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A Voice for Private Physicians Since 1943

We at American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your visits to this website. You do not have to identify yourself or divulge personal information unless you choose to give us your personal information. AAPS knows your right to privacy online is important. Should you choose to share your personal information, we would like you to know exactly how that information is used by us to provide a better user experience, and the steps we take to protect your information. This privacy policy has been created to answer any questions you may have regarding the AAPS’ data collection and protection policies.

Collection and disclosure of information: To ensure we are able to communicate effectively with visitors to our web site, we collect some information that can be directly associated with a specific person. We call this Personal Information and it includes, by way of illustration, names, addresses, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. We collect Personal Information from individuals who affirmatively request to receive e-mail or other services from us. We collect this Personal Information in order to provide these individuals with timely information regarding events, resources and issues. It is our general policy not to make Personal Information available to anyone other than our employees, staff, and agents.

Browser information collected on the web site: We log IP addresses, which are the locations of computers or networks on the Internet, and analyze them in order to improve the value of our site. We also collect aggregate numbers of page hits in order to track the popularity of certain pages and improve the value of our site. We do not gather, request, record, require, collect or track any Internet users’ Personal Information through these processes.

Cookies: A cookie is a tiny piece of data stored by a user’s browser that helps a web site or service recognize that user’s unique computer. You can remove or block cookies by changing the settings of your browser. Session specific cookies may be used on aapsonline.org to improve the user experience and for basic web metrics. These cookies expire in a very short time frame or when a browser window closes and are permitted by current federal guidelines.

For videos that are visible on aapsonline.org, a ‘persistent cookie’ is set by third party providers when you click to play a video. This persistent cookie is used by some third party providers to help maintain the integrity of video statistics. If you would like to view a video without the use of persistent cookies, a link to download the video file is typically provided just below the video.

Privacy of our email lists: As noted above, we maintain e-mail lists to keep interested, eligible individuals informed about important topics, and individuals must affirmatively request to join them. We configure our list server software to refuse to divulge the email addresses of our list subscribers to anyone other than those whom we authorize. However, we are not the author of this software, and are not responsible for any failures in the software to preserve subscriber anonymity.

Children’s privacy: Because we care about the safety and privacy of children online, we comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA). COPPA and its accompanying FTC regulation establish United States federal law that protects the privacy of children using the Internet. We do not knowingly contact or collect personal information from children under 13. Our site is not intended to solicit information of any kind from children under 13. It is possible that by fraud or deception we may receive information pertaining to children under 13. If we are notified of this, as soon as we verify the information, we will immediately obtain parental consent or otherwise delete the information from our servers. If you want to notify us of our receipt of information by children under 13, please contact us.

Security: We maintain a variety of physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect your personal information. For example, we use commercially reasonable tools and techniques to protect against unauthorized access to our systems. Your own efforts to protect against unauthorized access play an important role in protecting the security of your personal information. You should be sure to sign off when finished using a shared computer, and always log out of any site when viewing personal information. We may have links to other, outside web sites that we do not control. We are not responsible for the content or privacy policies of these sites, and users should check those policies on such sites.

Updated April, 2010