Last update: May 28th, 2024

This privacy notice discloses the privacy practices for this website, https://plssfoundation.org.

Who we are

The PLSS Foundation was formed as a joint initiative between the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS). This privacy notice applies solely to information collected by this web site, www.plssfoundation.org. It will notify you of the following:

*What information is collected, how it is used and potentially 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.

Information collection, use and sharing

The PLSS Foundation is the sole owner of the information collected on this site; to that extent, we only collect information that you voluntarily give us or we receive during the course of your usage of https://plssfoundation.org. Examples of the information we collect includes site usage, material access, completion statistics, quiz and exam scores.

Aside from extraordinary circumstances, we will not share personally identifiable information with any third party outside of our organization, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Society of Professional Surveyors, and/or the site managers, instructors or administrators responsible for day to day site activities other than as necessary to provide assistance to the everyday site user. In the event of extraordinary circumstances, we will do our best to alert individual site users as to what is shared and/or requested.

We do share non-personally identifiable aggregate demographic information with our partners. This is not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual site user or person. With paid accounts, we utilize various third party processing companies to collect funds. To our knowledge, these groups do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes beyond filling your order.

Unless you ask us not to, we may contact you via email, phone or other means to tell you about specials, new products or services, or changes to this privacy policy. Please note that if you request a password reset, your IP address may be included in the reset email provided.

3rd party profile image and comments

While completely optional, we encourage you to utilize the Gravatar service to upload and manage your digital likeness (profile picture). 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. In the event commenting is made available on this site and you opt to utilize the function, after approval of your comment, your Gravatar profile picture will be made visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Cookies

We use ”cookies” on this site. A cookie is a piece of data stored on a site visitor’s hard drive to help us improve your access to our site and identify repeat visitors to our site. For instance, when we use a cookie to identify you, you would not have to log in a password more than once, thereby saving time while on our site. Cookies can also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site. Usage of a cookie is in no way linked to any personally identifiable information on our site. Some of our business partners may use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers). However, we have no access to or control over these cookies.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

What rights you have over your data

If you have a personal account on this site, you can request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not apply to group enrollments or include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Data management and security

We take precautions to protect your information. When you submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and offline.

Wherever we collect sensitive information (such as credit card data), that information is encrypted and transmitted to us in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a closed lock icon at the bottom of your web browser or looking for ”https” at the beginning of the address of the web page.

While we use encryption to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect your information offline. Only employers, employees or relevant affiliates who need information to perform a specific job (for example, testing, arranging an exam proctor, or customer service) are granted access to personally identifiable information. If you feel that we are not abiding by this privacy policy or wish to make suggestions, please contact us immediately via our contact form.