Privacy policy

This website is owned and operated by the Land Trust Alliance (the Alliance). Our intention is to provide information and products in support of private land conservation. We recognize that visitors to our site may be concerned about the information they provide to us and how we treat that information. The Alliance is committed to honoring our constituents' privacy preferences.

This policy covers www.landtrustalliance.org, www.lta.org, www.gaininggroundUSA.org, www.findalandtrust.org and www.lta.org/resources, which are owned and operated by the Alliance. We encourage you to take the time to read this privacy policy and those of any website you visit.

In order to purchase items and register for events on any of the Alliance sites, you must create an account and provide at minimum your name, address, phone number and email address. For information about the handling of your credit card information, please see the section below titled "security of your information".

While many resources on www.lta.org/resources are available to all site visitors, to access to the full contents, you must register and provide your name, email and one of the following: member land trust affiliation, affiliate member affiliation or evidence of $500+ donation within the past 12 months.

You do not need to create an account in order to make a donation to the Alliance, however, you are required to provide at a minimum your name, address, phone number and email address. For information about the handling of your credit card information, please see the section below titled "Security of Your Information."

An Internet Protocol (IP) address is the number that is automatically assigned to your computer when you use the Internet. We collect an IP address from all visitors to our website. We use IP addresses to help diagnose problems with our server, administer our website, analyze usage trends and gather broad demographic information.

To sign up for alerts and e-newsletters you are in most cases required to provide us with your full name, state or residence and email address. You may check your subscriptions and preferences online.

There are occasions when we will ask for additional information, such as professional specialties, title or your organizational affiliation. We do this to better understand and respond to your needs and provide you with services and benefits that may be valuable to you.

You may decide to send the Land Trust Alliance personally identifying information, for example, in an email message requesting details about your membership. We will use this information to determine how to respond to you and we may add your information to our database. If you wish to view, modify or remove your personal information from our records, please see the section: "How to access, modify and remove personal information." It is important to note that we legally cannot remove a record from our database if that record contains information containing donations. At your request, the record may be marked to receive no other mailings.

Your information will be used to issue invoices, administer accounts, collect and process payments and to send information to you about the Land Trust Alliance and our services. You may opt-out of mailings (both postal and email) at any time if you do not wish to receive non-business-critical information from us. The Land Trust Alliance will not sell your email address for commercial purposes.

If at any time you wish to stop receiving an electronic newsletter from the Land Trust Alliance, you can login to our website and update your profile in order to unsubscribe from it. You may also opt-out at any time from receiving an e-newsletter by selecting the unsubscribe link located at the bottom of every e-newsletter, or by contacting us at webmaster@lta.org or 202-638-4725.  Please provide enough information for us to be able to identify you and the specific e-newsletter you wish to unsubscribe from so that we may comply with your request. 

As an Alliance land trust or affiliate member, you may choose to opt-out of all non-essential business email from the Land Trust Alliance. To do so, please send an email to membership@lta.org  with your contact information and your request, or send a written letter to Land Trust Alliance, Attn: Opt-Out Email, 1250 H Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Please help us serve you better by including a brief explanation of why you are making this request.

As an Alliance land trust or affiliate member, you may choose to opt-out of all non-essential business postal mail from the Land Trust Alliance. To do so, please send an email to membership@lta.org  with your contact information and your request or send a written letter to Land Trust Alliance, Attn: Opt-Out Postal Mail, 1250 H Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Please help us serve you better by including a brief explanation of why you are making this request.

It is our general practice to produce and distribute attendee lists for conferences and workshops. You may opt-out of having your name and contact information included in the attendee list by checking the box on the registration form indicating your desire to do so.

As an Alliance land trust or affiliate member, you may review your personal information and make updates on our website. See the instructions for opting out for more information on selectively removing yourself from email and postal mail lists.

You may also contact us at 202-638-4725 or at membership@lta.org  and request changes to your personal information. Please provide us enough information to process your request.

Written requests may be sent to:

Land Trust Alliance

Attn: Member Records

1250 H Street NW

Suite 600

Washington, DC 20005

To receive a print copy of your personal information or to request the removal of your personal information from our records, please send a letter to the address above.

If your record contains information concerning donations, we legally cannot remove it from our database. If you have not made a donation and request that we remove all of the personal information stored in your profile, we will promptly do so. However, you will not be able to use many of the services available on our site unless you re-register.

We will take appropriate steps to protect the security of your personal information. We will also protect your personal information in storage. We have implemented security policies, rules and technical measures to protect the personal data that we have under our control from: unauthorized access; improper use or disclosure; unauthorized modification; and unlawful destruction or accidental loss. All our employees who have access to, and are associated with processing of personal data, must respect the confidentiality of our visitor's personal data.

All sensitive information, including credit card information, provided to the Land Trust Alliance through our website is transmitted either to us or to our credit card processor using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. SSL is a proven coding system that lets your browser automatically encrypt, or scramble, data before you send it to us. No credit card information is stored on our site.

Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can ever be 100% secure. While we strive to protect your information to the fullest extent, we cannot ensure or completely guarantee the security of such information.

The globally recognized VeriSign Secure Site Program allows you to learn more about the websites that you visit before you submit any confidential information. The Alliance's investment in this advanced technology ensures that the web page you are visiting is authentic, secure and that any data or information you submit will be protected by 128-bit SSL encryption. Whenever you see the VeriSign Secure Site badge on our websites, you can personally verify that the web page in question is both secure and administered by the Alliance. You may, therefore, submit personally identifiable information and/or sensitive data (such as credit card numbers) with the assurance that:

• The Alliance's website has a VeriSign Secure Server ID.

• VeriSign has verified the organizational name and that the Alliance has the proof of right to use it.

• The website legitimately runs under the auspices of the Alliance.

• All information sent to the website, if in an SSL session, is encrypted, protecting against disclosure to third parties.

We provide links to third party sites. Since we do not control those websites, we encourage you to review the privacy policies posted on these third-party sites.

'Cookies' are small files sent from a web server to your computer through your browser program. There are two types of cookies: non-persistent and persistent cookies.

A non-persistent cookie enables a website to temporarily keep information on your computer as you travel from one page to another on our site. This cookie is automatically deleted from your machine when you close your browser. Because these cookies are necessary to provide some functions, failure to allow such cookies will make our website unavailable to you.

A persistent cookie is kept even when you close your browser. You can manually delete these cookies using commands specific to your browser and computer system. These cookies store information that would generally not change from session to session. They also contain information that would need to be reentered by you each time you visit the website. For example, a common use of persistent cookies is to allow a registered site visitor to enter the site without having to specify their user ID and password.

We use cookies for various reasons. We only read cookies written by our sites. We do not use cookies to obtain information on other websites that you may visit. We may use cookies to store some history about the parts of our sites that you have visited to help you navigate our site more easily or to alert you to related pages on our site that may interest you.

The Alliance complies fully with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA).

None of the websites covered by this policy knowingly collect identifiable personal information from children under age 13. If we discover that a person under the age of 13 has provided us with any personally identifiable information, we will delete that information from our systems. We are unable to reply to information requests from children under the age of 13 if so identified. A parent or guardian must initiate any requests for information from children under the age of 13 on their behalf.  We encourage parents to supervise children when they browse the internet.

The Alliance complies fully with the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM Act). To this end, the Alliance:

• Always offers recipients of e-mail marketing and e-newsletters a clear means of opting-out from the receipt of future messages.

• Always includes a link to the Alliance's physical address within the body of all e-mail messages.

• Never uses false or misleading header information in any email message.

• Never attempts to deceive email recipients by using deceptive subject lines.

• Never uses automated means to harvest email addresses from websites or web services.

• Never generates email addresses using programmatic methods.

The Land Trust Alliance welcomes comments and questions on this policy. We are dedicated to protecting your personal information and will make every reasonable effort to keep that information secure.

If you have any questions, please contact us at:

Land Trust Alliance

1250 H Street NW

Suite 600

Washington, DC 20005

membership@lta.org

Phone: 202-638-4725

The information you provide to us will also be covered by this policy.

We may change or supplement this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post an appropriate notice of changes to the Privacy Policy on our Site. Privacy Policy changes will apply to the information collected from the date we post the revised Privacy Policy to the Site, as well as to existing information held by us.

If we decide to change this policy in a material way, we will obtain the necessary consents required under applicable privacy laws if we seek to collect, use or disclose personal information for purposes other than those to which consent has been obtained, unless otherwise required or permitted by law. If any proposed change is unacceptable to you, you may request that we remove your Personal Information from our records, as described in "how to access, modify or delete your personal information.