Writer's Guidelines and Policy

Site Privacy Policy

This website is operated by Positive Psychology. We work hard to protect your privacy. We treat your privacy as we do our own. This privacy policy lets you know how we treat your personal information -- and to show you all the ways we work to keep it safe and private.

We allow third-party companies to serve ads and/or collect certain anonymous information when you visit our web site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information (e.g., click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over) during your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. 

These companies typically use a cookie or third party web beacon to collect this information. To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit  networkadvertising.org .

When connecting or registering with Facebook, we use your data in our registration process. We use your name, email, birth date, location, gender and bio in our registration process. We NEVER display your email address to anyone. Your name, location, and bio do appear on your individual authors page on our site. Your bio appears on every article you submit. We do not sell or share your personal information with anyone, except as mentioned above.

Positive Psychology will send you updates by e-mail. You can remove yourself from the mailing list at any time.

We do not share the information you've given us with unaffiliated groups without your explicit permission. We may share some of your personal information with the following affiliated groups:

• Affiliated Third Parties -- for example, our database administrators. They do not share your personal information or use it for any purpose other than as instructed by us.

In addition, with your explicit permission, we pass along certain of your information to the following groups:

• The President, legislators and news publications and other targets when you choose to use our email tool to send them messages (such as petitions);
• With the President, legislators, news publications, and the general public when you sign petitions or complete surveys;

Under circumstances where we determine that members may be misusing our systems, such activities may be reported to law enforcement agencies. In such cases, Positive Psychology may release personally identifiable information, including name and address, to those agencies.

Please review this privacy policy periodically because we modify it from time to time. Each time you visit this Site or provide us with information through the Site, by doing so you are accepting practices described in the privacy policy.  You are also accepting our specific rules or terms of use (such as Writers Guidelines) which may be posted on the Site.

Petitions and Surveys

For petitions and surveys you've signed or completed, we treat your name, city, state, and comments as public information - for example, we may provide compilations of petitions, with your comments, to the President and legislators, other targets, or to the press. We will not make your street address publicly available, but we may transmit it to members of Congress and to the President as part of a petition. This is a standard industry practice in such situations. In no such case will we disclose your email address or phone number without your permission. We may also make your comments, along with your first name, city, and state available to the press and public online.

Monetary Donations

If you choose to make a donation to Positive Psychology, your credit card information will be used only for this transaction through our secure online payment system. We do not retain credit card information.

Cookies

Some parts of the site are password-protected. We do use a cookie (cookies reside on your computer and are under the control of your browser) to enable you to return to password-protected areas of the website without having to re-enter your password. If you wish to disable these cookies, this will not allow you to login as our login process depends upon cookies. Thus, if you set your browser to disable cookies, you will not be able to access certain parts of this Site.

Advertising

We display online advertising with third-party vendors, including Google. In some cases, those third-party vendors may decide which ads to show you based on your prior visits to the Site. At no time will you be personally identified to those third-party vendors, nor will any of the information you share with us be shared with those third-party vendors. If you prefer to opt out of the use of these third-party cookies on the Site, you can do so by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt out page.

Data Tracking

In order to better serve our members, we use cookies and periodically analyze web logs. We may also use third-party services such as Google Analytics. This helps us understand traffic patterns and know if there are problems with our website. We may also use embedded links in emails to track open rates for our mailings, so that we can tell which articles appeal most to Positive Psychology members.

URLs contained in emails may contain an ID that enables us to correctly identify the person who takes an action using a web page. We use these URLs to simplify the process of signing petitions and filling out surveys. We may occasionally present a shortened URL that references a longer URL which contains an id -- we do this to simplify the display, to prevent links from becoming broken when copied, and to ensure compatibility with email programs which do not handle long URLs. When a shortened URL is displayed in an email, you will see the full URL in the browser's address bar when you access the page.

Links to Other Websites

Positive Psychology may provide links to third party websites, and other websites may provide links to the Site. Third party websites operate according to their own terms of use and privacy policies. Positive Psychology has no control over such third party websites, and by using this Site, you acknowledge and agree that Positive Psychology is not responsible for the availability of such third party sites, and does not endorse and is not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products or other materials on or available from such sites. You further acknowledge and agree that Positive Psychology will not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with use of or reliance on any content, advertising, products, or other materials on or available from such sites.

Changes to the Privacy Policy

Positive Psychology may revise or amend this policy at any time at our sole discretion. We encourage users to visit this page periodically to review our current policy.