Privacy Policy

We believe privacy is a right, and make efforts to protect your privacy and collect as little information needed. This privacy policy aims to describe the choices available to you regarding our use of personal information and how you can access and update this information.

By default, to provide you service through our website and newsletter (collectively "Services), a minimal amount of information is collected from you. You do not need to volunteer any more information than the minimum required to simply view pubically available portions of our Services, and the information we do collect automatically is not personally identifiable. This privacy policy does not apply to other services, websites, or companies we do not manage (collectively "Third-Parties") and individuals we do not employ or manage.

If you have questions about how we use your data, feel free to ask for more information.

What Information We Collect

Cookies and Similar Technologies

We may recieve information from cookies or similar technologies if you allow them. We make a concsious choice to use the minimum number of cookies to provide you our website, and do not use them to track users outside of our website. We do not using tracking software and avoid using any services that may provide additional cookies beyond those that we directly implement. However, we may not always be aware if any potential Third-party features added into the website might create a cookie. Cookies are small files saved to your computer's hard drive that track, save and store information about your interactions and usage of our website. For our purposes, they are simply used to ensure continuation of existing sessions, preferences, and settings. You may clear this information as you see fit, and you may disable the use of cookies through your browser settings. Do note that disabling cookies completely may break functionality of this site.

Contact and Communications

Users contacting this website and/or its owners, or sign up for our newsletter, do so at their own discretion and provide any such personal details requested at their own risk. Your personal information is kept private and stored securely until a time it is no longer required or has no use. With exception of our newletter provider, we do not share any information given with any Third-parties unless explicit permission is given.

Please review the Additional Privacy Disclosures later in this document regarding our newsletter provider, Mailchimp. By submitting your information on our website to sign up for the newsletter, you acknowledge that you have read the disclosure regarding our newsletter provider.

Log and Usage Data

We may log information about your access and use of our Services. This may include your IP address, user-agent string, browser type, operating system, referral URLs, device information, device settings, mobile carrier name, pages visited, links clicked, requested URLs, and search terms. We do not share the information we collect with Third-Parties, and proactively delete this information on a regular basis.

Location Information

We do not attempt to get precise location for any user of our Services, but may infer a general location from IP addresses collected or location information voluntarily provided by other means. This information is purged as necessary on a regular basis, and any location information not purged is anonymized.

What Information is Used For

The information we collect from you may be used in the following ways:

• To provide core functionality of our Services;
• To personalize our Services so that features match your preferences and settings; and
• To communicate with you regarding Mississippi Women in High Performance Computing.

Who Information is Shared With and How

We aim to share a little information with Third-Parties as possible, and attempt to protect your privacy as much as possible. We do not sell your information to any Third-Parties, and never intend to. However, we may share your personal information in the following ways:

• With your consent or direction.
• With Third-Party applications. You may access our Services through a Third-party application, such as a mail client or browser. You are in control of which applications have access to your information.
• With our service providers. We may share information with vendors, consultants, and other service providers who need access to such information to carry out work for us. Their use of personal information will be subject to appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
• To comply with the law. We may share information in response to a request for information if we believe disclosure is in accordance with, or required by, any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request, including, but not limited to, meeting national security or law enforcement requirements. To the extent the law allows it, we will attempt to provide you with prior notice before disclosing your information in response to such a request.
• In an emergency. We may share information if we believe it's necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily harm to a person.

How Information is Protected

We implement a variety of security measures to maintain the safety of your personal information when you enter, submit, or access your personal information. Among other things, your browser session are secured with SSL. We use TLS encryption when sending messages between our email servers and others, and require it to recieve messages as well.

Data Retention Policy

Information is stored as long as necessary for the purpose(s) for which it was originally collected, and we may retain certain information for legitimate purposes or as required by law. Information that is not necessary for legitimate use as outlined in this privacy policy or for legal reasons is purged on a regular basis.

Additional Privacy Disclosures

The following disclosures are for Third-Party services that we use to provide you with our Services. Mechanisms are being developed to aid in better locking down these third parties for your privacy protection.

Mailchimp Email Marketing Service

We use Mailchimp’s email marketing services to manage our newsletter and communicate with our subscribers. When you sign up via our subscription forms, Mailchimp collects and processes personal data such as your email address, name, and any other information you provide. Besides your email address, none of this information is mandatory. Mailchimp may also automatically gather information related to device type, IP address, and engagement (like when you open or click a message) to help optimize service performance and ensure security.

Mailchimp processes this information in accordance with its Global Privacy Statement and Data Processing Addendum, which detail the collection, use, storage, and security practices they employ. We rely on Mailchimp solely for managing our communications; we do not have direct access to the personal data stored on their servers. For additional details regarding Mailchimp’s data protection measures and privacy practices, please refer to Mailchimp’s Legal Policies available at https://mailchimp.com/legal/.

Adobe Font Service

The Adobe Font Service is provided to us as a way to better deliver a consistent branding across our website. Adobe collects information such as fonts served, service providing the fonts, the application requesting the fonts, the server serving the fonts, the hostname of the page loading the fonts, the amount of time it takes the web browser to download the font, the amount of time it takes from when the web browser downloads the fonts to when it is applied, if an ad blocker is installed to help identify whether the presense of an ad blocker affects accurate pageview tracking, and os and browser version. Additionally Adobe collects information about our website. Adobe uses this information collected to provision the Adobe Fonts service and diagnose delivery or download problems. The information is also used to pay or fulfill Adobe's contracts with the font foundries whose fonts are utilized. Information collected about us, but not our users, is shared with the font foundaries to enable font foundaries to verify that we have a valid license to use those fonts. Adobe does not use or set cookies in order to serve fonts.

Embeded Content from Third-Parties

Our Services may display some linked content in-line as "embeded media". For example, a link to YouTube may load the linked video within our Service directly from those services to your device so you don't have to leave our Service to see it. In general, we do not control how Third-Party services collect data when they serve you their content directly via embeded media. As a result, embedded content is not covered by this privacy policy but by the policies of the service from which the content is embedded.

Your Rights

In addition to these listed rights, you may have additional rights afforded to you by applicable laws and regulations in the country that you reside. We will not reject any exercise of your rights in regard to your information, and will not discriminate against any user that wishes to exercise their rights.

• You may access your information and change or correct certain information.
• You may request a copy of the personal information we maintain about you.
• You may request that we delete any personal information we maintain about you. Some information may be retained as required by law.
• You may set your browser to remove or reject cookies. If you do so, please note that functionality of our Services for you may be affected.

Additional Information for EEA Users

Users in the European Economic Area have the right to request access to, rectification of, or erasure of their personal data; to data portability in certain circumstances; to request restriction of processing; to object to processing; and to withdraw consent for processing where they have previously provided consent. These rights can be exercised as described in the "Your Rights" section above. EEA users also have the right to lodge a complaint with their local supervisory authority.

As required by applicable law, we collect and process information about individuals in the EEA only where we have a legal basis for doing so. Our legal bases depend on the Services you use and how you use them. We process your information on the following legal bases:

• You have consented for us to do so for a specific purpose;
• We need to process the information to provide you the Services, including to operate the Services, provide customer support and personalized features and to protect the safety and security of the Services;
• It satisfies a legitimate interest (which is not overridden by your data protection interests), such as preventing fraud, ensuring network and information security, enforcing our rules and policies, protecting our legal rights and interests, research and development, personalizing the Services, and marketing and promoting the Services; or
• We need to process your information to comply with our legal obligations.

International Data Transfers

Mississippi Women in High Performance Computing is based in the United States and we process and store information on servers located in the United States. We do not store information on servers and equipment in other countries, however we may transfer information to Third-Party services that may not be located in the United States. By accessing or using the Services or otherwise providing information to us, you consent to the processing, transfer, and storage of information in and to the U.S. and other countries, where you may not have the same rights as you do under local law.

When we transfer the personal data of users in the EEA, UK and/or Switzerland, we rely on the Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission for such transfers or other transfer mechanisms deemed ‘adequate' under applicable laws.

Additional Information for California Users

The California Consumer Privacy Act ("CCPA”), as amended, requires us to provide California residents with some additional information, which we address in this section.

In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:

• Identifiers, such your email address, IP address, and cookie information.
• Internet or other electronic network activity information, such as information about your activity on our Services.
• Geolocation information based on your IP address, or more specific location information if you provide it to us.
• Inferences we make based on other collected data, for purposes such as analytics.

You can find more information about (a) what we collect and sources of that information in the "What Information We Collect” section of this notice, (b) the business and commercial purposes for collecting that information in the "What Information is Used For” section, and (c) the categories of third parties with whom we share that information in the "Who Information is Shared With and How” section.

If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, including the right to opt out of any sales or sharing of your personal information, to request access to and information about our data practices, and to request deletion or correction of your personal information, as well as the right not to be discriminated against for exercising your privacy rights. We do not "sell” or "share” personal information as those terms are defined under the CCPA. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information except to provide you the Services or as otherwise permitted by the CCPA.

You may exercise your rights to access, delete, or correct your personal information as described in the "Your Rights” section of this notice. When you make a request, we will verify your identity by asking you to sign into your account or if necessary by requesting additional information from you. You may also make a rights request using an authorized agent. If you submit a rights request from an authorized agent who does not provide a valid power of attorney, we may ask the authorized agent to provide proof that you gave the agent signed permission to submit the request to exercise rights on your behalf. In the absence of a valid power of attorney, we may also require you to verify your own identity directly with us or confirm to us that you otherwise provided the authorized agent permission to submit the request. If you have any questions or concerns, you may reach us by emailing us at info@mswhpc.org.

Children

Children under the age of 18 are not allowed to submit information to us, however we do not have the ability to confirm the age of any user that submits information to us, as we do not collect that information. If it is made known to us that data has been submitted to use from an under-aged individual, we will promptly remove that information. However, we may still retain some identifying information for our own use to prevent further submission of information from an under-aged individual, such as IP addresses or an email address.

Changes to This Policy

We may make changes to this privacy policy from time to time. If we make changes, we will post the revised privacy policy and update the effective date above. If the changes, in our sole discretion, are material, we may also notify you by we will notify you via any means provided to us when your account(s) were created or through our Services directly. By continuing to access or use our Services on or after the effective date of the revised privacy policy, you agree to be bound by the revised privacy policy.

Contact Us

If you have any other questions or comments about this privacy policy, contact us by sending an email to info@mswhpc.org.

Last Updated: 7 May 2025