At Holy Trinity, we take very seriously our responsibility to handle personal information carefully. Our privacy policy is intended to protect individuals in our congregation from the threats posed by improper use of publicly-available personal information. In particular, we endeavour to abide by guidelines regarding the publishing and availability of personal information. These guidelines are disclosed below both to make them clear and to invite discussion. We welcome assistance in upgrading our privacy guidelines and our adherence to them.
This privacy policy mostly addresses the handling of congregational information, not information from website visitors. We do not intentionally collect any personal information from website visitors unless they provide their explicit consent. No visitor information is given or sold to others.
Feel free to contact us with comments, questions or concerns.
Privacy Policy
There are several categories of people that might be shown or referred to on our website; staff, adults, children and youth, and missionaries. Potentially sensitive information includes names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and photographs.
Home addresses, email addresses, or phone numbers will not be posted on public web pages unless requested in writing by the individual. The display of such information will be minimized and be limited to secure, password-protected areas of the website with access restricted to registered members and associates of the church.
The remainder of the policy applies to unrestricted, public pages accessible without registering and logging into the site.
For staff, we may list names, office email addresses, and office phone numbers. It is important that people be able to contact the staff and that access is all through the office. For adult members & non-members, we may list names when they are a contact for some church group or activity. We do not list personal email addresses or phone numbers unless the individual has specifically given permission in writing (they may request it for convenience).
For children and youth, we avoid giving names and do not list full names. In cases where a youth's name is used, at most the first name and initial of the last name will be used. Photograph captions will not include full names and generally will not include names at all. For missionaries, we are very careful what, if anything, we list for their personal protection. We don't post info, even names, emails or country, without the explicit permission of that missionary or a representative. Some specific areas of our online functionality may have additional guidelines.
When using photographs of Holy Trinity events, members, activities, etc. online, either directly on the website or in photo albums, we use the following guidelines.
- We will not post anything that we believe would be embarrassing, objectionable or hurtful to anyone in the photo. We endeavor to be conservative in this judgement, but it is possible that an individual in a picture may nonetheless have objections.
- We will gladly remove any photo immediately upon request of anyone in the photograph (or their parent or guardian if a minor under 18).
- We don't put full names of children or youth in captions with photos, and we avoid using the full names of adults.
- We will secure written permission (email or paper) from the parent or guardian of any minor under the age of 18 before posting a picture featuring them in which identification of the minor is reasonably possible.
- We will gladly provide credit for photos if desired by the photographer, and we would certainly honor any copyright wishes or restrictions.
In any case, if you see a photo (or any other personal information) that includes you or your child and would like it removed from the site, we would be glad to do so. Just notify the webmaster with the details.
Please be aware, that while we do not post home addresses or telephone numbers on publicly-accessible web pages, there are a number of websites that provide white pages, or extensive listings of such personal information. There are also a number of people-finder type sites that help in locating people and their names, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. These sites have many sources of data and you can probably assume that you're in there somewhere.
Revision 1.1
May 14, 2007