Privacy Policy

Effective date: August 1, 2011

Not only does the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) care about the preservation of the Appalachian Trail, we care about online privacy. The ATC values the support of our members, donors, customers and others who support the Appalachian Trail Conservancy through visiting our web sites.  We know that protecting personal information is important to our supporters.  To make our privacy policy easy to find, we make it available in the footer of every page of our website.  This privacy policy serves to inform you of what information we may collect about you, and how we may use that information. Please note that this privacy policy may change from time to time.

Please read the following description of our privacy practices and, if you have any questions, please contact us at info@appalachiantrail.org or via mail at:

Web Master
Appalachian Trail Conservancy
P.O. Box 807
Harpers Ferry, WV 25425

1. General Browsing Information – If you visit our site to read or download information, we may collect and store the following general information in order to analyze trends, gather broad demographic information, and monitor site traffic patterns that can help us further develop and improve the design and functionality of our site: your computer’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, the date and time you access our site, the Internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site; and the various pages that you visit while on our site. We may also use third-party web analytics to help us analyze how users engage with our Site. The General Browsing Information collected will be disclosed to, or collected by, these third-party service providers.

2. Personally-Identifiable Information – We will explicitly notify you before we collect any personally-identifiable information about you (e.g. your name, email address, contact information, credit card number, etc.), and will not collect any information unless you choose to provide it to us.

This information may be shared within our organization for the purposes of responding to any comments or questions you submit and/or providing follow-up information about our organization, or analysis to help us better understand our member and supporter base. We may outsource one or more of these functions.

From time to time, we may send information to you via e-mail from other organizations that we believe may be of interest to you or can provide services that will be of use to you, or we may share your postal address with such organizations. We will not share your email address or telephone number with other organizations. If you receive an e-mail from us, you may choose not to receive such messages in the future by following the “unsubscribe” link which we put in the footer at the bottom of each e-mail. We provide a similar opt out process in our postal mailings.

If you would like to update your membership information, please call 304.535.6331 extension 119.

If you have further questions or concerns, please contact us: info@appalachiantrail.org.

3. Publicly Sharing Your Comments and Stories – Appalachian Trail Conservancy often receives information from website visitors who have successfully participated in our programs and/or employed our resources. In certain instances, we would like to publicly share the comments and stories we receive by posting this information on our website. We will not, however, publicly share ANY information we receive on our website without first receiving the express consent of the individual who submitted the information. Furthermore, we will not post information in any way that specifically identifies the sender of that information unless the sender approves it.

4. Cookies – A cookie is a small file stored on your hard disk drive. Cookies contain information about your visit to the website. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy does not use this cookie to link to personally identifiable information on our site.  Some areas of this site may require use of cookies for proper use. If a user rejects a cookie, they may not be able to use that part of the site.

5. Other Security Measures – We provide our members and supporters with a secure experience when they are ordering memberships, making a donation, or buying nature education merchandise. Our technical security measures include using industry standard 128bit encryption to secure the transfer of data between your browser and our servers.

When our forms ask users to enter sensitive information (such as a credit card number), that information is encrypted and is protected with the best encryption method in the industry -Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). While on a secure page, such as our membership form, the lock icon on the bottom of Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer becomes locked, as opposed to un-locked, or open.

Although we will use reasonable means to safeguard the privacy of your personal information, transmissions made via the Internet cannot be made absolutely secure.

Appalachian Trail Conservancy reserves the right to amend this policy at any time as needed. We will post changes here, so please check back periodically. Changes will take effect when posted and your continued use of the site will constitute your agreement to the changes. Thank you.

Appalachian Trail Conservancy
799 Washington Street
P.O. Box 807 Harpers Ferry, WV 25425-0807