Privacy Policy

The Soaring Society of America, Inc. (SSA) treats the issue of privacy very seriously. It will not sell, reveal, or share its membership roster or any other personal information concerning its members or non-member customers at the SSA online store with any entity not a member of, or associated with, the SSA, except as may be required by law or regulation.

Personal information (e.g., name, address, telephone number, e-mail address) may be required as a condition of membership in the Society. Personal information, including credit card numbers and other data, are required from members and non-members when purchasing goods in the Society’s online store.

For purposes of releasing personal contact information of SSA members within the society and its affiliates, such data (other than credit card numbers) will be available to the following authorized individuals or organizations only:

• SSA Directors, SSA officials or officers (including SSA headquarters staff, SSA State Governors, State Recordkeepers, SSA Chapter officers, officers of Affiliates (such as the National Soaring Museum) and Divisions, and other SSA members in all categories including Business (except as noted below).

Authorized individuals and organizations may use such data for advertising and/or the providing of products, services, and information to members, as well as fundraising, and other such purposes as determined by the SSA Board of Directors. Individual SSA members may obtain contact information about other members either via the online SSA member locator (accessible only to other SSA members through encrypted access), or by direct inquiry to the SSA office.

As of May 25th, 2018, member locator and other personal information of members covered by European GDPR policies will be restricted unless specifically permitted by the member. Furthermore, e-mails and newsletters, other than membership notices, will not be sent to such members or subscribers without their specific permission.

SSA members may elect, by notifying SSA in writing, to restrict the use of their personal information by the SSA, its members and affiliates, to official SSA business only (see administrative supplement). Members covered by European GDPR policies will be restricted unless permission is granted by the member.

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.