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Privacy Policy

Emme is committed to protecting the privacy of visitors to our website, as well as employees and community members. Emme has established this Privacy Policy to explain what information we collect through our website and how it is used, as well as protections for our members’ and donors’ personal information.

In this policy, "Emme" refers to Emme staff, board members, cooperating attorneys, interns, volunteers, and consultants, all of whom are bound by law or contract to keep confidential information they receive as part of their assistance to Emme.

Emme does not sell or rent app or website visitor information under any circumstances, and we do not share the data of any specific visitor information without prior consent except as compelled by law. This restriction applies to app users and visitors to the site.

Emme is located within the United States, and therefore will transfer, process, and store your information in the United States, which may not provide as much protection as your home country. US data policies may  not be perfect, but here we are, and we are doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

Information Gathered by Emme's Site Logging

For visitors to our website, we generally log only timestamps, URLs, and HTTP requests and do internal analytical logging, including additional technical information such as a single byte from IP addresses, for up to seven days from when the data was collected.

Circumstances in which Emme may need to log and retain technical information for longer than seven days include when we believe it is reasonably necessary for Emme’s mission and functionality, including situations such as:

  • site testing,
  • diagnosis of technical problems,
  • defending against attacks to the site,
  • handling a spike in traffic or other abnormal, short-term circumstances, or
  • research projects (in anonymized form) that serve our overall mission to defend freedom online.

In those and similar situations we will delete the information as soon as it is apparent that the information is no longer needed for the purpose for which it was retained. For more information on Emme's position on data logging and techniques we use to anonymize, obfuscate, aggregate and delete information, see our the EFF Practices for Online Service Providers, which we use as guidance for our internal planning.

How Emme Internal Analytics Works

Emme endeavors to gather sufficient information for analyzing our website and how visitors move within it without compromising the privacy of our visitors.

Cookies

We do not use persistent ID cookies on this site. We use session cookies on certain portions of the website. Session cookies expire when you close your browser. You can use Tor if you wish to keep your connection information anonymous, but please note that you can still be identified to Emme if you log in.

Voluntarily Submitted Information

In addition, Emme collects and retains information you voluntarily submit to us. It is up to you whether to submit information to us, and how much information to provide. If you choose to become an Emme member, use the Emme Shop, or use the app to log your health, we may ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, mailing address and phone number and will retain that information. For people who buy the Emme Smart Case, we also ask for your credit card number or other payment information. If you use the Emme Shop, you are asked to provide personal information, such as a shipping address, necessary to complete your transaction.

We may ask for additional personal information when you provide feedback or comments, or otherwise communicate with us.

From time to time, we may ask for personal information on other portions of the site, such as asking you to sign a petition, participate in a contest, or participate in product assessment.

The Emme Newsletter and other Mailing Lists

If you choose to subscribe to our free electronic newsletter or any of our other mailing lists, we collect your email address, and, if you choose to provide it, a zip or postal code.

Emme's Use of Information

In general, Emme uses the information provided by you to further its mission of ensuring health care access to all.

Newsletter Subscribers

We use member and app user  information for our legitimate interest in processing and managing your membership or subscription, including reminders and renewals. If you agree, we will use your email address to send you updates and alerts. If you don’t agree, we don’t email you.

Publication by Emme

If you provide information or images for publication we may use your name and contact information you have provided to us to provide you with attribution.

Other activities

We may run surveys, contests, or similar activities through this site. Such information will be used for the purposes for which it was collected. We use the information provided through our online shop to fulfill your order, and address any problems that might arise. We also look at technical information to diagnose problems with or consider improvements to our servers or related technologies and to administer Emme.com and other websites we host or provide.

Third-Party Service Providers to Emme

Portions of the Emme.com site, including some of our shop webpages, are operated by third-parties. When necessary and appropriate, Emme uses the following categories of third party services:

  • content delivery networks and cloud hosting providers (for example, hosting and handling traffic to our site).
  • Financial services and payment processors (for example, your credit card and online payments)
  • cloud email providers (for example, sending you email, like the Emme newsletter)
  • shipping and fulfillment services (for example, shipping the Emme Smart Case)

Where possible, we take steps to limit the ability of third parties to retain data about our users. These service providers may place session cookies on your computer. Emme’s service providers may also log standard technical information, such as the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer you are using; the browser software you use and your operating system; the date and time you access our site; and the Internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site. Our service providers may also store and organize the personal information collected through this site on our behalf. Emme’s third party providers primarily process information in the United States, but may process data in other jurisdictions.

In addition, for all of Emme's service providers, hosting providers and credit card processors and any other providers we may use in the future, the information collected from Emme users remains protected by the terms of our agreements with those providers and we will ensure that the information to be kept confidential and disclosed only to employees who require such access in the course of their assigned duties. Emme also responds to notices from  any of our third-party service providers commitments to notify Emme if they receive legal process seeking information about visitors to Emme’s website.

Emme may change the specific third-party providers from time to time, and will transfer stored information to any new provider subject to similar restrictions and agreements. From time to time, Emme may work with third-party consultants or other service providers who may have access to personally identifiable information. In such cases, we will restrict their use of personally identifiable information in accordance with their assigned tasks.

Third-Party Services and APIs

Emme’s site may also provide links to or interacts with a wide variety of third-party websites, including interactive links to sites like social media, telephone calling services, mapping services, or video hosting websites, often via application programming interfaces (APIs). Emme is not responsible for, and does not have any control over, the privacy practices or the content of such third parties.

We encourage users to read the privacy policies of any website visited via links from or interactions with the Emme website. Where appropriate, we will provide specific notice of these third-party services at the point of interaction. It is our policy not to include third-party resources when users initially load our web pages, but we may dynamically include them later after giving the user a chance to choose to interact with them. If you believe a third-party resource is automatically loading, please let us know so we can address it.

Disclosure of Your Information

While Emme endeavors to provide the highest level of protection for your information, we may disclose personally identifiable information about you to third parties in limited circumstances, including: (1) with your consent; or (2) when we have a good faith belief it is required by law, such as pursuant to a subpoena or other judicial or administrative order.

If we are required by law to disclose the information that you have submitted, we will attempt to provide you with prior notice (unless we are prohibited or it would be futile) that a request for your information has been made in order to give you an opportunity to object to the disclosure. We will attempt to provide this notice by email, if you have given us an email address, or by postal mail if you have entered a postal address. If you do not challenge the disclosure request, we may be legally required to turn over your information.

In addition, we will independently object to requests for access to information about users of our site that we believe to be improper and we have done so.

Updating or Removing Your Information

You may choose to correct, update, access, or delete the membership information you have submitted to us by sending an email requesting changes to erynn@emme.com.

Your consent to our use of your information is very important to us.

Data Storage and Retention

Emme’s server logs are stored and retained as explained above in the section on logging.

Information submitted through the app or website, including records of the actions you take, is retained until you choose to delete your account. Email subscriptions information is retained until you unsubscribe from the mailing list(s).

If you communicate with Emme, such as through info@Emme.org, we keep records of those communications indefinitely, pursuant to our document retention policy (described below).

Financial records of donations and other transactions are retained indefinitely, pursuant to our document retention policy.

Our document retention policy provides that Emme generally retains documents for the period of their immediate or current use, unless longer retention is necessary to comply with contractual or legal requirements. However, data storage periods are based on Emme's assessment of its needs and might include retaining some documents for historical reference and retaining some documents because Emme has insufficient organizational resources available to dedicate to their review and destruction, and/or other pertinent factors.

If we inadvertently collect more personal information than intended, we endeavor to delete the extraneous information. When we no longer need to retain information or when deleting information on request, we endeavor to remove all copies. However, please understand that deleted information may continue to persist on backup media.

Contacting Emme

If you have any questions about our privacy and data protection practices, you can reach Emme at:

Emme
221 Third Street Suite 201
Newport RI 02840

If our processing of your personal data is covered by EU law, you may also lodge a complaint with the relevant data protection supervisory authority for your country of residence.

Security

Emme employs industry standard security measures to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control, including appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, such as the pseudonymization and encryption of personal data, data backup systems, and engaging security professionals to evaluate our systems’ effectiveness. Emme has turned on HTTPS by default.

Although we make good faith efforts to store information collected by Emme in a secure operating environment, we cannot guarantee complete security.

Changes to Our Policies

Emme's Privacy Policy may change from time to time. However, any revised privacy policy will be consistent with Emme's mission. If we make any substantive changes to our policies, we will place notice in our newsletter and post notice of changes on this page.

This privacy policy was last updated February 10, 2025