Who we are
We’re a community of a wide variety of “unprogrammed” Friends (Quaker) Meetings in parts of Mexico and the western USA. Our book of Faith and Practice describes the beliefs of Friends, PYM’s structures and processes, and the spiritual foundation of these processes and of our way of worship. We’re a year-round community, and we have a summer gathering we call “PYM Annual Session.” Western Friend is the official publication of Quakers in Pacific, North Pacific, and Intermountain Yearly Meetings. You can read more about Pacific Yearly Meeting here. Our main website is http://www.pacificyearlymeeting.org.
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 with spam detection.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF / GPS) included. Visitors to the website could download and extract location data from images on the website.
Documents
Documents with personally identifiable information (“PII”, like emails, addresses and phone numbers) should be explicitly approved for posting on the website by anyone with PII reflected in the document. PII in website documents presents an exposure of this information to anyone visiting our website (manually or programmatically).
Contact forms
We have various contact forms throughout the website. In addition to sending an email to the appropriate contact with the information submitted, the information provided will be stored, along with the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help with spam detection.
Cookies
This site uses cookies as a default capability of our platform (WordPress). Cookies are small files placed on the user’s computer. Among other things, these allow us to see the IP addresses of visitors and give us information about who is using the website. These cookies can be removed manually by the user using standard browser functions.
If you have an account and you log in to this site (applicable only to registrants for Annual Session), 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 may set up 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 on the website, 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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Pacific Yearly Meeting does not collect usage or other information from users accessing third-party sites from our website.
Registration for Yearly Meeting programs and events
The website houses the registration system for the Annual Session of Pacific Yearly Meeting. These data areis retained throughout the registration and post-registration period to aid the committees of the Yearly Meeting involved in planning, coordinating and evaluating the Annual Session. This information includes personal data like names, home and email addresses, phone numbers entered by registrants. Access to thesethis data areis restricted to select people directly involved in coordinating the Annual Session event and limited to the information required for each purpose. This includes the Registrar, members of the Arrangements and Ministry and Oversight committees, the Statistical Clerk, the appointed technical individual(s) who support the site and other individuals delegated by the yearly meeting to coordinate youth programs.
Membership data and online directory
The Yearly Meeting has plans to implement an online directory, which would house all of the relevant information found in monthly and quarterly meeting directories, plus information on the yearly meeting committee members, officers, representatives and liaisons. This policy will apply to the PYM Online Directory. Data within the directory is to be restricted for access by authorized users only within the authorized level and span of access. For example, one (or two) authorized delegate(s) per monthly meeting would have access to all of the directory information for that meeting, plus more limited information on the Quarterly and Yearly meeting clerks, committees and so on. Authorized monthly, quarterly and yearly meeting delegates would be able to maintain and distribute directory information for their respective constituencies.
The data gathered and managed for the PYM directory will only be used for that and related and approved directory publishing purposes.
How we protect Personal Data
We maintain appropriate data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures to protect against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure or destruction of your personal data, including usernames, passwords, transaction information and other data stored on our sites. We will delete or de-identify your online personal data when it is no longer needed for its original stated purpose.
Your privacy rights
As an individual you may:
- Ask us to provide you with information regarding the personal data housed on the site pertaining specifically to you.
- Provide information to rectify, update or complement inaccurate or incomplete personal data concerning you.
- Request that we delete all online personal data identifiably pertaining specifically to you.
- Notify the Pacific Yearly Meeting Presiding Clerk or Ministry and Oversight Committee if you are unhappy with the way we have treated your personal data or any related privacy request you have made of us (see https://www.pacificyearlymeeting.org/contact-us/).
Analytics
In order to better serve the users of our site, we use analytics software to see what browser, operating system, and devices our users are logging in with. Analytics also tracks geographical location of users, however your specific IP address is anonymized so your personal location is not tracked.
Who we share your data with
We do not share any information about our site visitors with outside organizations. All information collected is explicitly for the use of Pacific Yearly Meeting and its constituent Quarterly Meetings, Monthly Meetings, and Worship Groups.
How long we retain your data
True to Quaker tradition, we do our best to maintain accurate records of all our site activity. This information is retained indefinitely. Any registration information collected via forms or surveys is retained up to three years online, then only retained offline as needed for PYM planning purposes.
Currently we do not offer commenting or discussion on our sites. Should we enable this capability in the future, it will offer standard WordPress functionality: 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 who register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All logged-in 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
Currently only administrators of our sites have accounts on them, not site visitors. 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.
We collect registration and survey information through our site. TheseThis data areis not shared publicly online. We will remove any submissions after they have been used if requested via email. This information may be retained offline indefinitely for planning and administrative purposes.
Where we send your data
All data we collect areis explicitly for use by Pacific Yearly Meeting and areis not shared with other organizations.
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Currently comments are disabled, so this will not affect visitors.
Your contact information
Visitors submitting comments or creating user accounts on our site will share their IP and email address. Access to IP and email addresses is currently restricted to administrators of the site.
Contact information submitted through registration and survey forms is only used internally by our planning committees and is not shared online or publicly.
In the future this information may be included in a member directory, available only to members of PYM. Contact information may be excluded or removed from these directories upon receipt of an email request.
Additional information
How we protect your data
The PYM Communications Committee and web hosting providers do their best to protect our online resources from malicious usage or unauthorized intrusion. Our hosting company follows best accepted security procedures, and we do our best to keep abreast of current security concerns and to install defenses against hackers, spam, and other efforts to compromise our sites.
What data breach procedures we have in place
If we discover that our sites or data have been compromised, we will notify all registered users of the site immediately by email of that attack. Because these accounts currently include only administrators of the site, other site visitors should not be at risk or be affected. We will also publicly notify site visitors of the situation through a post on the site within a week of the discovery of any data breach.
Include link to data breach policy
What third parties we receive data from
We do not collect or utilize data from outside organizations on our site, except anonymous analytics data. As a courtesy, we offer links to other sites (mainly Quaker organizations) sites for our site visitors, though no data is exchanged with those other sites.
We may collect and share membership information with our constituent monthly meetings and worship groups for planning purposes and to create a member directory. This information is not shared outside of Pacific Yearly Meeting, and any information included may be removed following an email request by those identified.
What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data
We do not utilize any automated decision making, or advertisement suggestion software.