Last Updated: August 2024

Welcome, and thank you for your interest in Taproot Foundation, Inc. (“Taproot”, “we,” or “us”). This Privacy Policy applies to the Personal Information that we gather from you through our website at www.taprootfoundation.org, as well as related websites and communications on which a link to this Privacy Policy is displayed, or during one of our events (collectively, our “Services”). This Policy describes how we use and disclose such information, your rights and choices with respect to your information, and how you can contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

1. Personal Information We Collect

We may collect Personal Information about you directly from you and from third parties, as well as automatically through your use of the Services. In this Policy, “Personal Information” means any information relating to an identified or identifiable individual.

Information Provided by You

• Applicants. If you apply to be a volunteer, you may provide us with Personal Information, including contact information such as your name, email address, physical address, phone number; and employment related information such as your resume, employment history, online portfolio, and your skills.

• Volunteers. If you are accepted as a Taproot volunteer and participate in any Taproot pro bono projects or events, information related to your participation will be collected by Taproot, such as the project or event you’ve worked on and your capacity therein. As an active volunteer, you may also choose to submit additional information to us, such as by posting content within our online community or by adding information to your account, including your public LinkedIn profile or your photo.

• Donors. If you choose to donate to Taproot, you may be required to provide credit card or other billing information needed to process your donation.

• Client contacts. If you wish to have your nonprofit organization considered for projects or events, you may, as the contact for your organization, provide us with contact information.

• All users. When you complete a survey, contact us via a contact form, email, comment on a blog posting, or by other means, you may provide us with Personal Information, such as contact information, and the contents and nature of your correspondence with us.

Where required by applicable law, we indicate whether and why you must provide us with your Personal Information, as well as the consequences of failing to do so.

Information Collected via Automated Means

• Cookie Information. When you use our Services, we and third parties may automatically collect information about your visit via cookies, beacons, invisible tags, and similar technologies (collectively “cookies”) in your browser and on emails sent to you. This information may include Personal Information, such as your IP address, web browser, device type, and the web pages that you visit just before or just after you use the Services, as well as information about your interactions with the Services, such as the date and time of your visit, and where you have clicked. You can find more information about how we use cookies in the section How We Use Personal Information below.

Information Collected from Other Sources

• Third Parties. We may obtain information, including Personal Information, from third parties and sources other than the Services, such as our partners and advertisers. If we combine or associate information from other sources with Personal Information that we collect through the Services, we will treat the combined information as Personal Information in accordance with this Policy.

• Referrals. As part of our referral program, we request contact information of our users’ friends and family whom they think would like to receive information about Taproot. Only our staff will contact the persons referred to us. We use and treat information our users provide about their referrals in the same way we use and treat information about users who register directly with Taproot.

2. How We Use Personal Information

We use Personal Information we collect through the Services as necessary for the following purposes:

• Providing the Services. We use Personal Information to operate, maintain, enhance, and provide features of the Services.

• Events. We use Personal Information to staff, manage, and implement projects or events.

• Communicating with you. We use contact information and other Personal Information to send you information relating to Taproot, your professional interests or the pro bono/nonprofit sectors, including but not limited to information regarding upcoming or ongoing projects or events, educational resources, and content from the online community.

• Marketing. We may use your email address and other Personal Information to send marketing communications, including updates on promotions and events relating to products and services offered by us and by third parties we work with. Generally, you have the ability to opt out of receiving any promotional communications as described below under Your Rights and Choices. Where required under applicable law, we will only send you promotional emails with your opt-in consent.

• Evaluating applications. We use contact information and employment related information to complete your application process if you apply to become a Taproot volunteer, engage in a project, or participate in an event on behalf of your organization.

• Administrative and legal purposes. We may use your Personal Information to ensure that you are abiding by our Terms of Service, to notify you of major Services updates, to respond to your communications, or to address any administrative or legal issues pertaining to Taproot, including but not limited to intellectual property infringement, defamation, or rights of privacy issues.

• Understanding usage and improving the Services. We may use your contact information and other Personal Information to contact you to answer feedback and surveys, notably to improve our marketing and promotional efforts. We use the information that we collect through the Services to understand and analyze the usage trends and preferences of our users, to improve the Services, and to develop new products, services, features, and functionalities.

• Partnerships. We may use your Personal Information, including information related your use of our programs, to create reports, funding proposals and other promotional material to improve, increase the number of, or strengthen partnerships with corporate sponsors or non-profits.

• Aggregation. We may aggregate or otherwise de-identify Personal Information and use the resulting information for other business purposes.

How We Use Cookies and Similar Technologies

We and third-party service providers may use the following cookies to collect Personal Information:

• Functional cookies. Some cookies are strictly necessary to make our Services available to you. For example, to provide the chat and login functionality; and to remember your consent and privacy choices. We cannot provide you with the Services without this type of cookies.

• Analytical cookies. We also use cookies for website analytics purposes in order to operate, maintain, and improve our Services. We may use our own analytics cookies or use third-party analytics providers such as Google Analytics to collect and process certain analytics data on our behalf. These providers may also collect information about your use of other websites, apps, and online resources.

Where required by applicable law, we obtain your consent to use cookies. You can find more information about your rights and choices, and how to opt out of the use of certain cookies in the section Your Rights and Choices below.

Our Use of European Personal Information

If you are located in the European Economic Area, we only process your Personal Information when we have a valid “legal basis”, including when:

• You have consented to the use of your Personal Information, for example to send you marketing communications or to use cookies.

• We need your Personal Information to provide you with the Services, for example to respond to your inquiries, complete your registration for an event, or to complete your application process.

• We have a legal obligation to use your Personal Information, for example to comply with a court order.

• We or a third party have a legitimate interest in using your Personal Information. In particular, we have a legitimate interest in using your Personal Information for development and internal analytics purposes; and otherwise to improve the safety, security, and performance of our Services. We only rely on our or a third party’s legitimate interests to process your Personal Information when these interests are not overridden by your rights and interests.

3. When We Disclose Information

Except as described in this Policy, we will not disclose your information that we collect on the Services to third parties without your consent. We may disclose information to third parties if you consent to us doing so, as well as in the following circumstances:

Applicants and Volunteers

• Applications and project staffing. If you apply to participate as a volunteer, we may disclose the information you provide us to senior-level volunteers: (i) as part of your application process to become a Taproot volunteer; and (ii) for the purposes of staffing volunteers to work on pro bono projects. Typically, only a small fraction of volunteers is constituted of senior-level volunteers. Volunteers who have been assigned to certain pro bono projects may have access to the contact information of the other volunteers who are participating in the same pro bono project, if applicable. Taproot sometimes works with third parties to provide Taproot’s Services to such third-parties’ employees. If your employer is such a third party, we may also disclose the information you provide to us, including Personal Information, to your employer.

• Reporting. We may include your Personal Information, including information related your use of our programs, in reports, funding proposals and other promotional materials we provide to your employer.

Community Participants

• Online community. Our online community is, or likely will be made, available to other volunteers, staff members, and employees of our nonprofit or corporate partners. If you participate in our online community or consent to us disclosing your information to the online community, the following information may be made available to the other participants: (i) any content posted within our online community; (ii) contact information that you have submitted to us; (iii) any optional information that you have provided to us for this purpose, including your photo and public LinkedIn profile; and (iv) information related to your involvement with Taproot and its projects or events, including the projects or events you’ve worked on, the nature of such projects or events, and your role within the relevant volunteer teams.

• Public communications. Content you have posted in our online community may be made publicly available in the form of a newsletter, email or other form of communication. Please note that Taproot may include your first name, photo, employment related information, and background information with the publicly available user content but will not include any other Personal Information without your consent.

Client Contacts

• Volunteers. We disclose contact information of our client contacts to our volunteers.

All Users

• Any information that you voluntarily choose to post to a publicly accessible area of the Services, will be available to anyone who has access to that content, including other users.

• We work with third-party service providers to provide website development, hosting, maintenance, and other services for us. These third parties may have access to or process your information as part of providing those services for us. Generally, we limit the information provided to these service providers to that which is reasonably necessary for them to perform their functions on our behalf and we require them to agree to maintain the confidentiality of such information.

• We may make certain information available to third parties for various purposes, including (i) compliance with various reporting obligations; (ii) for business or marketing purposes; or (iii) to assist such parties in understanding our users’ interests, habits, and usage patterns for certain programs, content, services, advertisements, promotions, and/or functionality available through the Services. Where required under applicable law, we will only use anonymized or aggregated information for these purposes.

• We may disclose your information if required to do so by law or in the good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with applicable laws, in response to a court order, judicial or other government subpoena or warrant, or to otherwise cooperate with law enforcement or other governmental agencies.

• We also reserve the right to disclose your information that we believe, in good faith, is appropriate or necessary to (i) take precautions against liability; (ii) protect ourselves or others from fraudulent, abusive, or unlawful uses or activity; (iii) investigate and defend ourselves against any third-party claims or allegations; (iv) protect the security or integrity of the Services and any facilities or equipment used to make the Services available; or (v) protect our property or other legal rights including, but not limited to, enforcement of our agreements, or the rights, property, or safety of others.

• Information about our users, including Personal Information, may be disclosed and otherwise transferred to an acquirer, successor or assignee as part of any merger, acquisition, debt financing, sale of assets, or similar transaction, as well as in the event of an insolvency, bankruptcy, or receivership in which information is transferred to one or more third parties as one of our business assets.

• We may share Personal Information with our affiliates, subsidiaries, and branch offices to which it is reasonably necessary or desirable for us to disclose Personal Information in order to carry out the above-mentioned information processing purposes.

4. Your Rights and Choices

You may, of course, decline to share certain Personal Information with us, in which case we may not be able to provide to you some of the features and functionality of the Services. You may update or correct your account information and preferences at any time by accessing your account preferences page on the Service. If you wish to access, amend, or delete any other Personal Information we hold about you, you may contact us using the contact details at the end of this Policy. Please note that while any changes you make will be reflected in active user databases instantly or within a reasonable period of time, we may retain all information you submit for backups, archiving, prevention of fraud and abuse, analytics, satisfaction of legal obligations, or where we otherwise reasonably believe that we have a legitimate reason to do so, as permitted under applicable data protection law.

If you receive commercial email from us, you may unsubscribe at any time by following the instructions contained within the email. You may also opt out from receiving commercial email from us and any other promotional communications that we may send to you from time to time, by contacting us using the contact details at the end of this Policy. We may allow you to view and modify settings relating to the nature and frequency of promotional communications that you receive from us in the user account functionality of the Services.

Please be aware that if you opt out of receiving commercial email from us or otherwise modify the nature or frequency of promotional communications you receive from us, it may take up to ten business days for us to process your request and you may receive promotional communications from us that you have opted out from during that period. Additionally, even after you opt out from receiving commercial messages from us, you will continue to receive administrative messages from us regarding the Services.

Your Cookie Choices

You have the following choices with regard to the use of cookies and similar technologies.

• Browser settings. Many web browsers allow you to manage your preferences relating to cookies. You can set your browser to refuse cookies or delete certain cookies. You may be able to manage other technologies in the same way that you manage cookies using your browser’s preferences. Please note that if you choose to block cookies, doing so may impair the use of our Services.

• Google cookies. You can learn about Google’s practices by going to https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/ and opt out by downloading the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, available at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout or via Google’s Ads Settings or Ad Settings for mobile apps.

• Do Not Track. We do not specifically respond to Do Not Track (“DNT”) signals. However, some third-party websites do keep track of your browsing activities, including across other websites on the Internet, which enables these websites to tailor what they present to you. Your browser may allow you to set a DNT signal on your browser so that these third parties know you do not want to be tracked.

Your European Privacy Rights

If you are located in the European Economic Area, you have additional rights described below.

• You may request access to and receive information about the Personal Information we maintain about you, update and correct inaccuracies in your Personal Information, restrict or object to the processing of your Personal Information, have the information anonymized or deleted, as appropriate, or exercise your right to data portability to easily transfer your Personal Information to another company. In addition, you may also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, including in your country of residence, place of work, or where an incident took place.

• You may withdraw any consent you previously provided to us regarding the processing of your Personal Information, at any time, and free of charge. We will apply your preferences going forward and this will not affect the lawfulness of the processing before you withdrew your consent.

You may exercise these rights by contacting us using the contact details at the end of this Policy. Please note that there are exceptions and limitations to each of these rights, and that while any changes you make will be reflected in active user databases instantly or within a reasonable period of time, we may retain information for backups, archiving, prevention of fraud and abuse, analytics, satisfaction of legal obligations, or where we otherwise reasonably believe that we have a legitimate reason to do so.

Your California Privacy Rights

If you are located in California you may have the following additonal rights under CCPA/CPRA:

• Right to confirm we process your personal information and, if so, to request we disclose to you:

• The categories of personal information we collected about you

• The categories of sources from which the personal information is collected

• The business or commercial purpose for collecting, selling, or sharing personal information

• The categories of third parties to whom we disclose personal information

• The specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you

• Right to access — which may include a portable copy — correct, complete, or delete specific pieces of personal information we hold about you.

• Right to limit our use and disclosure of your sensitive personal information.

• Right to opt out of the sale of personal information, as sale is defined under CCPA/CPRA.

• Right to opt out of the sharing of personal information, as sharing is defined under CCPA/CPRA.

• Right not to receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under CCPA/CPRA.

• Additionally, California Civil Code Section 1798.83 may permit you the right to request information regarding the personal information about you we disclose to third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes.

5. International Visitors

The Services are hosted in the United States and are intended for visitors located within the U.S. If you choose to use the Services from regions of the world with laws governing data collection and use that may differ from U.S. law, then please note that you are transferring your Personal Information outside of those regions to the U.S. for storage and processing, which does not have the same data protection laws as your jurisdiction. When we transfer your Personal Information to the U.S., we take steps to comply with applicable data protection law, in particular legal requirements regarding adequate protection for data transfers. Also, we may transfer your data from the U.S. to other countries or regions in connection with storage and processing of data, fulfilling your requests, and operating the Services. By providing any information, including Personal Information, on or to the Services, you consent to such transfer, storage, and processing.

European Visitors

If you are located in the European Economic Area, we will comply with applicable EEA data protection law when transferring your Personal Information outside of the EEA. We may transfer your Personal Information to countries which have been found to provide adequate protection by the EU Commission (e.g., Switzerland, Canada), use contractual protections for the transfer of Personal Information, or transfer to recipients who have certified to the Privacy Shield or adopted Binding Corporate Rules. For more information about how we transfer Personal Information outside of the EEA, or to obtain a copy of the contractual safeguards we use for such transfers, you may contact us as specified below.

6. Children’s Privacy

Our Services are for general audiences and are not directed to children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect Personal Information from children under the age of 13 without obtaining parental consent. If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use or access the Services at any time or in any manner. If we learn that Personal Information has been collected on the Services from persons under 13 years of age and without verifiable parental consent, then we will take the appropriate steps to delete this information. If you are a parent or guardian and discover that your child under 13 years of age has obtained an account on the Services, then you may alert us using the contact details at the end of this Policy and request that we delete that child’s Personal Information from our systems.

7. Retention

We take measures to delete your Personal Information or keep it in a form that does not permit identifying you when this information is no longer necessary for the purposes for which we process it, unless we are required by law to keep this information for a longer period. We generally do not retain Personal Information for longer than 7 years after the end of our relationship with you. When determining the specific retention period, we take into account various criteria, such as the type of service provided to you, the nature and length of our relationship with you, and mandatory retention periods provided by law and the relevant statute of limitations.

8. Third-Party Services

The Services may contain features or links to websites and services provided by third parties. Any information you provide on third-party sites or services is provided directly to the operators of such services and is subject to those operators’ policies, if any, governing privacy and security, even if accessed through the Services. We are not responsible for the content or privacy and security practices and policies of third-party sites or services to which links or access are provided through the Services. We encourage you to learn about third-parties’ privacy and security policies before providing them with information.

9. Information Security

We use certain physical, managerial, and technical safeguards that are designed to improve the integrity and security of Personal Information that we collect and maintain. We cannot, however, ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us or store on the Service and you do so at your own risk.

10. Changes and Updates to this Policy

Please revisit this page periodically to stay aware of any changes to this Policy, which we may update from time to time. If we modify this Policy, we will make it available through the Services, and indicate the date of the latest revision. In the event that the modifications materially alter your rights or obligations hereunder, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you of the change. For example, we may send a message to your email address, if we have one on file, or generate a pop-up or similar notification when you access the Services for the first time after such material changes are made. Your continued use of the Services after the revised Policy has become effective indicates that you have read, understood, and agreed to the current version of this Policy.

11. Our Contact Information

Unless otherwise indicated, Taproot is the entity responsible or “data controller” for the processing of your Personal Information as described in this Policy. Please contact us with any questions or comments about this Policy, your Personal Information, our use and disclosure practices, or your consent choices by email at privacy@taprootfoundation.org.

Tapfound Inc.

82 Nassau St. #62288, NY NY 10038

email: privacy@taprootfoundation.org

telephone: 212-257-7660