Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: https://www.friendsinadoption.org.

Social Media Engagements & Privacy Policy:

Friends in Adoption assigns team members to monitor our social media pages. These team members are permitted to engage in happy, positive, and pro-adoption comments or messages in our social media platforms, on behalf of Friends in Adoption. However, due to HIPPA regulations, and also out of respect to those involved in an adoption story, Friends in Adoption team members are not permitted to participate or engage in any sensitive public discussions. All posts, stories, and family photos published by Friends in Adoption in our social media pages are published upon proper written authorizations and signed releases by the adults and/or legal guardians of those involved in the story.

Friends in Adoption reserves the right to block and permanently ban spammers, trolls, and anyone else displaying an abusive and/or disruptive behavior in our social media channels. Posts by Internet Trolls are only welcomed if they worked as cast members during the making of the movie “Shrek”. Kidding aside, while we welcome everyone’s voices, our policy is to not allow aggressive, accusatory, or biased comments/posts/messages; which are usually presented as one-sided, baseless, and in many cases defamatory rants. Persons flooding our feed as they post the same message over and over in multiple posts are considered spammers (regardless of the quality of their messages).

Friends in Adoption is passionate about providing a lifelong community resource for birth parents, birth families, adoptive families, people who were adopted, and even those interested in learning more about adoption. All are welcome to reach out to Friends in Adoption, privately, to discuss their options regarding post-adoption services. We suggest emailing us first in order to schedule a time to chat on the phone if necessary.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

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.

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 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.

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.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, 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.

What rights you have over your data

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.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.


This page was last updated on December 8, 2018.