This Privacy Statement sets forth the practices of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) regarding the collection and use of information relating to the SME website and other activities of SME. SME created its policy with a fundamental respect for the rights to privacy of our members, customers and visitors. Some pages of the website may be accessed only by members of SME, SME Committees or affiliates, although most of the website may be accessed by all who visit the website. Information Collection and Use When registering for our educational events or trade shows, using our website, ordering products and signing up for certain selected services (such as free subscriptions), you may be asked for information about yourself, including but not limited to contact information (such as name, e-mail address, mailing address and phone number) or demographic information (such as job title and purchasing responsibilities, company information and professional certification). If you sign up to become a member of SME, you are asked for personal information such as your education level, interests and date of birth. This information is used to better understand our membership and is not disclosed to outside organizations. Some of our publications, products and services are free to subscribers who meet certain demographic criteria. Independent auditors may need to certify the eligibility of these subscribers. To do that, we may ask you for information (such as mother's maiden name), which we disclose to the auditors strictly for audit verification purposes. For our services that require payment (such as certain events, products and subscriptions), we collect credit card information (such as account name, number and expiration date), which is used for billing purposes only, and is not otherwise shared, except with a reputable third-party processing vendor. SME uses secure socket layer (SSL) technology when you make purchases or send credit card and login information to SME. We offer some interactive and community features such as discussion boards, webcasts and user profiles. Personal information sent or posted via such features becomes public information for which we are not responsible. We have features through which you may submit information to us (such as our feedback forms). Requests for service, support or information may be forwarded as needed to best respond to a specific request. Under some circumstances, we may retain e-mails and other information sent to us for our internal administrative purposes, and to help us better serve customers. From time to time we may invite you to provide information via surveys or contests. Participation in these surveys or contests is completely voluntary and therefore you have a choice whether to disclose requested contact information (such as name and mailing address) and demographic information (such as zip code or job title). In addition to other uses set forth in this policy, contact information collected in connection with surveys and contests is used to notify the winners and award prizes and may be shared with sponsors of such surveys or contests. Automatically collected data Web servers automatically collect information about visitors, and ours does as well. This information includes the date, time and navigation history of the session, as well as your browser type, and IP address. This information does not contain anything that can identify you personally. Automatically collected data may be used to deliver content specific to your interests and to honor your preferences. We use "cookies," (a "cookie" is a piece of data stored on the user's hard drive containing information about the user). Cookies make it possible for us to reduce the number of times you are required to login or to tailor the website to fit your interests. Most Internet browsers allow you to erase cookies from your computer hard drive, block cookies or receive a warning before a cookie is stored. Please refer to the instructions or help screen of your browser to learn how it handles cookies. Some of our business affiliates may use cookies on our sites in ads or promotions. We have no access to or control over these business affiliates' cookies, so we urge you to read their privacy policies for information. Information about you that may be stored in our database We may check the information you have provided during the shopping process or via any of our forms, e-mail, forums or discussion groups against any information we have about you in our customer database. We do this to ensure that we maintain the most current and accurate information about you as a valued customer. Our database may contain your name, title, affiliation, industry classification, address, phone and fax numbers, and e-mail address, if you provide them. We may also collect additional information about you including but not limited to: site registration, member ID numbers and your participation with SME (magazine subscriptions, offices, committees, councils, boards or task forces on which you serve or have served, membership status, meetings attended, products purchased, events attended, etc.). How we use information about you Automatically collected data such as cookies and log files help us understand the interests of our visitors in order to enhance their experience on our sites. We also use this information for our internal security audit log, trend analysis and system administration, and to gather broad demographic information about our user base for aggregate use. We may use information you have provided to process transactions you request. We may also use this information to inform you of new products and upcoming events that may be of interest to you, based on your participation in SME activities, purchases of products — or interests in technologies you have indicated. You may choose not to receive these communications. We may combine demographic information you have supplied with site usage data to produce general profiles, in aggregate form that cannot identify you personally, about our members, customers' and visitors and their preferences in the content of the site and advertising. We use aggregate demographic information about our members, customers and visitors to improve our service, for marketing purposes and/or industry reporting purposes. Shared data We partner with other third parties to provide specific services. For example, exposition registration services may be provided by a third party. These third parties are not allowed to use information about you except for the purpose of providing these services. We may share aggregated or composite information that does not identify you personally with our advertisers, exhibitors and business affiliates. SME may be required to provide information about any of its customers or prospective customers to law enforcement or government agencies. Your Choices Concerning Access, Correction and Deletion of Your Personal Data We provide you with reasonable access to the personal information that you have provided through your use of our services. You may update, correct, or delete your account information and preferences at any time by accessing your account settings from our website. Please note that while any changes you make will be reflected in our user database within a reasonable period of time, we may retain all information you submit for backups, archiving, prevention of fraud and abuse, analytics, or where we otherwise reasonably believe that we have a legitimate reason to do so. If you wish to access or amend any personal information we hold about you, or request that we delete any information about you, you may contact us as set forth in the “Contact, questions, comments, complaints” section. You may decline to share certain personal information with us, in which case we may not be able to provide to you some of the features and services that we offer. Security We utilize appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure a reasonable level of security. When our registration/order form asks users to enter sensitive information (such as credit card number and/or social security number), that information is encrypted and is protected utilizing SSL encryption. Links This website contains links to other sites. Please be aware that SME cannot be responsible for the privacy practices of other sites. We urge you to read the privacy statements of websites that collect personally identifiable information. Students and children SME will not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under 16 years of age, unless it is necessary to respond to a one-time request. Once the request has been answered, SME will delete the requesting child's personally identifiable information. Preferences, permission, opt-out If you wish to be excluded from marketing by SME via mail and/or e-mail, phone or fax, please contact SME at 800.733.4763 or e-mail privacy@sme.org to make that change to your account. Updates to this privacy statement SME may, in its sole discretion, update this statement at any time by posting the amended statement on the website, and it shall be effective upon posting. Contact, questions, comments, complaints If you would like to communicate with SME regarding privacy issues, or have questions, comments or complaints regarding this website or its policy practices, or if you feel that SME is not abiding by our privacy policy statement, please contact SME at 800.733.4763 or e-mail privacy@sme.org.
