Who we are
We are an animal welfare NGO based in Guatemala, Central America, where we also run a shelter for domestic animals and a veterinary clinic.
ADDRESSES
Website: https://animalaware.org/
e-mail: info@animalaware.org
Home: Granja Montecito, Pachaj, Sumpango 140216, Guatemala, Central America
A brief summary of our Privacy Policy
We want you to feel comfortable when using our site. We are committed to respecting your personal information, and to using it – if ever we need to – in secure and responsible ways. We will always respect your wishes regarding any of your information we have kept on file, either on the website or in the office computer. Except in special cases, and always in consultation with you, the only information about you that we keep is for contact purposes – sending you our Newsletter, for example. And we will only send you the Newsletter if we have received a specific request from you. We do keep a record of Volunteers, which can include other information, such as comments along the lines of “Excellent Volunteer”. We will always send you on demand a complete copy of all your personal information that we have kept on file.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Name; email address; country of origin; website (if necessary); telephone number (if you give it to us and we’re likely to use it).
Personal information is stored either on the AWARE website (see Comments and Media below), or in the AWARE office computer. There is a maximum of three people (the Director, her P.A., and the General Manager when we have one) who have access to it.
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. This is a service provided by WordPress, the tried and true Content Management Service that we use for the website. Here’s a link to the WordPress Privacy Policy: https://wordpress.org/about/privacy/
If you send us a Volunteering enquiry, we respond with a form for you to fill in and return to us. This includes a request for supplementary information such as street address OR simply country of origin; age; gender; allergies to animals or any other health issues that might need to be considered in the specific situation of working around animals at 2000m above sea-level in a non-sterile environment; degree of fluency in Spanish; experience with animals (particularly dogs &/or cats); other relevant skills (e.g. construction, computers, solar power, dog grooming etc etc). We never share any of this information with anyone else. If we were asked (although we never have been) by law enforcement agencies for this information we would consider complying with that enquiry, and might comply. The form includes an optional request to delete and destroy the information you have provided.
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.
Contact forms
There used to be a form on the site that visitors could use to send us an enquiry or other message, but we removed it because the form is yet another way in which visitors’ personal information might be harvested. It’s almost as simple – and a lot more straightforward – to send us your message using email.
Cookies
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 have an account and you log in to this site, 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.
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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
We do not use much (if any, at the moment) embedded content. If and when we do, we accompany the embedded content with a notice alerting the visitor to the fact that this video / image / article is from another site and might contain tracking cookies. You can then decide for yourself whether or not to engage with the embedded content.
Analytics
Website usage data gathering and analysis – In addition to the above described information collection, AWARE also uses Google Analytics to collect information about how visitors use our website. Google Analytics collects information such as how often users visit our site, which pages have been visited, time spent on each page, and also information about how you arrived on AWARE’s webpage (name of search engine, search term(s) used, link from another site, etc.). AWARE uses the information that is collected by Google Analytics to improve the usability of our site. When you visit the AWARE website Google Analytics will record the IP address that was assigned to you at the time and date of your visit. Google Analytics does not make IP addresses available to AWARE and AWARE will never seek to acquire an IP address via Google Analytics, nor will we attempt to identify individuals via Google Analytics. Click here to view the Google privacy policy.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment using the ‘Comment’ form on the website, 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, 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.
What rights you have over your data
All information about you belongs to you. If you have shared any of that information with us, we will treat it with respect. If for whatever reason you don’t want us to retain your information, tell us and we will delete it as soon as possible. For residents of the European Union, the EU’s General Data Protection regulation is an evolving process which can only get more sophisticated (and possibly more stringent) as time goes by. Other administrations either already have or will soon have their own set of data protection regulations. AWARE undertakes to respect all of these rules, and to update our policy as may become necessary.
If you have any suggestions or comments on our Privacy Policy, or think that there’s something we should have covered but haven’t, send us an email at info@animalaware.org and let us know.
UPDATE AUGUST 2020
Google has recently published further privacy guidelines for entities dealing with clients based in the European Union. We would like to take this opportunity of reassuring our visitors that we stringently adhere to all principles of respect for the data of our visitors and users, whether resident in the EU or not, whether covered by the EU’s GDPR or not. Please feel safe while browsing the AWARE website! We will take every precaution to ensure that no abuse of your personal information will take place here.
