Privacy Policy

We collect no personal information about you when you visit our website unless you choose to provide this information to us. However, we collect and store certain information automatically. Here is how we handle information about your visit to our website. 

Who We Are

Our website address is: shop.eriecanalway.org. The site is owned by the Erie Canalway Heritage Fund, Inc.

What We Collect and Store Automatically

If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we will gather and store certain information about your visit automatically. This information does not identify you personally. We automatically collect and store only the following information about your visit:

  • The Internet domain (for example, “xcompany.com” if you use a private Internet access account, or “yourschool.edu” if you connect from a university’s domain) and IP address (an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web) from which you access our website
  • The type of browser and operating system used to access our site
  • The date and time you access our site
  • The pages you visit
  • If you linked to our website from another website, the address of that website. We use the information we collect to count the number and type of visitors to the different pages on our site, and to help us make our site more useful to visitors like you.

Information Collected for Tracking and Customization (Cookies)

A cookie is a small file that a website transfers to your computer to allow it to remember specific information about your session while you are connected. Your computer will only share the information in the cookie with the website that provided it, and no other website can request it. There are two types of cookies, session and persistent. Session cookies last only as long as your Web browser is open. Once you close your browser, the cookie disappears. Persistent cookies store information on your computer for longer periods of time.

shop.eriecanalway.org uses session cookies for technical purposes such as to enable better navigation through the site, or to allow you to customize your preferences for interacting with the site. Like many websites, shop.eriecanalway.org uses “persistent cookie” technology. A persistent cookie is a small text file that this website places on your web browser so that it can gather anonymous summary demographic information, and remember your browser when it is used to visit our site again later. These cookies uniquely identify a browser on a computer, but never a person. In other words, if the same person uses Chrome and Internet Explorer, two unique browser cookies will be assigned, one for each browser, so that person will be counted as two different visitors because visits are based on browsers, not computers or persons. We use persistent cookies in three ways, all of which enhance your experience on shop.eriecanalway.org while also protecting your privacy:

  • To remember you when your browser comes back to the site, so we don’t invite you to take our customer satisfaction survey or receive a newsletter every time you visit.
  • To get aggregate metrics on site usage to understand how people are using the site and how we can make it better. We use web metrics services to track activity on shop.eriecanalway.org.
  • To gather anonymous summary demographic information about our visitors such as gender, age range, and areas of interest for adults over the age of 18. We do this by using Google Demographic and Interests reports. When you visit a website that has partnered with the Google Display Network, Google stores a number in your browser using a persistent cookie to remember your visits. This number uniquely identifies a web browser, not a specific person. Browsers may be associated with a demographic category, such as gender or age range, based on the sites that were visited. This demographic information is used to help us better understand our visitors’ interests and needs to more effectively develop content to serve you.

Most Internet browsers automatically accept persistent cookies. Although using persistent cookies creates a much better experience for you, this site will also work without them. If you do not wish to have session or persistent cookies stored on your machine, you can edit your browser’s options to stop accepting persistent cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

USA.gov provides instructions for “opting-out” of web measurement and customization technologies through disabling cookies on your web browser.

If You Send Us An E-mail

You may choose to provide us with personal information, as in an e-mail with a comment or question. We use the information to improve our service to you or to respond to your request. Sometimes we forward your e-mail to other employees, authorized concessioners, or partners who may be better able to help you. Except for authorized law enforcement investigations, we do not share your e-mail with any other outside organizations.

Links to Other Sites

Our website may have other websites. When you click one of these partner links, you are no longer on our site and are subject to the privacy policy of the new site.

What Personal Data We Collect and Why We Collect It

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

How Long We Retain Your Data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What Rights You Have Over Your Data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where We Send Your Data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.