Privacy Policy
Updated 30 December 2021
Who We Are
We are the Society of Christian Scholars, an organisation that equips Christian academics to have a missional and redemptive influence for Christ among their students, colleagues, institutions, and academic disciplines.
Our website address is: https://scshub.net/
You may contact us by email at: contact@scshub.net.
The Society of Christian Scholars is committed to respecting the privacy of our website visitors, members, donors, employees, volunteers, and partners. We will not sell information to any third party and will only share data with third parties when absolutely necessary to help with operations of our mission, but not at the expense of anyone’s privacy.
What Personal Data We Collect and Why We Collect It
Data Collected to Manage Your Account
At registration, we collect your name (or pseudonym, where applicable), email address, username, password, and personal information such as your country, academic discipline, and research interests. This information is used to set up your account and get your profile started in order for you to participate in the online community.
Data Collected to Manage Your Membership
At checkout, we may also collect your credit card number, expiration date, and security code. This information is passed along to our payment gateway in order to process your Society membership purchase. The last 4 digits of your credit card number and the expiration date are saved by our site to use for reference and to send you an email if your credit card will expire before the next scheduled payment. If you are redirected to an offsite payment gateway to complete your payment, we may store this information in a temporary session-variable to set up your membership when you return to our site.
Data Collected to Assist You with Building Your Community
We collect data submitted on your profile, including name/pseudonym, discipline; and information related to academics, region and information related to geolocation, gender, and additional affiliations so that you and your colleagues can find each other more easily in our member directory in order to build connections within the site’s online community.
Data Collected to Assist You with Our Services
When you submit forms or request services from us, we collect your email, questions, comments, and information related to your request in order to better understand your needs and to provide you with better service.
Data Collected for Us to Understand You
When you use our site, your information is collected via our analytic tools to help us serve various regions where we have members. Information collected includes IP address, your website activity (such as what pages you visit), the general geolocation from which you visit, the type of device you are using, and other technical information.
Comments
When members leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments-form, the member’s IP address, and browser user agent string to help in detecting spam.
An anonymised 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 other members in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the site, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Members of the site can download and extract any location data from images on the site.
Contact Forms and Other Forms
If you submit a contact form on our site, we collect your email, subject, message, page url you were on, user agent, and IP address. We retain this information indefinitely for customer service and analytic purposes. Collecting this data helps us more accurately assist you by being able to troubleshoot with additional details.
When you submit other contact forms, each form will collect different amounts of personal information, depending on the service. We retain all of this information indefinitely for customer service and analytic purposes.
Cookies
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.
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.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen-options cookies last for one year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after one day.
When you visit our site, some pages give you a choice of language. We use cookies to identify your current language and retain the language you were last using while visiting our site.
Analytics
The Society of Christian Scholars uses Google Analytics as our analytics package to analyse data from users who visit our site. We use this data to understand who our site is reaching, what content is important to our site visitors, and how to better serve you.
If you ever wish to opt out of making your site activity available to Google Analytics, you can opt out by using Google’s opt-out browser add-on. You can find a link to it at this Google Support Page: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/181881?hl=en
Embedded Content from Other Sites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the 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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Who we Share Your Data With
- Google
- When you access our site, some data is sent to Google Analytics. For further details, please view the “Analytics” and “Data Collected for Us to Understand You” sections above. When you fill out forms on our site, most forms will send an email to us at Google Mail or at our internal mail server. Some of our forms also implement Google’s reCAPTCHA service which will send a spam score to Google. Some data is also stored in Google Drive. You can view Google’s Privacy Policy here.
- MailPoet
- When you sign up for an account you agree to subscribe to our newsletter. We send our emails through the MailPoet sending service. This service allows us to track opens and clicks on our emails. We use this information to improve the content of our newsletters. You can view MailPoet’s privacy policy here.
- Salesforce
- When you create an account, purchase a membership, or update your profile, data entered during these stages are sent to Salesforce so we may keep a definitive list of our users and their memberships and automate some emails that we send to you. We do not store any credit card data. You can view Salesforce’s Privacy Policy here.
- Stripe or Paypal
- Zapier
- We use Zapier to integrate our site with external tools such as Salesforce and Google. This allows us to pass data between services that normally do not communicate with one another. You can view Zapier’s Privacy Policy here.
- Zoom
- When you sign up for an account, one of the benefits you receive is the ability to make group video conferences. We send your email address to Zoom to create an account on your behalf so you can have access to a free Zoom Pro license. You can view Zoom’s privacy policy here.
- Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
How long we retain your data
The length of time we retain your data depends on what type of data it is. Contact information needed and transaction data except credit card and bank information is kept for at least 7 years per U.S.A. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations for audit and tax purposes. Contact information needed to send you newsletters and updates about our organisation are kept indefinitely, until you notify us that you no longer wish to receive newsletters or updates. Information related to your user profile is kept indefinitely, until you notify us that you wish for your account to be deleted. Any information you provide to us through forms is kept indefinitely. You can review this information in the Contact Forms and Other Forms section.
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.
How We Protect Your Data and What Data Breach Procedures We Have in Place
The Society of Christian Scholars takes proactive and ongoing steps to protect your data.
- We use SSL/HTTPS throughout our website to encrypt our user communications with the server so personal identifiable information is never captured by third parties without authorization.
- We encrypt your data in transit and use several security rules to prevent the access of your personally identifiable information (PII) on our web server.
- We use a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to ensure only legitimate traffic comes to our web server.
- Our office staff participate in Security Awareness Training to be aware of the current attack-vectors and to learn how to become a better “human firewall” to protect your data.
The Society of Christian Scholars cannot enforce security standards with third parties, but we do our best to secure your data by understanding the security features used by these third parties and by utilising reputable third parties.
In the event of a data breach, System Administrators will immediately work to identify the cause of the breach, working with vendors if needed, and to notify affected users by email. Affected users may also be asked to reset their password on our site.
