Privacy Policy

At The Mercy & Sharing Foundation, we respect our visitors and donors and understand that you are concerned about your privacy. We have instituted policies to ensure that your personal information is handled safely and responsibly.

The Mercy & Sharing Foundation is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We do not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this Web site.

Online Donations: We request information from the user during online donations. Here a user must provide contact information (like name and shipping address) and financial information (like credit card number, expiration date). This information is used solely for donation purposes.

Cookies: A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user’s hard drive containing information about the user, such as which pages you visited on the site. Usage of a cookie is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information while on our site. Once the user closes their browser, the cookie simply terminates. If a user rejects the cookie, they may still use our site.

Links: This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects personally identifiable information.

Email List: The Mercy & Sharing Foundation email list is used to notify our donors and website visitors of important information and events taking place at the foundation. We do not sell, share, or rent the email addresses in our list. Users can opt-in as well as opt-out at any time.

Security

This website takes every precaution to protect our users information. When users submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and off-line. When our online donation form asks users to enter sensitive information (such as credit card number), that information is encrypted and is protected with the best encryption software in the industry - SSL. While on a secure page, such as our order form, the lock icon on the bottom of Web browsers such as FireFox, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer becomes locked, as opposed to un-locked, or open, when you are just surfing.

SSL: Short for Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL works by using a private key to encrypt data that’s transferred over the SSL connection. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers. By convention, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https: instead of http:

While we use SSL encryption to protect sensitive information online, we also do everything in our power to protect user-information off-line. All of our users information, not just the sensitive information mentioned above, is restricted in our offices. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, our billing clerk or a customer service representative) are granted access to personally identifiable information. Our employees must use password-protected applications gain access to your information. Furthermore, all employees are kept up-to-date on our security and privacy practices.