We value personal privacy and have no desire to violate yours. The only way Citizens Comment might learn personally identifiable information about you, such as your name or email address, is if you voluntarily reveal that information to us, through an email or some other means of communication that you decide to utilize. If you do choose to send us an email or a letter (to ask a question or communicate interest in supporting our efforts) we will use any personally identifiable information you provide only for purposes of directly responding to you. Under no circumstances will Citizens Comment ever share or sell your email address (or other personal information), nor will we use your address to clog your electronic or physical mailbox with future solicitations and communications that you have not requested.
Citizens Comment does use Google Analytics to track usage of our website. This enables us to see the frequency with which pages of the website are viewed. Google makes this information available to us only in aggregate form – never as individual records. So we can see what our visitors are doing, but we cannot see exactly who these visitors are. For more information, see Google’s own privacy policy statement. Note that we do not use Google’s advertising services, so the explanations of how Google places ads are not relevant here.
Finally, please note that the “Comment Pages” to which we provide links in order to facilitate your commenting on federal regulatory proposals, and which in some cases may ask you to identify yourself or furnish an email address, are pages on government websites, completely external to our organization. Whatever comment or information you include on these pages is submitted directly to a federal government agency, and is not sent to Citizens Comment in any form. You should note that often, even when submission of a comment requires you to fill in boxes with identifying information, it is permissible to identify yourself as “Anonymous” instead of using your real name. Moreover you should be aware that personally identifiable information collected by federal government agencies is generally protected by the federal Privacy Act. If you are at all uncomfortable about submitting requested information to the government, you should be sure to carefully read the information on the government’s website page explaining how any electronically submitted information will be used; and you may want to consider sending your comment in an alternative form (such as a hard-copy letter) that affords you more control over what information you choose to provide.