contact us.
Personal Information Provided by You. The personal information that we collect depends on the context of your interactions with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the features you use. The personal information we collect may include the following:
• names
• email addresses
• mailing addresses
• billing addresses
• photos
• phone numbers
Do we collect any information from third parties? We do not collect any information from third parties.
Payment Data. We may collect data necessary to process your payment if you choose to make donations, such as your payment instrument number, and the security code associated with your payment instrument. All payment data is handled and stored by PayPal and Stripe. You may find their privacy notice link(s) here: https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/privacy-full#personalData and https://stripe.com/privacy.
All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes to such personal information.
Information automatically collected
In Short: Some information — such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address and/or browser and device characteristics — is collected automatically when you visit our Services.
We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity (like your name or contact information) but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, device name, country, location, information about how and when you use our Services, and other technical information. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of our Services, and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.
Like many organizations, we also collect information through cookies and similar technologies.
The information we collect includes:
• Log and Usage Data. Log and usage data is service-related, diagnostic, usage, and performance information our servers automatically collect when you access or use our Services and which we record in log files. Depending on how you interact with us, this log data may include your IP address, device information, browser type, and settings and information about your activity in the Services (such as the date/time stamps associated with your usage, pages and files viewed, searches, and other actions you take such as which features you use), device event information (such as system activity, error reports (sometimes called ‘crash dumps’), and hardware settings).
• Device Data. We collect device data such as information about your computer, phone, tablet, or other device you use to access the Services. Depending on the device used, this device data may include information such as your IP address (or proxy server), device and application identification numbers, location, browser type, hardware model, Internet service provider and/or mobile carrier, operating system, and system configuration information.
• Location Data. We collect location data such as information about your device’s location, which can be either precise or imprecise. How much information we collect depends on the type and settings of the device you use to access the Services. For example, we may use GPS and other technologies to collect geolocation data that tells us your current location (based on your IP address). You can opt out of allowing us to collect this information either by refusing access to the information or by disabling your Location setting on your device. However, if you choose to opt out, you may not be able to use certain aspects of the Services.
To manage the cookies and similar technologies used (tracking pixels, web beacons, etc.) and related consents, we use the consent tool “Real Cookie Banner”. Details on how “Real Cookie Banner” works can be found at <a href=”https://devowl.io/rcb/data-processing/” rel=”noreferrer” target=”_blank”>https://devowl.io/rcb/data-processing/</a>.
The legal basis for the processing of personal data in this context are Art. 6 (1) (c) GDPR and Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR. Our legitimate interest is the management of the cookies and similar technologies used and the related consents.
The provision of personal data is neither contractually required nor necessary for the conclusion of a contract. You are not obliged to provide the personal data. If you do not provide the personal data, we will not be able to manage your consents.
You can read our Cookie Notice here : https://www.treesandcircles.org/cookie-policy/
Google API
Our use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
2. HOW DO WE PROCESS YOUR INFORMATION?
How do we process your information?
In Short: We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We may also process your information for other purposes with your consent. We process your information only when we have a valid legal reason to do so.
We process your personal information for a variety of reasons, depending on how you interact with our Services, including:
• To facilitate account creation and authentication and otherwise manage user accounts. We may process your information so you can create and log in to your account, as well as keep your account in working order.
• To respond to user inquiries/offer support to users. We may process your information to respond to your inquiries and solve any potential issues you might have with the requested service.
• To send administrative information to you. We may process your information to send you details about our Services, changes to our terms and policies, and other similar information.
• To send you marketing and promotional communications. We may process the personal information you send to us for our marketing purposes, if this is in accordance with your marketing preferences. You can opt out of our marketing emails at any time. For more information, see ‘WHAT ARE YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS?’ below.
• To send donation confirmation messages. In order to send users a receipt for their donation.
• To save or protect an individual’s vital interest. We may process your information when necessary to save or protect an individual’s vital interest, such as to prevent harm.
3. WHAT LEGAL BASES DO WE RELY ON TO PROCESS YOUR INFORMATION?
In Short: We only process your personal information when we believe it is necessary and we have a valid legal reason (i.e. legal basis) to do so under applicable law, like with your consent, to comply with laws, to provide you with services to enter into or fulfil our contractual obligations, to protect your rights, or to fulfil our legitimate interests.
We may rely on the following legal bases to process your personal information:
• Consent. We may process your information if you have given us permission (i.e. consent) to use your personal information for a specific purpose. You can withdraw your consent at any time.
• Performance of a Contract. We may process your personal information when we believe it is necessary to fulfil our contractual obligations to you, including providing our Services or at your request prior to entering into a contract with you.
• Legitimate Interests. We may process your information when we believe it is reasonably necessary to achieve our legitimate interests and those interests do not outweigh your interests and fundamental rights and freedoms. For example, we may process your personal information for some of the purposes described in order to:
o Send users information about fundraising campaigns, fundraising events, and activities
o Improve user satisfaction
• Legal Obligations. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary for compliance with our legal obligations, such as to cooperate with a law enforcement body or regulatory agency, exercise or defend our legal rights, or disclose your information as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
• Vital Interests. We may process your information where we believe it is necessary to protect your vital interests or the vital interests of a third party, such as situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person.
4. WHEN AND WITH WHOM DO WE SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?
In Short: We may share information in specific situations described in this section and/or with the following third parties.
Vendors, Consultants, and Other Third-Party Service Providers. We may share your data with third-party vendors, service providers, contractors, or agents (‘third parties’) who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. We have contracts in place with our third parties, which are designed to help safeguard your personal information. This means that they cannot do anything with your personal information unless we have instructed them to do it. They will also not share your personal information with any organization apart from us. They also commit to protect the data they hold on our behalf and to retain it for the period we instruct.
The third parties we may share personal information with are as follows:
• Lawyer, Auditor, Revisor, Tax Consultant, and other Professional Services
• Web and Mobile Analytics. Statify. Statify is 100% compliant with GDPR. Statify uses neither cookies nor a third party. Statify does not process and store personal data as e.g. IP addresses. Statify counts site views, not visitors. https://wordpress.org/plugins/statify/
• Website Hosting. Ionos https://www.ionos.com/
• Donation Pages for online fundraising. Donorbox https://donorbox.org/privacy
• Marketing, Automation and email Marketing Platform. Intuit Mailchimp https://mailchimp.com/legal/
• Allow Users to Connect to Their Third-Party Accounts. LinkedIn account, Instagram account and Facebook account
Plugin: Really Simple Security.
Really Simple Security and Really Simple Security add-ons do not process any personal identifiable information, so the GDPR does not apply to these plugins or usage of these plugins on our website. https://really-sim. https://really-simple-ssl.com/legal/privacy-statement/
Plugin: Smush
Smush sends images to the WPMU DEV servers to optimize them for web use. This includes the transfer of EXIF data. The EXIF data will either be stripped or returned as it is. It is not stored on the WPMU DEV servers.
Smush uses the Stackpath Content Delivery Network (CDN). Stackpath may store web log information of site visitors, including IPs, UA, referrer, Location and ISP info of site visitors for 7 days. Files and images served by the CDN may be stored and served from countries other than your own.
Smush uses a third-party email service (Drip) to send informational emails to the site administrator. The administrator’s email address is sent to Drip and a cookie is set by the service. Only administrator information is collected by Drip.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Comments
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Password Reset
If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.
5. DO WE USE COOKIES AND OTHER TRACKING TECHNOLOGIES?
In Short: We may use cookies and other tracking technologies to collect and store your information.
We may use cookies and similar tracking technologies (like web beacons and pixels) to gather information when you interact with our Services. Some online tracking technologies help us maintain the security of our Services and your account, prevent crashes, fix bugs, save your preferences, and assist with basic site functions.
Specific information about how we use such technologies and how you can refuse certain cookies is set out in our Cookie Notice: https://www.treesandcircles.org/cookie-policy
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
6. HOW LONG DO WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION?
In Short: We keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this Privacy Notice unless otherwise required by law.
We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements). We will keep your personal information indefinitely, unless you tell us otherwise.
When we have no ongoing legitimate need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize such information, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.
If you leave a comment on the site, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
7. HOW DO WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION SAFE?
In Short: We aim to protect your personal information through a system of organizational and technical security measures.
We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. However, despite our safeguards and efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorized third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access the Services within a secure environment.
8. DO WE COLLECT INFORMATION FROM MINORS?
In Short: We do not knowingly collect data from or market to children under 18 years of age.
We do not knowingly collect, solicit data from, or market to children under 18 years of age, nor do we knowingly sell such personal information. By using the Services, you represent that you are at least 18 or that you are the parent or guardian of such a minor and consent to such minor dependent’s use of the Services. If we learn that personal information from users less than 18 years of age has been collected, we will deactivate the account and take reasonable measures to promptly delete such data from our records. If you become aware of any data we may have collected from children under age 18, please contact us at treesandcircles@gmail.com.
9. WHAT ARE YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS?
In Short: Residents in Switzerland or in some regions, such as the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, and US, have rights that allow them greater access to and control over their personal information. You may review, change, or terminate your account at any time, depending on your country, province, or state of residence.
In some regions (like Switzerland, the EEA, UK, and Canada), you have certain rights under applicable data protection laws. These may include the right (i) to request access and obtain a copy of your personal information, (ii) to request rectification or erasure; (iii) to restrict the processing of your personal information; (iv) if applicable, to data portability; and (v) not to be subject to automated decision-making. In certain circumstances, you may also have the right to object to the processing of your personal information. You can make such a request by contacting us by using the contact details provided in the section ‘HOW CAN YOU CONTACT US ABOUT THIS NOTICE?‘ below.
We will consider and act upon any request in accordance with applicable data protection laws.
Withdrawing your consent: If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us by using the contact details provided in the section ‘HOW CAN YOU CONTACT US ABOUT THIS NOTICE?’ below.
However, please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.
Opting out of marketing and promotional communications: You can unsubscribe from our marketing and promotional communications at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link in the emails that we send, or by contacting us using the details provided in the section ‘HOW CAN YOU CONTACT US ABOUT THIS NOTICE?‘ below. You will then be removed from the marketing lists. However, we may still communicate with you — for example, to send you service-related messages that are necessary for the administration and use of your account, to respond to service requests, or for other non-marketing purposes.
Cookies and similar technologies: Most Web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove cookies and to reject cookies. If you choose to remove cookies or reject cookies, this could affect certain features or services of our Services. For further information, please see our Cookie Notice: https://www.treesandcircles.org/cookie-policy/.
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
If you have questions or comments about your privacy rights, you may email us at support@treesandcircles.org
Account Information
If you would at any time like to review or change the information in your account or terminate your account, you can:
• Log in to your account settings and update your user account.
• Contact us using the contact information provided.
Upon your request to terminate your account, we will deactivate or delete your account and information from our active databases. However, we may retain some information in our files to prevent fraud, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our legal terms and/or comply with applicable legal requirements.
10. CONTROLS FOR DO-NOT-TRACK FEATURES
Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track (‘DNT’) feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage, no uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this Privacy Notice.
11. DO WE MAKE UPDATES TO THIS NOTICE?
In Short: Yes, we will update this notice as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws.
We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated ‘Revised’ date at the top of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes to this Privacy Notice, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.
12. HOW CAN YOU CONTACT US ABOUT THIS NOTICE?
If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may contact us by post at:<br>Trees&Circles<br>Gerbestrasse 2 <br>Heiden CH 9410 <br>Switzerland<br>Or by email at support@treesandcircles.org
13. HOW CAN YOU REVIEW, UPDATE, OR DELETE THE DATA WE COLLECT FROM YOU?
Based on the applicable laws of your country or state of residence in the US, you may have the right to request access to the personal information we collect from you, details about how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law. To request to review, update, or delete your personal information, please send us an email at support@treesandcircles.org