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What information is collected and what is shared?

Privacy and Security Policy

SafetyLit is an independent, not-for-profit organization and has no financial interest in your private information. SafetyLit is committed to protecting individual and institutional privacy and to securing the personal information (voluntarily, automatically and involuntarily) made available to us when you visit our website. To the best of our ability, SafetyLit complies with current requirements for privacy and security established by Australian, Canadian, European Union, United States agencies and other entities. This page outlines our privacy and security policies as they apply to SafetyLit Foundation websites (but not to third party sites and applications that SafetyLit uses for example our pages on, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) where other privacy policies will apply.

This privacy statement of policy describes what information is made available to SafetyLit and third parties when you visit SafetyLit.org and how the SafetyLit Foundation uses and stores that information.

Please visit this page now and then to learn of any changes to the SafetyLit security and privacy policy. If there are any changes that may increase the risk to users personal information an alert will be posted to the SafetyLit homepage.

Who Is the "Owner" of the Data We Collect?

All web user data is the property of the SafetyLit Foundation, Incorporated, a not-for-profit organization registered with the United States government and with the State of California. For more information about the owner and this privacy policy contact the following email address: privacy@safetylit.org

Your Visit to SafetyLit Websites

Your visit to this SafetyLit website is private and secure. We do not collect any personally identifiable information from you or about you unless you choose to explicitly provide it to us (such as to subscribe to the SafetyLit email update notice -- more on this will be discussed below). We do, however, collect some data about your visit to our website to help us to better understand public use of the site and to make it more useful to our visitors. This page describes to information that is automatically collected and stored. The amount of automatically collected information is no greater than that collected by all websites and is far less than most.

What Type of Information SafetyLit Collects and Why

When you visit any website, certain information is automatically collected to "web logs". SafetyLit collects and temporarily stores the following information about your visit:

  • The name of the domain or internet service provider you use to access the internet;
  • The date, time, and duration of your visit to our website;
  • The pages and documents you viewed on our website;
  • The name of any external search engine such as Bing or Google you used;
  • The search terms you used to find this website;
  • The URL of the website you visited prior to visiting this site;
  • The query terms you used if you searched for literature on SafetyLit;
  • The type and version of your Web browser and operating system; and
  • Your location at the time of your visit, down to the nation and state or province

Many other websites automatically collect and retain much more information about visitors even when they have requested "do not track". Although some websites silently collect your detailed demographic information, record the site you visit next, and other personal information; SafetyLit does not collect this information from anyone.

The information collected by SafetyLit is used to measure the number of visitors to the various sections of our site and improve organization, coverage, system performance or to identify problem areas. This information is not used for associating search terms or patterns of site navigation with individual users. SafetyLit periodically deletes its web logs. On occasion, SafetyLit may provide aggregated information to third party entities it contracts with for the purposes of research analysis. Aggregated data cannot be linked back to an individual user. Further, if there are few users from a particular nation or geographic area we will pool those visitors with others from nearby nations to assure that individuals are masked. We share this aggregated location data with potential donors and with our agency partners.

Google Analytics (with anonymized IP)

When you browse through the SafetyLit website, we use Google Analytics software to gather and temporarily store a variety of information about your visit. For example, we gather information about how many visiters downloaded the Weekly Update Bulletin PDF file, performed a basic or Boolean literature search, etc. However, this information cannot be used to identify you as an individual.

We do not associate any of the data we collect with you as an individual. Instead, we aggregate this data from all visits in order to improve our website and provide a better user experience to our visitors. The aggregate data is available only to SafetyLit web managers and other designated staff who require this information to perform their duties. It is retained only for as long as needed for proper analysis. While Google Analytics is used by some other sites to serve customized advertisements, SafetyLit uses this tool only to efficiently measure visitor information. The SafetyLit website contains no advertising. The Google Analytics privacy policy is available at https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/.

Third Party and Social Networking Websites

Websites such as Add-This, Facebook, Twitter, etc. offer to webmasters the ability for visitors to other websites (such as this one) the ability to place an icon, link, or widget to enable SafetyLit visitors to easily select and post material from SafetyLit to these other websites. Unfortunately, these tools may also allow SafetyLit visitors to be tracked by these third-party commercial websites even if they do not wish to interact with these third-party sites. Thus, SafetyLit no longer offers these shortcuts to our visitors.

How SafetyLit Uses Cookies

Except when you specifically request it (see My SafetyLit below) the SafetyLit website will not place "cookies" on your computer. If you want to participate in the My SafetyLit service it is necessary for us to store a "persistent cookie" on your computer. This will allow you to save time by calling a saved search of the web-version of the weekly update and limit the items you view to selected categories. You will be asked to set a user name and password to gain access to this additional optional service. These usernames and passwords are stored in an encrypted form and cannot be retrieved by anyone including SafetyLit staff. Thus, if you forget your username or password you must sign up for the service again.

How to Opt Out or Disable Cookies

Unless you use the My SafetyLit option you will not ever have a temporary or permanent cookie placed on your computer. If you do not use the My SafetyLit option for 90 days the persistent cookie will be removed from your machine the next time you visit SafetyLit.org.

Personally Identifiable Information

You are not required to share personal information to visit the SafetyLit website. You are required to share limited information to subscribe to the weekly email message that alerts you when a new Weekly Update Bulletin has been posted to the SafetyLit website.

SafetyLit requires an email address to deliver the weekly email messages to subscribers. Subscriber e-mail addresses will never be shared with anyone, not even with the agencies that provide our support.

Subscribers are required to provide information about their nationality and (if in the United States) the state in which they reside. This is done for two reasons: 1) our supporting agencies like to have a summary of this information included in SafetyLit status reports; and 2) requiring this sort of input action on the part of subscribers helps reduce attempts to subscribe by robots. As further protection against automated robot subscriptions, we use Google reCAPTCHA to make robot registrations less likely. SafetyLit uses other mechanisms to assure that subscribers are not plagued by prank subscriptions in their name. SafetyLit subscriptions require that a potential subscriber must reply to a confirmation message before their address is added to the mailing list.

The nationality information will also be occasionally used in publicly circulated reports but never in a way that will allow the identification of individual subscribers.

We request your full name when subscribing to the SafetyLit email service. Although this information is not required, it is very important. We often receive requests to change a subscribers status or email address. Many times the requester's e-mail address does not match any subscriber's address because internal changes at their organization have altered their address format. In this case, the subscribers name is an invaluable way to facilitate fulfilling the subscribers request.

Subscriber names will never be shared with anyone, ever.

Data Storage and Server Location and Security

All SafetyLit web files and user data are stored in the United States of America under contract with Pair Networks of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pair Networks regularly updates the security of the software on its servers to help assure that no malware will affect visitors to SafetyLit.

For site security purposes and to assure that this website remains available to all users, we use special software programs to monitor traffic and to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or to otherwise cause damage.

Legally Compelled Disclosure

SafetyLit may be legally required to comply with demands for user data from law enforcement or government agencies. The limited nature of the data we collect and our web-log deletion policies severely limit the usefulness of any data we are forced to provide.

What Happens If SafetyLit Is Hacked By Scoundrels?

Other than the email addresses of Weekly Update subscribers, SafetyLit collects no personalized information. In the unlikely event that the (encrypted) email address list is stolen all subscribers will be notified as soon as the problem is identified.

Last reviewed: 1 July 2019