This Privacy Policy is provided by Houston Local Information Initiative, Inc. (“we” or “us” or “our” or “Houston Local Information Initiative, Inc.”) and discloses the privacy practices applicable to all functionalities offered on our website, abdelraoufsinno.com (the “Site”). The Privacy Policy applies solely to the Personally Identifiable Information collected from subscribers, donors, consumers or users (“users” “consumers” or “you”) who use our Services. We want you to be informed on how the Personally Identifiable Information is being used online.

Please read our Privacy Policy carefully to get a clear understanding of how we collect, use, protect or otherwise handle your Personally Identifiable Information in accordance with our Services. This Privacy Policy will notify you of the following:
What Personally Identifiable Information is collected from you through our Site or in the course of rendering our Services, how it is used, and with whom it may be shared.
What choices are available to you regarding the use of your data.
The security procedures in place to protect the misuse of your information.
How you can correct any inaccuracies in the information and request to be forgotten.

What Personal Information We Collect from Our Site Visitors
When contacting us, signing up for our newsletter, completing a survey for purposes such as content formulation and/or review, or otherwise sharing information through our Site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your name, address, phone number, email address, payment information (for donations), or other relevant details, which we collect to help you with your experience. We may also collect information you have shared, such as general feedback, testimonials, comments, or questions and requests submitted through our Contact Us page or other means.

How We Collect Information
We collect information from you whenever you submit information to us, including subscribing to our newsletter, providing your contact information such as email address, responding to a marketing communication, making a donation or otherwise interacting with us or entering information on our Site. We also collect certain information automatically, such as IP addresses, when you visit our Site. See Internet Protocol (IP) Address below.

We may use Google Analytics to monitor website traffic on our Site, including demographics and interest reporting, but we do not collect any identifiable personal information this way. To review Google Analytics’ current available opt-outs, click HERE. Please note that it may take up to ten (10) business days for your unsubscribe request to be processed. 

We also use cookies and other automatic information-gathering technologies to gather Personally Identifiable Information every time you use our Site. We may leverage unique identifiers associated with your device(s) to assist us in collecting and analyzing this data. We may additionally use cookies to keep you logged in, save your preferences for the Services, track your logged-in status, and/or look up your sessions data. Your device, operating system, or web browser may allow you to erase information stored in cookies or local browser storage, or you may be able to set your browser to refuse all web storage. If you do so, you may lose some preferences or settings.

Why We Collect Information and How We Use It
We only use your information in accordance with the law. This gives us the authority to use your data in relation to your participation in our organization, and/or using our Site. We use the collected data for various purposes, including:

  • To fulfill the reason you provided the information. For example, if you share your information to inquire about programs, journalism efforts or local news coverage by us, we will use that personal information to respond to your inquiry.
  • To process your donation.
  • To improve, personalize and develop our Site to deliver the type of content or service offerings in which you are most interested.
  • To monitor usage of our Site and make improvements in order to better serve you.
  • To detect, prevent, and address technical issues.
  • To provide you with support and to respond to your questions, comments or other feedback, including to investigate and address your concerns and following up with you after correspondence.
  • To send you periodic emails regarding other programs and services which may be of interest to you (which you may unsubscribe to at any time).
  • To comply with a legal obligation.
  • For any other purpose described to you when collecting your personal information or with your consent.

Use of Cookies
A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes an anonymous unique identifier that is sent to your browser from a website’s servers and stored on your computer. We may use cookies on this Site for essential purposes, including enabling you to navigate our Site and use its features, such as accessing any secure areas. We may also use cookies on this Site to gather statistics on how visitors use our Site. This allows us to gain insight so that we may make improvements to its usability. Some of our third party providers may also use cookies. We urge you to review their privacy policies and practices.

Internet Protocol (IP) Address
We collect an Internet Protocol (IP) address from all visitors to our Site. An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer when you use the Internet. We use IP addresses to help diagnose problems with our server, administer our Site, analyze trends, gather broad demographic information for aggregate use to help us to improve the Site, and deliver customized, personalized content. IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.

As with almost all Sites, temporary log files are kept which identify some information about our visitors, including the IP addresses of machines that access the Site. Our web logs are not available to the public. These logs allow Site administrators to see how many people visit, how many pages have been accessed, which pages are accessed most frequently, and which links are leading people to the Site.

Standard logs (including ours) also track which pages are visited by each IP address. This information is important for us to have because it allows us to catch “denial of service” attacks (for example, individual computers accessing hundreds of thousands of pages per day). We take great care to make sure this information cannot be used to compromise the privacy and security of our visitors.

Authorized Release of Information
You consent to the processing of your Personally Identifiable Information as described in this Privacy Policy, including the transfer, use and storage of your personal data. We will only provide this information to trusted Third-Parties if necessary to render the functionalities within this Site. We will not sell or trade this information to outside parties.

While we endeavor to provide the highest level of protection of your information, we may be legally required to disclose information in certain circumstances without your consent, such as pursuant to a subpoena or other judicial or administrative order. We comply with all applicable legal requirements.

How We Protect Your Information
We take commercially reasonable steps to protect your information from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction. Please understand, however, that no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our databases, nor can we guarantee that the information that you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to and from us over the Internet. In particular, email may not be secure, and you should, therefore, take special care in deciding what information you send to us via email.

To help prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect.

Your personal information is contained behind secured networks and is only accessible by a limited number of persons who have special access rights to such systems, and are required to keep the information confidential.

Our Site is scanned by our third-party hosting provider on a regular basis for security holes and known vulnerabilities in order to make your visit to our Site as safe as possible.

Third Party Disclosure
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer your personally identifiable information to outside parties.

We do use a number of third party providers to host our Site and constituent database, process program registrations, and manage our communications. We may share information from or about you with these third party providers so that they can perform their services or complete your requests. All shared data is transferred and stored securely, in accordance with the privacy policies of each provider. We endeavor to work with providers with privacy standards that match our own, but in some cases, third party providers collect more information on you than we do, and we encourage you to review their privacy policies.

Links to Third Party Sites/Services
This Privacy Policy applies only to the functionality of this Site, and not of any third-party website linked to or from it, or any third-party website win which our content or functionality is embedded. Notwithstanding, we may disclose Personally Identifiable Information to provide certain functionalities of our Site, or when you authorize or instruct us to do so. We may also disclose Personally Identifiable Information to companies, agents, contractors, service providers, or others engaged to perform functions on our behalf (such as processing of payments, provision of data storage, hosting of our Site, marketing of our programs, columns, and journalism initiatives, conducting audits, and/or performing web analytics). We may license third party software to include in or use within our Site, in which case we may disclose Personally Identifiable Information to the licensor. These third parties’ collection and use of information are subject to their own privacy policies.

Right to Know and Data Portability
You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you about our collection and use of your personal information over the past 12 months (the “right to know”). Once we receive your request and confirm your identity (see Exercising Your Rights to Know or Delete), we will disclose to you:

  • The categories of personal information we collected about you.
  • The categories of sources for the personal information we collected about you.
  • Our business or commercial purpose for collecting or selling that personal information.
  • The categories of third parties with whom we share that personal information.
  • If we sold or disclosed your personal information for a business purpose, two separate lists disclosing:
    • sales, identifying the personal information categories that each category of recipient purchased; and
    • disclosures for a business purpose, identifying the personal information categories that each category of recipient obtained.
  • The specific pieces of personal information we collected about you (also called a data portability request).

We do not provide a right to know or data portability disclosure for Business-to-business (B2B) personal information.

Right to Delete
You have the right to request that we delete any of your personal information that we collected from you and retained, subject to certain exceptions (the “right to delete”). Once we receive your request and confirm your identity (see Exercising Your Rights to Know or Delete), we will review your request to see if an exception allowing us to retain the information applies. We may deny your deletion request if retaining the information is necessary for us or our service provider(s) to:

  1. Complete the transaction for which we collected the personal information, provide a service that you requested, take actions reasonably anticipated within the context of our ongoing business relationship with you, or otherwise perform our contract with you.
  2. Detect security incidents, protect against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, or prosecute those responsible for such activities.
  3. Exercise free speech, ensure the right of another consumer to exercise their free speech rights, or exercise another right provided for by law.
  4. Engage in public or peer-reviewed scientific, historical, or statistical research in the public interest that adheres to all other applicable ethics and privacy laws, when the information’s deletion may likely render impossible or seriously impair the research’s achievement, if you previously provided informed consent.
  5. Enable solely internal uses that are reasonably aligned with consumer expectations based on your relationship with us.
  6. Comply with a legal obligation.
  7. Make other internal and lawful uses of that information that are compatible with the context in which you provided it.

We will delete or deidentify personal information not subject to one of these exceptions from our records and will direct our service providers to take similar action.

We do not provide these deletion rights for B2B personal information.

Exercising Your Rights to Know or Delete
To exercise your rights to know or delete described above, please submit a request via email to [email protected] or through our Contact Us page. Only you, or someone legally authorized to act on your behalf, may make a request to know or delete related to your personal information. You may only submit a request to know twice within a 12-month period. Your request to know or delete must:

  • Provide sufficient information that allows us to reasonably verify you are the person about whom we collected personal information and
  • Describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to it.

We cannot respond to your request or provide you with personal information if we cannot verify your identity or authority to make the request and confirm the personal information relates to you.

How does our Site handle Do Not Track signals?
We honor Do Not Track signals and Do Not Track, plant cookies, or use advertising when a Do Not Track (DNT) browser mechanism is in place.

COPPA (Children Online Privacy Protection Act)
The Services are not for use by children under 13 years of age. Should you become aware of anyone under the age of 13 years using our Site, please let us know.

California Online Privacy Protection Act
CalOPPA requires commercial website and online services to post a privacy policy. The law’s reach stretches well beyond California to require any person or company in the United States (and conceivably the world) that operates websites collecting Personally Identifiable Information from California consumers to post a conspicuous privacy policy on its website stating exactly the information being collected and those individuals or companies with whom it is being shared. To see more click here.

We comply with CalOPPA and agree to the following:

  • Users can visit our site anonymously.
  • There is a link on our home page to our Privacy Policy.
  • Our Privacy Policy link includes the word “Privacy” and is easily found on our Site.
  • You will be notified of any Privacy Policy changes on our Privacy Policy page.
  • You can change or delete your personal information by emailing us at [email protected].

CAN-SPAM Act
The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 (“CAN-SPAM Act”) is a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have emails stopped from being sent to them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

We collect your email address in order to:

  • Send information, respond to inquiries, and/or other requests or questions.
  • Send information and updates pertaining to our programs and services.
  • Market to our mailing list or continue to send emails to our program participants and/or interested participants after you have provided us your information.

To be in accordance with CANSPAM, we agree to the following:

  • Not use false or misleading subjects or email addresses.
  • Identify the message as an advertisement in some reasonable way.
  • Include the physical address of our business or Site headquarters.
  • Monitor third party email marketing services for compliance, if one is used.
  • Honor opt-out/unsubscribe requests quickly.
  • Allow users to unsubscribe by using the link at the bottom of each email.

If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from receiving future emails, you may click on the “UNSUBCRIBE” link or button.

Fair Information Practices
The Fair Information Practices Principles form the backbone of privacy law in the United States and the concepts they include have played a significant role in the development of data protection laws around the globe. Understanding the Fair Information Practice Principles and how they should be implemented is critical to comply with the various privacy laws that protect personal information. There are five (5) core principles of Fair Information Practice: (i) consumers should be provided notice of whom the information is going to and what it will be used for; (ii) choices should be offered and consent required; (iii) consumers should be able to access and alter data; (iv) data should be accurate and secure; and (v) mechanisms in place for enforcement and redress are necessary. In order to be compliant with Fair Information Practices we will take the following responsive action, should a data breach occur:

  • We will notify you via email within seven (7) business days.
  • We will notify users via in-site notification within seven (7) business days.

We also agree to the Individual Redress Principle which requires that individuals have the right to legally pursue enforceable rights against data collectors and processors who fail to adhere to the law. This principle requires not only that individuals have enforceable rights against data users, but also that individuals have recourse to courts or government agencies to investigate and/or prosecute non-compliance by data processors.

Changes to our Privacy Policy
By using our Site and providing us with Personally Identifiable Information you agree to the practices described in this Privacy Policy. We reserve the right to amend this Privacy Policy at our discretion and at any time. When we make changes to this Privacy Policy, we will post the updated notice on the Site and update the notice’s last updated date. Your continued use of our Site following the posting of changes constitutes your acceptance of such changes.

How to Contact Us
If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, the ways in which Houston Local News collects and uses your information described here, your choices and rights regarding such use, or wish to exercise your rights under the law, please do not hesitate to contact us via email at [email protected] or through our Contact Us page. Please reference “Privacy” in the subject line.