Privacy Policy (the basics)

MoveOn will never sell your personal information to anyone ever. For petitions, letters to the editor, and surveys you've signed or completed, we treat your name, city, state, and comments as public information, which means anyone can access and view it. We will not make your street address publicly available, but we may transmit it to your state legislators, governor, members of Congress, or the President as part of a petition. MoveOn will send you updates on this and other important campaigns by email. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so.

Complete Privacy Policy

MoveOn's public petition website, http://petitions.moveon.org (the “Site”), are operated by MoveOn.org Civic Action (“We” or “Us” or “MoveOn”). We want you to know what you should expect when you use this Site. We’re members too, and we believe you should be informed about how your information will be used. 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 MoveOn and any other entity or offline contact between you and MoveOn.

If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so by following the unsubscribe link included in any email from MoveOn. The Site is directed to users in the United States only. This privacy policy was last updated on April 30, 2013.

You may visit the Site and review some of its contents without providing any personal information to MoveOn. To create or sign a petition, to make comments, or to upload content, such as photographs, on MoveOn's petition website, you will be asked to become a member of the Site (“Member”), and must provide information including your first name, last name, address, phone number, email address, and street address (“Personal Information”). Once you create and/or sign a petition, some of your information will be made public, including without limitation your first name, last name, city, and state (“Public Petition Information”). Public Petition Information—that is, information that is provided generally during the petition signing process—is considered public information, and you should assume that it will be made public. All other information you have been asked to provide will not be made public. Your Personal Information will be shared with MoveOn.org Civic Action and MoveOn.org Political Action (the “MoveOn Entities”), but only Public Petition Information will be available to the public.

If you become a Member, MoveOn may send you updates about the Site and about any petition you created or signed by email. If you sign a petition on the Site, you may also receive emails from the creator of that petition (the “Petitioner”). You can remove yourself from the MoveOn mailing lists at any time by following the instructions contained in any email communication you receive.

If you have expressed a desire to participate in the activities on the Site, you may be contacted by phone to coordinate your participation with MoveOn's petition website or other MoveOn activities. Unless you provide it directly, no Petitioner will have access to your phone information. If you would like to be removed permanently from our phone list, please click here.

Except as noted in this Privacy Policy, we do not, without your express permission, share your email address or telephone number with other organization or company EXCEPT for the following:

  • The MoveOn Entities: MoveOn.org Political Action and MoveOn.org Civic Action.
  • Affiliated Third Parties—for example, our database administrators or organizations that provide extra organizers at an urgent time—for the sole purpose of helping Us do our work. These groups do not share your personal information or use it for any purpose other than as instructed by Us.
  • Third-Party Administrators, such as organizations we engage to facilitate large distribution of messages. The content of these emails will be from MoveOn Political Action or MoveOn.org Civic Action and these third parties do not have direct access to your personally identifiable information.

Petitions are public documents. That means that the public may have access to your name, city, state, and any comments you make while on the Site, as well as the content of the petition(s) you have signed. In addition, you or MoveOn—with your permission—may affirmatively pass along Personal Information to the following groups and individuals (as is standard practice):

  • Elected officials and other targets of your choosing that you decide to send messages to through our online messaging tool.
  • Elected officials, other targets of your choosing, and the general public when you sign petitions or complete surveys.
  • Third-party networking sites that you choose to use to share the petition(s) you sign.

In addition to this Privacy Policy, Our Terms of Use outline how and when MoveOn's petition website should be used. In cases where we determine that Members may be misusing our systems for malicious purposes (for example, petition creators sending harassing or commercial email to petition signers), or, in MoveOn’s discretion, any purpose that is inconsistent with our Terms of Use, such activities may be reported to law enforcement agencies. In such cases, MoveOn may release personally identifiable information, including name and address, to those agencies. MoveOn will also release Personal Information pursuant to a valid subpoena or court order.

Please review this privacy policy periodically because we modify it from time to time. Each time you visit this Site or provide us with information through the Site, by doing so you are accepting the terms of this 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 or sending emails, and taking part in our photo campaigns.

Sharing of Information Between MoveOn.org Civic Action and MoveOn.org Political Action

MoveOn.org Civic Action is a 501(c)(4) organization that primarily focuses on nonpartisan education and advocacy on important national issues. MoveOn.org Political Action is a federal political committee that primarily helps members elect candidates who reflect our values through a variety of activities aimed at influencing the outcome of the next election. MoveOn.org Civic Action and MoveOn.org Political Action are separate organizations. However, they’re both interested in promoting your participation in the democratic process. As such, when you provide your personal information to MoveOn, it will be shared with MoveOn.org Civic Action and MoveOn.org Political Action. Notwithstanding the foregoing credit card information you may provide us with in order to make a donation will not be shared with any of the MoveOn sites. Please see the Financial Donations section below for more information about donations.

Petitions and Surveys

For petitions and surveys you've signed or completed, we treat your name, city, state, and comments as public information and reserve the right to share that information with anyone and to disclose it publicly in connection with the transmittal of petitions and publicizing of such petitions. For example, we may provide compilations of petitions, with your comments, to the president, members of Congress, state elected officials and/or state legislators, the media, and/or other nonprofit or advocacy or political organizations. We will not make your street address publicly available, but we may transmit that address to the president, members of Congress, state elected officials and/or state legislators if you have included it in the course of signing a petition created after February 24, 2012. (Note: Our policy prior to March 9, 2012 was to only share name, city, and state with these elected officials. We never apply changes to our privacy policy retroactively). We may also make your comments, along with your first name, city, and state, available to the creator of the petition, targets of petitions other than those noted above, the press, and public online.

Sending Emails via MoveOn's Petition Website

In certain cases, we enable Petitioners to send individual emails to signers of petitions they have created, 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 the Petitioner’s name, with the Petitioner’s email address as the return address and the Petitioner’s full name and contact information is provided as part of the submission. These messages will be sent out under the Petitioner’s name only as the Petitioner approves them on an individual basis using our email messaging tool. If you are a Petitioner, you are solely responsible for the specific message(s) you send using our email tool.

Financial Donations

If you choose to make a donation to MoveOn.org Civic Action, your credit card information will be used only for this transaction through our secure online payment system. MoveOn Entities do not retain credit card information.

Phone Campaigns

From time to time, MoveOn staff members, volunteers, and vendors may contact you by telephone about urgent campaigns. If you would like to be removed permanently from our phone list, please click here. Please allow eight to ten business days for your information to be removed.

Children

This Site is not directed at children and MoveOn does not knowingly collect information—nor does it want to collect information—from anyone under the age of 18. MoveOn Entities do not solicit personally identifying information from children.

Cookies

Some parts of the Site are password-protected. If you check "Remember Me" upon log-in, we will use a cookie (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 to do that. If you set your browser to disable cookies, however, you may not be able to access certain parts of this Site.

Advertising

We may place online advertising with third-party vendors, including Google, which will be shown on other sites on the Internet. In some cases, those third-party vendors may decide which ads to show you based on your prior visits to the Site. At no time will you be personally identified to those third-party vendors, nor will any of the information you share with us be shared with those third-party vendors. If you prefer to opt out of the use of these third-party cookies on the Site, you can do so by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.

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 to most MoveOn 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 that 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 that 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

The Site may provide links to third-party websites, and other websites may provide links to the Site. Third-party websites operate according to their own terms of use and privacy policies. MoveOn has no control over such third-party websites, and by using this Site, you acknowledge and agree that MoveOn 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 MoveOn 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.

Changes to the Privacy Policy

MoveOn.org Civic Action 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 website home page and post the changes on this page. We endeavor to, and make commercially reasonable efforts only to, change our policies and practices to make them more protective of Member information collected prior to the effective date of any changes. We will keep you informed of changes and we encourage all 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, you can contact us.