TheDirtyLie.com and the Waterkeeper Alliance are very sensitive to online privacy concerns. A privacy policy should be clear and straightforward about what information a site collects and how it’s used. Here is ours:

Waterkeeper Alliance and The Dirty Lie value the support of our members, donors, customers, supporters and others who share our common goal of fighting the harmful impacts of coal and protecting the nation’s waterways. We are committed to maintaining the privacy of those who visit our web site. We have instituted the following privacy policy to ensure that any personal information you provide while visiting our site remains confidential. If you have questions or concerns regarding our site’s privacy statement, please contact us directly by e-mailing us at the address below.

Any personal information submitted by you to our website, including name, address and financial information, is stored in a secure location and is accessible only by designated staff or contractors of Waterkeeper Alliance. This information may be shared with licensed Waterkeeper member programs that make up the Waterkeeper Alliance and other organizations that share similar missions and concerns of Waterkeeper Alliance. This type of sharing operates on an opt-out basis. Your information will not be shared with entities outside the Alliance and its licensed programs, however, if you check the “Please DO NOT EXCHANGE my name with other organizations” box on the membership page of the website. The Alliance does not provide its supporting membership lists to marketing organizations for any purpose.

Your personal information is collected for several reasons, including the following:

• to send you email alerts;
• to answer your requests;
• to let you become an online member;
• to track your and others’ use of our website;
• to provide us with aggregate data about our site visitors;
• to suggest other website services to you;
• to solicit donations.

If you visit our website to read or download information, we may collect and securely store your computer’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, the date and time you access our site, the Internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site; and the various pages that you visit while on our site.

Like most websites, The Dirty Lie may place a “cookie,” or small file, in the browser files of a visitor’s computer. We use cookies to save information you give us so you don’t have to re-enter it each time you visit our site. Cookies allow us to personalize the site to your taste and provide the best web experience possible to our visitors. We do not use this cookie to link to personally identifiable information on our site. Cookies expire after a period of time specified in the cookie. This ranges from a few hours to years. Some areas of this site require use of cookies for full use of the site. If a user rejects a cookie, he or she simply will not be able to use some parts of the site.

We have made every effort to insure the secure collection and transmission of sensitive user information using industry accepted data collection and encryption methodologies. If you are still concerned about the safety of your credit card information online, you may also submit contributions or other payment to Waterkeeper Alliance by mailing a check as directed by instructions on the appropriate pages of our website. 

Information about visitors who take part in our “Action Alert” program is forwarded to the recipient of the alert – typically governmental officials. The information sent is limited to your name and address and never contains any financial information, including credit card numbers, which may be submitted to us for membership. 

Finally, we provide links to third party sites. Because we do not control those web sites, we encourage you to review the privacy policies posted on these third party sites. That another web site is linked to our site does not constitute an endorsement by Waterkeeper Alliance of the owner of the other site, the content of its site, or its products or services.

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.