Legal & Privacy

Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society is protecting your privacy. Please be assured that we treat your privacy as we treat our own. 

We do not share your information with any unaffiliated groups without your EXPLICIT permission.

We may share your personal information with the following affiliated groups:

Affiliated Third Parties – for example, Democracy In Action – for the sole purpose of helping us do our work by facilitating large distributions of emails. These groups do not share your personal information or use it for any purpose other than as instructed by us.

In addition, only with your explicit permission, we pass along certain parts of your information to the following groups, as is standard practice (for more specific information please see below):
        - With the President of the United States, legislators and news publications and other targets when you choose to use our email tool to send them    messages.
        - With the President, legislators, news publications, and the general public when you sign petitions or complete surveys.
   
Please review this privacy policy periodically because we modify it from time to time.

This privacy policy was last revised in November 2009.

Each time you visit this Site or provide us with information through the Site, you are accepting practices described in the privacy policy in effect at that time.

You are also accepting our specific rules or terms of use, which may be posted on specific sections of the Site, including areas for making donations, signing petitions and sending emails.

This privacy policy applies to transactions and activities in which you engage and to data gathered only on the Site. This privacy policy does not apply to any other website or any offline contact between oceanfutures.org and any other entity or offline contact between you and oceanfutures.org.

Online Activism
In certain cases, we may enable you to send individual e-mails to the President, legislators, and other targets as well as Letters-to-the-Editor to various news publications, through our website.

These messages are sent in your name, with your e-mail address as the return address and your full name and contact information is provided as part of the submission. These messages will only be sent out under your name as you approve them on an individual basis using our email tool. This is necessary for your message to be effective, and in the case of many government officials it is required.  You are solely responsible for the specific message(s) you send using our email tool.

Petitions and Surveys
In certain cases (present or in the future), we may enable you to sign petitions and surveys.  For petitions and surveys you've signed or completed, we treat your name, city, state, and comments as public information—for example, we may provide compilations of petitions, with your comments, to the President and legislators, other entities, or to the press.

We will not make your street address publicly available, but we may transmit it to members of Congress and to the President as part of a petition. This is a standard industry practice in such situations.

In no such case will we disclose your email address or phone number, without your permission.  However, we may make your comments, along with only your first name, city and state available to the press and public online.

"Tell Your Friends" Pages and Postcards
To forward an article, postcard or action alert you must enter your name, your email address and the email address(es) of anyone you are sending it to. Ocean Futures Society includes your name and email address when we send your message.  We will not keep your friends information on record nor will we contact your friend until he or she decides to become a member of Ocean Futures Society and opt-in to our communications. If a user elects to use our referral service for informing a friend about our Site, we ask them for the friend's name and email address. Ocean Futures Society will automatically send the friend a one-time email inviting them to visit the Site. Ocean Futures Society stores this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email.

Financial Donations
If you choose to make a donation to Ocean Futures Society, your credit card information will be used only for this transaction through our secure online payment system.  Ocean Futures Society does not retain credit card information.
Federal law requires us to report to the IRS on our tax returns (form 990) the name and address for each Ocean Futures Society contributor who gives more than $5000 during each calendar year.  However, when the form 990 is published publicly, as is common practice, no private information such as, name and address of the contributor is made public

Children
If you are under the age of 13, we require your parent’s or guardian's consent before you can provide personal information to us. Also, if you are ever unsure about anything you are reading or seeing on this site, ask your parent or guardian for assistance. Children registering with Ocean Futures Society will never be asked to disclose personal information beyond First Name, email address and birth date. Visitors under 18 years of age should not make donations or use the oceanfutures.org email and lobbying tool. A parent may review their child’s information on record with our organization by sending written request including phone number to:
Registration

Ocean Futures Society

325 Chapala Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

An Ocean Futures employee will contact you regarding your request.

Cookies
Some parts of the Site are password-protected. We use cookies (cookies reside on your computer and are under the control of your browser) to enable you to return to password-protected areas of the website without having to re-enter your password.

If you wish to disable these cookies, the help portion of the tool bar on most browsers will tell you how do that. If you set your browser to disable cookies, however, you may not be able to access certain parts of this Site.

Data Tracking
In order to better serve our members, we use cookies and periodically analyze web logs. We may also use third-party services such as Google Analytics. This helps us understand traffic patterns and know if there are problems with our website. We may also use embedded images in emails to track open rates for our mailings, so that we can tell which mailings appeal most to Ocean Futures Society members.

URLs contained in emails may contain an ID that enables us to correctly identify the person who takes an action using a web page. We use these URLs to simplify the process of signing petitions and filling out surveys.

We may occasionally present a shortened URL that references a longer URL which contains an id—we do this to simplify the display, to prevent links from becoming broken when copied, and to ensure compatibility with email programs which do not handle long URLs. When a shortened URL is displayed in an email, you will see the full URL in the browser's address bar when you access the page.

Links to Other Websites
Ocean Futures Society may provide links to third party web sites, and other web sites may provide links to our Site. Third party web sites operate according to their own terms of use and privacy policies

Ocean Futures Society has no control over such third party web sites, and by using this Site, you acknowledge and agree that Ocean Futures Society is not responsible for the availability of such third party sites, and does not endorse and is not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products or other materials on or available from such sites.

You further acknowledge and agree that Ocean Futures Society will not be responsible or liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage or loss caused or alleged to be caused by or in connection with use of or reliance on any content, advertising, products, or other materials on or available from such sites.

Copyright
Unless otherwise stated, Ocean Futures Society has the copyright to all video, images and articles hosted at http://www.oceanfutures.org. This also includes copyright for all materials originating on the Site and made viral through any social networking sites. 

All Media related to Jean-Michel Cosuteau Ocean Adventures is a co-production of Jean-Michel Cousteau's Ocean Futures Society and KQED and therefore copyright both both parties.

Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society, including the Manfish logo are internationally registered trademarks of Ocean Futures Society, Inc.

Please contact the following for permission to reproduce materials on this Site:

For articles and text, please contact Holly Lohuis at 805-899-8899 X124 or hlohuis@oceanfutures.org

For video, please contact Jim Knowlton at 805-899-8899 X123 or jknowlton@oceanfutures.org

For images, please contact Carrie Vonderhaar at 805-899-8899 X105 or cvonderhaar@oceanfutures.org

We expressly forbid the use of any Ocean Futures Society material appearing on this site for:
- Personal or corporate gain except by express permission from Ocean Future Society
- Political party advertising or the suggestion of endorsement by Ocean Futures Society of any candidate for public office.
- Any suggestion of Ocean Futures Society endorsement of a product or policy where such endorsement has not explicitly been made by Ocean Futures Society in writing.
- Any suggestion of Ocean Futures Society endorsement of violence or improper behavior as determined by Ocean Futures Society.

Changes to Legal and Privacy
Ocean Futures Society may revise or amend this policy at any time at our sole discretion. If we make any substantive changes in the way we collect or use personally identifying information provided by users, we will post a prominent announcement on our web site home page and post the changes on this page.

We will never change our policies and practices to make them less protective of user information collected prior to the effective date of any changes without the consent of affected users. We encourage users to visit this page periodically to review our current policy.

Contact
If you have any questions about this privacy statement, your personal information, or the practices of this Site, please email contact@oceanfutures.org.