OUR ONLINE PRIVACY POLICY

We at WhiteHouse.gov are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your visits to this website. Outlined below is our online privacy policy. If you have questions about this policy, please let us know.

Collection and disclosure of information: To ensure we are able to communicate effectively with visitors to our web site, we collect some information that can be directly associated with a specific person. We call this "Personal Information," and it includes, by way of illustration, names, addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.

We collect Personal Information from eligible individuals who affirmatively request to receive e-mail or other services from us. We collect this Personal Information in order to provide these eligible individuals with timely information via e-mail regarding events, resources and issues.

It is our general policy not to make Personal Information available to anyone other than our employees, staff, and agents.

Online Comments and Personal Information: We treat your name, city, state, and any comments you provide as public information. We may, for example, provide compilations of your comments to national leaders and other individuals participating in our efforts, without disclosing email addresses. We may also make comments along with your city and state available to the press and public online.

Opting out and modifying information: Subscribers to our e-mail list may terminate their subscriptions via a link at the bottom of each email sent from Whitehouse.gov.

Browser information collected on the web site: We log IP addresses, which are the locations of computers or networks on the Internet, and analyze them in order to improve the value of our site. We also collect aggregate numbers of page hits in order to track the popularity of certain pages and improve the value of our site. We do not gather, request, record, require, collect or track any Internet users' Personal Information through these processes.

Cookies: A cookie is a tiny piece of data stored by a user's browser that helps a web site or service recognize that user's unique computer. You can remove or block cookies by changing the settings of your browser.

Session specific cookies may be used on WhiteHouse.gov to improve the user experience and for basic web metrics. These cookies expire in a very short time frame or when a browser window closes and are permitted by current federal guidelines.

The federal government has guidelines for the use of persistent cookies. The goals of the guidelines are to enable the useful functioning of federal websites while protecting individual privacy.

For videos that are visible on WhiteHouse.gov, a ‘persistent cookie’ is set by third party providers when you click to play a video.  (We may experience some engineering difficulties as the new Whitehouse.gov is posted and reviewed.  We intend, however, to fully enforce the above provisions as soon as possible.  If you are experiencing any difficulties, please contact us.)

This persistent cookie is used by some third party providers to help maintain the integrity of video statistics. A waiver has been issued by the White House Counsel's office to allow for the use of this persistent cookie.

If you would like to view a video without the use of persistent cookies, a link to download the video file is typically provided just below the video.

Privacy of our email lists: As noted above, we maintain e-mail lists to keep interested, eligible individuals informed about important topics, and individuals must affirmatively request to join them. We configure our list server software to refuse to divulge the email addresses of our list subscribers to anyone other than those whom we authorize. However, we are not the author of this software, and are not responsible for any failures in the software to preserve subscriber anonymity.

Children's privacy: Because we care about the safety and privacy of children online, we comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). COPPA and its accompanying FTC regulation establish United States federal law that protects the privacy of children using the Internet. We do not knowingly contact or collect personal information from children under 13. Our site is not intended to solicit information of any kind from children under 13.

It is possible that by fraud or deception we may receive information pertaining to children under 13. If we are notified of this, as soon as we verify the information, we will immediately obtain parental consent or otherwise delete the information from our servers. If you want to notify us of our receipt of information by children under 13, please do so by emailing us at Comments@WhiteHouse.gov.

Security: We maintain a variety of physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect your personal information. For example, we use commercially reasonable tools and techniques to protect against unauthorized access to our systems. Also, we restrict access to Personal Information to those who need such access in the course of their duties for us. Your own efforts to protect against unauthorized access play an important role in protecting the security of your personal information. You should be sure to sign off when finished using a shared computer, and always log out of any site when viewing personal information. We may have links to other, outside web sites that we do not control. We are not responsible for the content or privacy policies of these sites, and users should check those policies on such sites.

Changes to this policy: We will revise or update this policy if our practices change, or as we develop better ways to keep you informed about them. You should refer back to this page often for the latest information and the effective date of any changes. If we decide to change this policy, we will post a new policy on our site and change the date at the bottom. Changes to the policy shall not apply retroactively.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

So, let's recap.  We have a "privacy policy" that allows the fine folks at the White House to collect your name, address, email and phone number and IP address.  Email lists will be maintained.  As a general rule, they will not make this information available to others, but such disclosure could happen intentionally or if there is a flaw in the data mining software, for which the White House bears no responsibility.  They will use cookies to track you on your own computer.  They have the capacity to purge a name from the email list (which they will do if they discover that a child has been added) but they won't remove data otherwise.  They also want you to forward to them the names and email addresses of your neighbors who might have some "misconceptions" about their policies.  And once those names get on the email lists, your neighbor has no way of getting those names off.

I, myself, received an email from David Axelrod at the White House.  I never wrote the White House – maybe a concerned neighbor wants to give me free admission to a re-education camp.

I sure feel reassured about the privacy of my information, don't you?

On December 12, 2008, the Australian Capital Territory Supreme Court ruled that MKM Capital could use Facebook to serve legal documents on borrowers who had previously been evading other means of service.

So far, reaction to the Australian Court's decision has not been positive.  Several commentators in Australia note that Facebook is intended to foster social relationships, rather than to serve as a tool for commercial interests to collect debts.

Residents of the United States are not in any danger of receiving a "super poke" from bill collectors anytime soon.  Laws in the United States require bill collectors to respect customers privacy and Facebook itself offers users the option to block undesireable "friends."  The United State also guarantees its residents due process of law – an email in a Facebook inbox would not withstand a procedure challenge.

However, I think that we can learn from this story that all of us should understand that our privacy is at risk when we document parts of our life online.  Take a look at your Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo or Twitter profile.  How much information could a nefarious third party learn about you simply by studying your various profiles.   How often do your online profiles contain the answers to "secret" profile questions that you answer when you set up your online access to a bank.  You may remember that a hacker broke in to Sarah Palin's Yahoo account by guessing the answer to her identify confirmation question and changing the password to her account.