Privacy Policy

At Waging Nonviolence, we strongly believe in protecting your privacy and strive to create a safe environment for all our readers, many of whom are activists doing sensitive work. That’s why our site was developed to allow you to access our content without having to reveal your identification or personal information to us. The only personal information we collect and store is what you give us voluntarily when you comment on a story, sign up for a newsletter, make a contribution to our organization, apply for a job, or contact us directly. In short, we treat all website visitors with the assumption that they do not want to be tracked and have undertaken a wide set of measures to meet that expectation.

Our hosting service
We host our content on the servers of May First/People Link, a movement-based, democratically-run membership organization dedicated to Internet work. They provide an activist-friendly, secure, surveillance-resistant approach that we consider vital to both our work and our readers.

Social media
The social media share buttons that appear on our site are simple links. They do not allow third parties to track users on our site. Please be advised that once you leave Waging Nonviolence, third parties may begin collecting your information.

Traffic analysis
We use the open-source web analytics platform Matomo to analyze the traffic patterns of visitors. We obtain information based on IP address, web browser information, and what is read on the site. This information gives us insight into what types of articles our readers prefer, and none of it is ever shared with a third party. We also encourage republishers to utilize a tracking image pixel from Matomo, which allows us to monitor traffic to our stories after they have been republished on another website.

Fonts
We use open source fonts rather than Google Web Fonts in order to prevent Google from tracking readers as well as the site itself.

Email newsletters
Waging Nonviolence publishes email newsletters and invites all readers to opt-in to receive them. We allow all e-newsletter recipients to opt-out at any time through a link included in each e-newsletter. We do not rent, exchange or sell the e-mail addresses provided to us by any of our subscribers. However, certain information does get shared with our service provider. Go here to read Mailchimp’s privacy policy.

Comments
We ask for some personal information during the comment posting process, including your e-mail address and name. Our content management system (which is WordPress) requires it. We use that information so that we can contact you in case there is a violation of our commenting policy, which prohibits digressions, personal attacks, hateful language, unsubstantiated claims, impersonations and copyright infringement.

Links to other websites
Our content often contains links to other websites of interest. We have no control over these other sites or their content. Please be aware when you leave our site for another, and remember that other sites have their own user agreements and privacy policies.

Embedded video, podcast and image content
We often embed video, podcast and image content from third parties as part of our content offerings. Please note that these third parties (e.g., YouTube, Soundcloud and Getty) collect information from your device, including through tracking. Unfortunately, we cannot limit access by these third parties to your information.

Donations and membership
We collect the names and emails of all members and donors. This is so we can send thank-you emails, exclusive offers, notices of payment failures and support renewal reminders. We also collect the physical addresses of members who have requested to receive a gift. The only information ever shared or made public is the names of those who have chosen to be featured on our Wall of Solidarity. We keep all other information confidential. Please note that we do not have access to anyone’s credit card and banking information — that is kept with the third party payment platforms we use: Stripe, Square and Paypal.

Security
We use HTTPS, or HyperText Transport Protocol Secure, to transmit and receive data in a secure manner. This guarantees a secure connection and that any information on the site — or data being entered into the site by visitors — is encrypted. HTTPS protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, eavesdropping and tampering of the communication.

Email
To protect our communication with everyone we interact with over email, we use ProtonMail, a privacy-oriented secure email service that has built-in end-to-end encryption and uses open source cryptography. Unlike Google, which has access to your Gmail account and can be legally compelled to hand over your messages to law enforcement, ProtonMail is not able to access your encrypted data. They also do not log or track any personally identifiable information.

If you have any questions, please send them to contact@wagingnonviolence.org. We will be happy to provide you with more information.