International Art of Living Foundation (the "Art of Living") respects the privacy rights of visitors to our website and is committed to protecting those rights. To support this commitment, we have adopted a Privacy Policy that guides how we collect, use, disclose, update and protect the information you provide online to the Art of Living.
Please read this Privacy Policy carefully before you use the Art of Living website. This Privacy Policy does not apply to information collected by Art of Living other than through its website.
Visitors to the Art of Living website from outside of Switzerland are advised that the Art of Living's Privacy Policy is intended to meet the laws and requirements of Switzerland, which may not necessarily be the same as the laws and regulations of your home country. Any information that you provide to the Art of Living online will be handled in accordance with the laws and regulations of Switzerland.
Contents
This Privacy Policy will inform you as to:
- Which websites are covered by the Privacy Policy
- What types of information (if any) may be collected from you and by what means
- How such information may be used and shared
- The consequences (if any) if you choose not to provide personal information
- The measures that the Art of Living takes to maintain data security, quality and integrity
- How you can confirm and, if necessary, change the personal information that the Art of Living maintains
- Where and how to ask questions or file complaints
Websites covered by the Privacy Policy
Please note that this Privacy Policy applies only to this website and other websites maintained by the Art of Living. This Privacy Policy does not apply to websites maintained by other companies or organizations to which we may link.
When you click on a hyperlink displayed on our website, you may be leaving the Art of Living's website and entering another website for which this Privacy Policy does not apply. You may not be specifically informed of this fact, although in most instances a new browser window will be opened when a hyperlink is redirecting you to a website which we do not operate or control. This may not always be the case, however. Therefore, before providing any personal information which may be requested from you, you should first verify the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or the hypertext transfer protocol (http) address displayed by your web browser to confirm whether or not you are still accessing a website operated by the Art of Living. If not, this Privacy Policy will not apply to your visit.
You should carefully review the privacy statements or policies of any other website that you visit or wish to send e-mail to because those privacy statements or policies will apply to your visit and e-mail sent to that site and may be very different from the Art of Living's Privacy Policy.
Our website is not intended for children under 13 years of age. No one under age 13 may provide any personal information on our websites, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under age 13. If you are under age 13, do not use or provide any information on this website, make any purchases through this website, use any interactive or public comment features of this website, or provide any information about yourself to us. If we learn that we have collected or received personal information from a child under age 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under age 13, please contact us at donations.support@artofliving.org.
Collection of Personal Information and Its Use and Purpose
Demographic and Aggregate Information
In order to provide you with the best possible experience on our website, the Art of Living may collect demographic and aggregate information from online visitors who access its websites. "Demographic information" is anonymous information such as age, gender and geographic location. "Aggregate information" is data about a group or category of services or users from which individual identities have been removed. Demographic and aggregate information is not considered personal information, as it does not permit the identification of an individual.
Online Applications and Donations
Some of our websites allow users to submit personal information in a certain capacity (e.g., course or volunteer applications or donations). Personal information collected in this capacity will be used solely for the purpose specified. For example, course application submissions will be used for the sole purpose of registering and informing participants of current and future Art of Living course offerings. Any financial information collected, such as credit card information, will not be disclosed except as necessary to complete the requested transaction and will be discarded after processing.
User Comments and E-mail
Our websites will sometimes invite users to provide us with their comments on our services or on certain events. Users who wish to provide us with their comments will sometimes have the option of also providing us with their name and e-mail address. We do not require users to provide us with such information, however. Comments provided to the Art of Living by users may be posted on our websites. Alongside such comments, we may also post the user's first name and last initial as well as the city and province which this user has indicated he or she is from. However, we will take measures to prevent such postings from containing any personal information.
If an online form or an e-mail submitted by a user contains personal information, we will only use such personal information to the extent necessary to respond to any comment or question from such user. We will limit access to such personal information and will keep such personal information in a secure system. Although most online forms and e-mail messages submitted by users are deleted after we respond, in certain cases hard copies or data extracts may be kept on file. Any such copy or any such information, to the extent it is personal, will also be stored in a secure location.
Cookies, Web Beacons and Log Files
Some of our sites use cookies. Cookies are small text files placed on your hard drive when you visit a website. These files identify your computer and record your preferences and other data about your visit so that when you return to the site, the site knows who you are and can personalize your visit. The cookies used on our websites are not linked to any personal information about you.
We use cookies to collect information so that we can determine how to improve our websites by seeing which areas, features and products are most popular, to personalize the website and make recommendations based on products you have examined while visiting our website and to improve the website experience. As noted, the information collected by the cookies we use is not personal information, as it is not identifiable to you specifically. As technology advances and cookies provide more functionality, we expect to utilize them in different ways. If so, we will update this Privacy Policy to identify such new uses of cookies.
Most browsers are automatically set to accept cookies. You can disable cookies or set your browser to alert you when cookies are being sent. However, some areas of our website may not function properly if you do so. There are many sources for additional information about Internet cookies, and we encourage anyone concerned about the use of cookies to do more research on the topic so you can make an informed decision about accepting them from any site.
The Art of Living also uses "web beacons" (also known as "web bugs," "action tags," "pixel trackers," or "clear GIFs"), which are small, graphic images on a web page, web-based document or in an e-mail message that are designed to allow us or a third party to collect certain information and monitor user activity on our sites. Web beacons are invisible to the user because they are typically very small (only 1-by-1 pixels) and have the same color as the background of the web page, document or e-mail message. We may use web beacons to collect non-personal information such as the IP address of the computer that the web beacon is sent to, the URL of the page the web beacon comes from, and the time it was activated (such as when you view the web page, advertisement or e-mail that contains the web beacon). Web beacons can be linked to personal information, but we do not use web beacons that link to personal information. We may permit third parties to place web beacons on our sites, but these web beacons are not linked to personal information either.
The Art of Living maintains log files, which contain Internet Protocol ("IP") addresses. An IP address is a numeric address that is assigned to your computer by your Internet Service Provider. We do not link IP addresses to personal information. In general, we only use log files to monitor traffic on our websites and to troubleshoot technical problems. In the event of abuse, however, we may block certain IP addresses.
Disclosure of Your Personal Information
We may disclose demographic and aggregated information about our users and information that does not identify any individual without restriction.
We may disclose personal information that we collect or you provide as described in this Privacy Policy:
- To our subsidiaries and affiliates.
- To contractors, service providers and other third parties we use to support our business and who are bound by contractual obligations to keep personal information confidential and use it only for the purposes for which we disclose it to them.
- To third parties to market their products or services to you if you have not opted out of these disclosures. We contractually require these third parties to keep personal information confidential and use it only for the purposes for which we disclose it to them.
- To fulfill the purpose for which you provide it.
- For any other purpose disclosed by us when you provide the information.
- With your consent.
We may also disclose your personal information:
- To comply with any court order, law or legal process, including to respond to any government or regulatory request.
- To enforce or apply our terms of use and other agreements, including for billing and collection purposes.
- If we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to protect the rights, property or safety of the Art of Living, our customers or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.
Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Personal Information
We strive to provide you with choices regarding the personal information you provide to us. We have created mechanisms to provide you with the following control over your information:
- Tracking Technologies and Advertising. You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when cookies are being sent. To learn how you can manage your Flash cookie settings, visit the Flash player settings page on Adobe's website. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this website may then be inaccessible or not function properly.
- Disclosure of Your Information for Third-Party Advertising. If you do not want us to share your personal information with unaffiliated or non-agent third parties for promotional purposes, you can opt-out by sending us an email at donations.support@artofliving.org.
- Promotional Offers from the Art of Living. If you do not wish to have your e-mail address or other contact information used by the Art of Living to promote our own or third parties' products or services, you can opt-out by sending us an e-mail stating your request to donations.support@artofliving.org. If we have sent you a promotional e-mail, you may send us a return e-mail asking to be omitted from future e-mail distributions.
- Targeted Advertising. If you do not want us to use information that we collect or that you provide to us to deliver advertisements according to our advertisers' target-audience preferences, you can opt-out by sending us an e-mail stating your request to donations.support@artofliving.org.
We do not control third parties' collection or use of your information to serve interest-based advertising. However, these third parties may provide you with ways to choose not to have your information collected or used in this way. You can opt out of receiving targeted ads from members of the Network Advertising Initiative ("NAI") on the NAI's website.
Accessing and Correcting Your Personal Information
You may send us an e-mail at donations.support@artofliving.org to request access to, correct or delete any personal information that you have provided to us. We cannot delete your personal information except by also deleting your user account. We may not accommodate a request to change information if we believe the change would violate any law or legal requirement or cause the information to be incorrect.
Safeguards to Protect Your Personal Information
The Art of Living maintains reasonable safeguards in an effort to ensure the security, integrity and privacy of the personal information we collect. We also have implemented reasonable security measures in an effort to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Personal information collected by the Art of Living is stored in secure operating environments that are not available to the public (e.g., locked rooms), and access to that information is limited to employees who need the information to provide you with our products or services.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information transmitted to our website. Any transmission of personal information is at your own risk. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the website.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to make changes in this Privacy Policy. If we make such changes, we will post the changes and change the date at the top of the policy. Please check back from time to time to ensure that you are aware of any changes in our privacy practices.
Where and how to ask questions or file complaints
If you have any questions, complaints, or comments regarding this Privacy Policy, please send an e-mail to the following address: donations.support@artofliving.org.
