The Ask Your Lawmaker (AYL) privacy policy describes how AYL treats personal information when you use the AYL website. AYL is committed to bringing you information tailored to your individual needs but we also recognize the importance of protecting the privacy of your personally identifiable information. In adopting this privacy policy our intent is to balance our legitimate business interests in collecting and using personally identifiable information to improve our service to you - and your reasonable expectations of privacy.

Personal Information

• Non-Account Activity: You can listen to audio on AYL and explore the site without having an AYL Account.
• Account-Related Activity: Certain other activities on AYL - asking questions, voting on questions and posting comments - require you to have an AYL Account. We ask for some personal information when you create an AYL Account, such as your name, e-mail address, and zip code. These items are mandatory. We also ask for information about your age, gender, household income and education level – these are optional. The more information you provide, the better we are able to customize your experience on the site. Your email address and a password selected by you will be used to protect your account from unauthorized access.
• Usage Information. We may record information about your usage, such as when and how long you use AYL, the channels, groups, and favorites you subscribe to, the contacts you communicate with, and the frequency and size of data transfers, as well as information you display or click on in AYL (including UI elements, settings, and other information). If you are logged in, we may associate that information with your account.
Uses
• If you submit personally identifiable information to us through the AYL site, we use your personal information to operate, maintain, and provide to you the features and functionality of the AYL site, as well as provide special personalized features to you.
• Your account name (not your email address) is displayed to other Users when you submit questions or comments through the AYL site. Any questions or comments that you submit to the AYL site may be redistributed through the internet and other media channels, and may be viewed by the general public. We will give you the opportunity to decide whether you wish to publicly display your full name with your questions, as well as the option to be notified if and when your question is answered by a lawmaker. You can also let us know whether you wish to be contacted to participate in live news programming for our network of public radio stations.
• In order to provide services free of charge, we display advertisements. AYL delivers targeted advertisements on behalf of advertisers. Advertisers give us an advertisement and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (for example, females over 25 years old). We take the advertisement and display it to users meeting that criterion. In this process, the advertiser never has access to individual account information. AYL advertisers or Web sites that have links on our site may also collect personally identifiable information directly from you. The information practices of companies collecting data on our site or Web sites linked to AYL are not covered by this privacy statement. We do not control the privacy policies of our advertisers, sponsors or other sites or businesses to which we provide hyperlinks or access. Please visit the sites of these businesses to review their privacy policies.
• We do not use your email address or other personally identifiable information to send commercial or marketing messages without your consent or except as part of a specific program or feature for which you will have the ability to opt-in or opt-out. We may, however, use your email address without further consent for non-marketing or administrative purposes (such as notifying you of major AYL site changes or for customer service purposes).
• We use both your personally identifiable information and certain non-personally-identifiable information (such as anonymous user usage data, cookies, IP addresses, browser type, clickstream data, etc.) to improve the quality and design of the AYL site and to create new features, promotions, functionality, and services by storing, tracking, and analyzing user preferences and trends.
• AYL allows for the RSS syndication and podcast of all of its public content within the website.
• We use cookies, clear gifs, and log file information to: (a) store information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit the AYL site; (b) provide custom, personalized content and information; (c) monitor the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns; (d) monitor aggregate metrics such as total number of visitors, pages viewed, click-throughs, etc.
• Except as stated in this privacy policy or at the time of collection, a user's personally identifiable information will not be transferred to a party outside AYL unless notice is given at the time of collection or prior to transfer. AYL may also disclose account information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our User Agreement or may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) AYL’s rights or property, other AYL users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities.

Data Security

• We have in place physical, electronic and managerial procedures to protect the information we collect online. However, as effective as these measures are, no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that the information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the internet.
Your Choices
• You may, of course, decline to submit personally identifiable information through the AYL site, in which case you can still listen to audio and explore the AYL site, but AYL may not be able to provide certain services to you.
• You may update or correct your personal profile information and email preferences at any time by visiting your account profile page (link).
• You may request deletion of your AYL account by emailing us at support@askyourlawmaker.org.
Effective Date of this Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy is effective as of November 1, 2007

More Information:
If you have additional questions, please contact us at any time at support@askyourlawmaker.org.
Or write to us at:
AYL Privacy
110 Maryland Avenue, NE, Suite 201, Washington D.C. 20002