Privacy Policy

Personal information you disclose to us

In Short: We collect personal information that you provide to us.

We collect personal information that you voluntarily provide to us when you express an interest in obtaining information about us or our products and Services, when you participate in activities on the Services, or otherwise when you contact us.

Personal Information Provided by You. The personal information that we collect depends on the context of your interactions with us and the Services, the choices you make, and the products and features you use. The personal information we collect may include the following:

• names
• email addresses
• mailing addresses
• billing addresses
• messages and resource suggestions you choose to send us through our forms

Sensitive Information. We do not process sensitive information.

Payment Data. We may collect data necessary to process your payment if you choose to make purchases, such as your payment instrument number, and the security code associated with your payment instrument. All payment data is handled and stored by Shopify. You may find their privacy notice here: shopify.com/legal/privacy.

All personal information that you provide to us must be true, complete, and accurate, and you must notify us of any changes to such personal information.

Information automatically collected

In Short: Some information — such as your Internet Protocol (IP) address and/or browser and device characteristics — is collected automatically when you visit our Services.

We automatically collect certain information when you visit, use, or navigate the Services. This information does not reveal your specific identity (like your name or contact information) but may include device and usage information, such as your IP address, browser and device characteristics, operating system, language preferences, referring URLs, device name, country, location, information about how and when you use our Services, and other technical information. This information is primarily needed to maintain the security and operation of our Services, and for our internal analytics and reporting purposes.

Like many businesses, we also collect information through cookies and similar technologies. You can find out more about this in our Cookie Policy.

The information we collect includes:

Log and Usage Data. Log and usage data is service-related, diagnostic, usage, and performance information our servers automatically collect when you access or use our Services and which we record in log files. Depending on how you interact with us, this log data may include your IP address, device information, browser type, and settings and information about your activity in the Services (such as the date/time stamps associated with your usage, pages and files viewed, searches, and other actions you take such as which features you use), device event information (such as system activity, error reports (sometimes called “crash dumps”), and hardware settings).

In Short: We process your information to provide, improve, and administer our Services, communicate with you, for security and fraud prevention, and to comply with law. We may also process your information for other purposes with your consent.

We process your personal information for a variety of reasons, depending on how you interact with our Services, including:

• To deliver and facilitate delivery of services to the user. We may process your information to provide you with the requested service.
• To respond to user inquiries/offer support to users. We may process your information to respond to your inquiries and solve any potential issues you might have with the requested service.
• To send administrative information to you. We may process your information to send you details about our products and services, changes to our terms and policies, and other similar information.
• To fulfill and manage your orders. We may process your information to fulfill and manage your orders, payments, returns, and exchanges made through the Services.
• To protect our Services. We may process your information as part of our efforts to keep our Services safe and secure, including fraud monitoring and prevention.
• To comply with our legal obligations. We may process your information to comply with our legal obligations, respond to legal requests, and exercise, establish, or defend our legal rights.
• To review resource suggestions. When a visitor suggests a resource, we use what they send only to check the resource against official sources before adding it to the directory. We do not contact them for any other reason.

In Short: We may share information in specific situations described in this section and/or with the following third parties.

Vendors, Consultants, and Other Third-Party Service Providers. We may share your data with third-party vendors, service providers, contractors, or agents (“third parties”) who perform services for us or on our behalf and require access to such information to do that work. We have contracts in place with our third parties, which are designed to help safeguard your personal information. This means that they cannot do anything with your personal information unless we have instructed them to do it. They will also not share your personal information with any organization apart from us. They also commit to protect the data they hold on our behalf and to retain it for the period we instruct.

The third parties we may share personal information with are as follows:

• Website hosting, delivery and security: Cloudflare
• Website hosting and form database: Lovable
• Typefaces (fonts): Google Fonts
• Invoice and billing: Shopify

We also may need to share your personal information in the following situations:

• Business Transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.

In Short: We use a small number of first-party cookies and browser storage to run the site. We do not use advertising or tracking technologies.

We use a first-party cookie and your browser’s local storage to remember choices you make on the site — such as accepting our welcome notice, the contents of your Gift of Hope cart, and your accessibility settings — so the site works the way you left it. These stay on your own device and are not used to follow you across the internet.

We do not use third-party cookies, advertising cookies, tracking pixels, web beacons, analytics services, or any technology that tracks you across other websites. Because we never sell or share personal information and never use targeted advertising, there is nothing on this site to opt out of.

Specific information about what this site saves on your device is set out in our Cookie Policy.

In Short: We keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this Privacy Notice unless otherwise required by law.

We will only keep your personal information for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice, unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law (such as tax, accounting, or other legal requirements). In practice:

• Messages sent through our forms are kept only as long as we need to answer or review them, and then we delete them.
• We delete anything sent by someone under 13 as soon as we find it.
• Gift of Hope order records are kept for up to 7 years, as tax and accounting rules require.
• Our website host keeps basic technical logs for a short time only.

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize such information, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

In Short: We aim to protect your personal information through a system of organizational and technical security measures.

We have implemented appropriate and reasonable technical and organizational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. However, despite our safeguards and efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorized third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access the Services within a secure environment.

In Short: Depending on your country, province, or state of residence, you may have the right to review, correct, or delete the personal information we hold about you.

Withdrawing your consent: If we are relying on your consent to process your personal information, which may be express and/or implied consent depending on the applicable law, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us using the contact details provided in the section “How can you contact us about this notice?” below.

However, please note that this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before its withdrawal nor, when applicable law allows, will it affect the processing of your personal information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.

Cookies and similar technologies: Most web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove cookies and to reject cookies. If you choose to remove cookies or reject cookies, this could affect certain features or services of our Services. For further information, please see our Cookie Policy.

If you have questions or comments about your privacy rights, you may email us at info@helpfosteryouth.org.

Most web browsers and some mobile operating systems and mobile applications include a Do-Not-Track (“DNT”) feature or setting you can activate to signal your privacy preference not to have data about your online browsing activities monitored and collected. At this stage, no uniform technology standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals has been finalized. As such, we do not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online. If a standard for online tracking is adopted that we must follow in the future, we will inform you about that practice in a revised version of this Privacy Notice.

California law requires us to let you know how we respond to web browser DNT signals. Because there currently is not an industry or legal standard for recognizing or honoring DNT signals, we do not respond to them at this time. Because we do not track visitors in the first place, your experience on this site is the same whether or not your browser sends a DNT signal.

In Short: If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or Virginia, you may have the right to request access to and receive details about the personal information we maintain about you and how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, get a copy of, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law. More information is provided below.

Categories of personal information we collect

The table below shows the categories of personal information we have collected in the past twelve (12) months. The table includes illustrative examples of each category and does not reflect the personal information we collect from you. For a comprehensive inventory of all personal information we process, please refer to the section “What information do we collect?”

We may also collect other personal information outside of these categories through instances where you interact with us in person, online, or by phone or mail in the context of:

• Receiving help through our customer support channels;
• Participation in customer surveys or contests; and
• Facilitation in the delivery of our Services and to respond to your inquiries.

We will use and retain the collected personal information as needed to provide the Services or for:

• Category A — Names and email addresses sent through our forms are kept only as long as we need them to answer or review the message, then deleted. Names and mailing addresses from Gift of Hope orders are kept for up to 7 years, as tax and accounting rules require. Our website host keeps IP addresses in its technical logs for a short time only.
• Category B — Names and email addresses from our forms are kept only as long as needed to answer or review the message, then deleted. Names and mailing addresses from Gift of Hope orders are kept for up to 7 years, as tax and accounting rules apply.
• Category D — Gift of Hope order records are kept for up to 7 years, as tax and accounting rules apply.
• Category F — Our website host keeps basic technical logs of pages visited for a short time only. We do not use this information to track visitors or show them ads.
• Category I — The outlet or organization a reporter names in our media form is kept only as long as we need it to answer their request, then deleted.

Sources of personal information

Learn more about the sources of personal information we collect in “What information do we collect?”

How we use and share personal information

Learn more about how we use your personal information in the section “How do we process your information?”

Will your information be shared with anyone else?

We may disclose your personal information with our service providers pursuant to a written contract between us and each service provider. Learn more about how we disclose personal information in the section “When and with whom do we share your personal information?”

We may use your personal information for our own business purposes, such as for undertaking internal research for technological development and demonstration. This is not considered to be “selling” of your personal information.

We have not sold or shared any personal information to third parties for a business or commercial purpose in the preceding twelve (12) months. We have disclosed the following categories of personal information to third parties for a business or commercial purpose in the preceding twelve (12) months:

• Category A. Identifiers
• Category B. Personal information as defined in the California Customer Records law
• Category D. Commercial information

The categories of third parties to whom we disclosed personal information for a business or commercial purpose can be found under “When and with whom do we share your personal information?”

Your rights

You have rights under certain US state data protection laws. However, these rights are not absolute, and in certain cases, we may decline your request as permitted by law. These rights include:

• Right to know whether or not we are processing your personal data
• Right to access your personal data
• Right to correct inaccuracies in your personal data
• Right to request the deletion of your personal data
• Right to obtain a copy of the personal data you previously shared with us
• Right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights
• Right to opt out of the processing of your personal data if it is used for targeted advertising (or sharing as defined under California’s privacy law), the sale of personal data, or profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects (“profiling”)

Depending upon the state where you live, you may also have the following rights:

• Right to access the categories of personal data being processed (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Minnesota)
• Right to obtain a list of the categories of third parties to which we have disclosed personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in California, Delaware, and Maryland)
• Right to obtain a list of specific third parties to which we have disclosed personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Minnesota and Oregon)
• Right to obtain a list of third parties to which we have sold personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Connecticut)
• Right to review, understand, question, and depending on where you live, correct how personal data has been profiled (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Connecticut and Minnesota)
• Right to limit use and disclosure of sensitive personal data (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in California)
• Right to opt out of the collection of sensitive data and personal data collected through the operation of a voice or facial recognition feature (as permitted by applicable law, including the privacy law in Florida)

How to exercise your rights

To exercise these rights, you can contact us by visiting helpfosteryouth.org/contact, by emailing us at info@helpfosteryouth.org, or by referring to the contact details at the bottom of this document.

Under certain US state data protection laws, you can designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf. We may deny a request from an authorized agent that does not submit proof that they have been validly authorized to act on your behalf in accordance with applicable laws.

Request verification

Upon receiving your request, we will need to verify your identity to determine you are the same person about whom we have the information in our system. We will only use personal information provided in your request to verify your identity or authority to make the request. However, if we cannot verify your identity from the information already maintained by us, we may request that you provide additional information for the purposes of verifying your identity and for security or fraud-prevention purposes.

If you submit the request through an authorized agent, we may need to collect additional information to verify your identity before processing your request and the agent will need to provide a written and signed permission from you to submit such request on your behalf.

Appeals

Under certain US state data protection laws, if we decline to take action regarding your request, you may appeal our decision by emailing us at info@helpfosteryouth.org. We will inform you in writing of any action taken or not taken in response to the appeal, including a written explanation of the reasons for the decisions. If your appeal is denied, you may submit a complaint to your state attorney general.

California “Shine The Light” law

California Civil Code Section 1798.83, also known as the “Shine The Light” law, permits our users who are California residents to request and obtain from us, once a year and free of charge, information about categories of personal information (if any) we disclosed to third parties for direct marketing purposes and the names and addresses of all third parties with which we shared personal information in the immediately preceding calendar year. If you are a California resident and would like to make such a request, please submit your request in writing to us by using the contact details provided in the section “How can you contact us about this notice?”

Help Foster Youth is a free, anonymous directory. Nobody needs an account, and we never ask visitors to sign up. ZIP codes typed into the search are used only to show results. They are not saved or linked to anyone. We will never email, call or text you because you searched or visited our site. The only time we contact anyone is to answer a message they sent us first. Our site is not meant for children under 13. If we learn that someone under 13 sent us information, we delete it right away. Please don’t include private details, like health or family information, in messages to us. If you do, we use them only to answer you and then delete them. We do not sell or share personal information. Because of that, a browser’s Global Privacy Control setting is always honored. We are a directory only and do not provide services ourselves. Organizations listed on our site have their own privacy policies. Gift of Hope purchases are handled by Shopify under Shopify’s privacy policy.

In Short: Yes, we will update this notice as necessary to stay compliant with relevant laws.

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated “Revised” date at the top of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes to this Privacy Notice, we may notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Notice frequently to be informed of how we are protecting your information.

If you have questions or comments about this notice, you may contact our Data Protection Officer (DPO) by email at info@helpfosteryouth.org, or contact us by post at:

You have the right to request access to the personal information we collect from you, details about how we have processed it, correct inaccuracies, or delete your personal information. You may also have the right to withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information. These rights may be limited in some circumstances by applicable law. To request to review, update, or delete your personal information, please visit helpfosteryouth.org/contact or email info@helpfosteryouth.org.