Personal Genetics Education & Dialogue (PGED) is a program of the President and Fellows of Harvard College (“Harvard”) based in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS) to raise awareness and inspire curiosity, dialogue, and reflection about genetics. Our website address is https://www.pged.org. As used in this Privacy Policy, the words “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to PGED as well as Harvard. Please contact us at pged@pged.med.harvard.edu with any questions regarding our privacy policy.
Privacy Statement
PGED acknowledges the importance of privacy to its users. To that end, we have adopted the following policy with regard to the collection, use, and dissemination of personal information requested from visitors to this site. Personal information is information associated with a user’s name or personal identity. We are providing this policy below so that you may understand the terms and conditions associated with the provision of any personal information to us. Please note, however, that this policy has been developed with the recognition that Internet technologies continue to develop and evolve rapidly, and that such changes may require us to alter our Privacy Policy. Any such alterations will not affect our general commitment to the protection of our visitors’ privacy. We will post any changes to our Privacy Policy on this page. Your continued use of this Website constitutes acceptance of such terms and policies.
General Statement
You may visit our website without identifying yourself or revealing any personally identifiable information. However, certain transactions that you choose to engage in on this site will require your submission of personal information, including, but not limited to, newsletter mailing list requests, survey responses, or event/programming registration. As a general rule, we will not sell, swap, rent, or otherwise disclose to any third party any such personal information for commercial purposes. Information will be utilized only for the general purpose stated. We may disclose the information to our employees, consultants, agents, collaborators and service providers who have a legitimate need to know the information. We reserve the right to disclose this information under special circumstances, including disclosures required by law, court order or circumstances under which disclosure, in our sole discretion, is necessary to protect our legal rights, including intellectual property rights.
Usage Information Collected and Use of Information
We may collect other information about our users that is not connected with any specific personal identity, such as data about usage and service operation. The following summarizes the types of information that we may collect.
System Information, IP Addresses and Referrers
When you connect to our website, our web server may record the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer you are using, information about your browser and operating system, date and time of access and the internet address and page which linked you to our site. We use such information to help diagnose problems with our servers, to administer and improve our website, and to generate aggregate statistical reports that analyze general user information and demographics. Unless required by legal process, we do not link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable. This means that user sessions may be tracked by IP address, but a user’s identity remains anonymous.
In addition, we ordinarily do not disclose to third parties site usage by individual IP addresses, but may do so in very limited circumstances when complying with law or legal process, working with consultants assisting us in fixing or improving our site, or in monitoring and improving the security of our network.
Cookies
Cookies are small files that are stored on your computer (unless you block them). We use cookies to understand and save your preferences for future visits and compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future. We may contract with third-party service providers to assist us in better understanding our site visitors. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help us conduct and improve our business.
Mailing Lists
Our mailing lists use the Intuit Mailchimp platform, which may have access to information you provide when you sign up for a PGED mailing list or interact with emails from such a mailing list. Intuit’s use of such information is subject to its own privacy policy.
Third-Party Cookies
Cookies may be set by an organization other than PGED.org. These “third-party cookies” may, for example, originate from websites such as YouTube, X, Facebook, or other social media services for which PGED.org has implemented “plug-ins.” Since the cookie policies of these sites change over time, you should determine their policies by visiting the privacy policy pages of these sites directly.
You may disable cookies through your individual browser options. If you would like to learn more about cookies please refer to the following website: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/
External Links
The PGED website contains links to other independently run Web sites within the Harvard network and to some sites outside both the “hms.edu” and “harvard.edu” domains that are not controlled by Harvard and are not covered by this Privacy Policy, nor that of any other Harvard school or unit. Neither PGED nor Harvard are responsible for the privacy practices, security or content of such Web sites.
Users Located in the European Economic Area
If you are located in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, or Norway (the “European Economic Area”), please click here for additional information about ways that certain Harvard schools, centers, units, and controlled entities may collect, use, and share information about you.
Children
We do not intentionally collect personally identifiable information about children age 13 or younger. If you suspect that we have personally identifiable information about your child, please notify us immediately so that we may remove this information from our database.
Security Precautions
This site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Internet communications, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure. While PGED remains committed to protecting the privacy of our users, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems. We do so by using secure technology, privacy protection controls, and restrictions on employee access; however, we make no representations regarding the veracity of such measures.
Embedded Content
Pages and resources on this site may include embedded content, including but not limited to videos, images, and articles. 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. We are not engaged in and have no responsibility for any such data collection, all of which may be subject to such third party sites’ own privacy policies. Please contact us at pged@pged.med.harvard.edu with any questions regarding our privacy policy.
Last updated 5 September 2024