Welcome, and thank you for your interest in the OE Patients website, a noncommercial service providing information on living well with vision loss, and a joint work by Association for Macular Diseases, Inc. and Ophthalmic Edge.

This Policy is subjected to our Terms of Use. Capitalized terms used but not defined in this Policy have the meaning given to them in our Terms.

We recognize the importance of maintaining your privacy. We value our relationship with you and we appreciate the trust you show in providing information to us. Explaining how we collect, use and protect customer information is, therefore, of utmost importance to us. By visiting this site, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy.

We do not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or non-affiliated companies except as disclosed in this Privacy Policy. Your information will not be shared without your permission.

Information Collected From You

This section of our privacy policy applies to the different types of information we collect from or through the Services.

The information that we collect from you helps us personalize and continually improve upon your experience on our Services. We may also process data upon your consent, asking for it as appropriate. You have the option not to provide certain information; however, withholding information may prevent you from being able to take full advantage of some of our Site’s features.

User-Provided Information

When you visit our Site, we automatically receive and store any information you enter on our Site. For example, you provide information when you create an account, log into the Site, fill in your account profile, communicate with us by phone or e-mail, complete a questionnaire, post comments, submit a donation or any number of other ways.

As a result of those actions, you might supply us with such information as your name, address, and phone numbers; transactional information based on your activities on the Site and content you generate or that relates to your account. This information might also result from your participation in community discussions, your correspondence through the Site, and correspondence with us.

Automatically-Collected Information

Whenever you interact with us, we collect and analyze some data about you, which may include the full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) click stream to, through and from our website, including date and time and cookie data. Your IP address is used for internal use only and helps us diagnose problems with our server and administer our Site.

We also automatically track certain information about your activities on our Site. These may include: browser type and version, operating system and platform; statistics on page views, traffic to and from the Site; and standard web log information. We use this information to do internal research on your interests and to help us better understand and serve you.

If you are a registered user, we link this automatically-collected data to your personally-identifiable information. We may collect and measure session information, including page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), and methods used to browse away from the page.

Cookies

We also store certain types of information when you interact with us on our Site. For example, we use “cookies” and can obtain certain information from your web browser. By transferring these alphanumeric identifiers or “cookies” that your browser creates at our request in an approved and standardized place on your computer, we assign you a unique customer code and records information about your activity on our Site.

When you visit or return to our site, we read the cookie to identify you as one of our users. This enables us to recall orders or preferences you have selected and to identify you as a registered member, if applicable. The cookie also enables us to recall your past activities, post your account data, and tailor site elements to you.

How We Use The Information We Collect

We use the information that we collect in a range of ways, including the following:

Operations

We use the information to operate, maintain, and provide all features of the Services, to serve the information that you request, to respond to comments and questions and to provide support to users of the Services.

Improvements

We use the information to understand, process and analyze the usage trends and preferences of our Users, in order to improve our Services, and to develop new features and functionalities.

Communications

If we have your email address, we may use it to contact you for administrative purposes such as customer service, or with updates on news, educational information and events. You have the ability to opt out of receiving any communications as described below, under “Your Choices.”

Cookies, Tracking Technologies and Pixels

We use automatically-collected information and other information collected on the Services through cookies and such technologies to: personalize our Service, such as recalling a User’s information so that you will not have to re-enter it during subsequent visits; monitor and analyze the effectiveness of Services; and monitor site usage metrics such as total number of visitors and pages viewed.

A custom audience pixel is a tiny piece of Javascript code incorporated into each of our Site pages. This piece of code helps to transmit application-specific events and user-defined data to Facebook. The custom audience pixels are used by us to record information about the way visitors use our Site.

Information recorded includes the user’s browser session, along with a hashed version of the Facebook ID and URL viewed. This allows us to serve you with Facebook ads tailored to your interests; which in our case, is the promotion of our educational articles and seminars. The user information is deleted after 180 days, until the user visits the Site again.

We respect your privacy. No personal information about individual visitors or identities are disclosed or discovered.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to measure and evaluate traffic on the Site, and to create user navigation reports for our Site administrators. Google operates individually from us and has its own privacy policy, which we recommend that you review. Google may use the information collected through Google Analytics to evaluate activity on our Site. For more information, see Google Analytics Privacy and Data Sharing.

The data collected is only used to remedy technical issues; administer the Site and evaluate visitor preferences; and is in a non-identifiable form.

We also use ActiveCampaign, an email marketing tool, to measure and evaluate email traffic, as well as user activity (such as clicks), to our delivered email communications. These analytics are used to create reports for our team. The data is used to tailor our marketing activities, and to further shape our email communications to better serve your interests.

ActiveCampaign operates individually from us and has its own privacy policy, which we recommend that you review. For more information, see their Privacy Policy.

To Whom We Disclose Information

Except as described in this Privacy Policy, we will not disclose the personal information collected or stored through our 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:

Unrestricted Information

Any information that you choose to submit or publish, such as a comment, will be available to any User who has access to that content.

Service Providers

To carry out certain organizational functions, such as e-mail delivery, we sometimes hire other companies to perform these functions on our behalf. These companies have access to the information needed to perform their functions, but are required to keep it secure and confidential and do not use it for any other purpose than completing their contractual requirements to us.

As a part of the normal process of completing your donation, we may provide your personal data to a third-party payment processor, for example. Any credit card or payment information you submit is used for billing the donation transaction for which the information was submitted and may also be used to bill future renewal transactions, as in the case of periodic donation requests.

Non Personally Identifiable Information

We may use aggregate, non-personally identifying information for purposes that we deem necessary. For instance, we will use this non-identifying and aggregate information to better design or add features to our Site. However, in these instances, we do not disclose anything that could be used to identify you.

Law Enforcement, Legal Process and Compliance

Other than as described in this Privacy Policy, we will not disclose any account or personal information about you with anyone except in order to enforce our Terms of Use, to protect our rights or property or others, or if we are compelled to by law.

Your Choices

Access, Correction, Deletion

We respect your privacy rights and provide you with reasonable access to the Personal Data that you may have provided through your use of the Services. If you wish to access Personal Data we hold about you, or to request that we delete or transfer any information about you that we have received from an Integrated Service, you may contact us using the information in the “How to Contact Us” section.

You may update or delete your Account preferences at any time by contacting us. Please note that while any changes made will be reflected in active databases or within a reasonable period of time, we may retain your submitted information for backup purposes, archiving, prevention of fraud and abuse, analytics, or in situations with legitimate reason to do so.

You may decline to share certain Personal Data with us, in which case we may not be able to provide to you some of the features of the Services.

At any time, you may object to the processing of your Personal Data, on legitimate grounds, except if otherwise permitted by applicable law. You also have a right to lodge a complaint with data protection authorities. If you believe your right to privacy granted by applicable data protection laws has been infringed upon, please contact us.

Navigation Information

You may opt out from the collection of information about your Site visit by Google Analytics by using the Google Analytics Opt-out feature.

Opting Out from Communications

If you receive emails from us, you may unsubscribe at any time by following the instructions within the email or by sending a request email to the address provided in the “How to Contact Us” section.

Please note that if you opt out of receiving emails from us, it may take up to ten (10) business days for us to process your request. If you have an existing Account on the Site, you may continue to receive Site administrative messages from us regarding the Service.

Third-Party Services

The Services may contain features or links to third-party web sites and services. Any information you provide on third-party sites or services is provided to the operators of those services and is subject to their privacy and security policies, even if accessed through the Services. We encourage you to learn about third parties’ privacy and security policies before providing them with information.

Data Security

We follow accepted industry standards to protect your information submitted to us, both during transmission and once it’s received by us. We also maintain administrative, technical and physical safeguards to protect your data against accidental or unlawful destruction, accidental loss, unauthorized disclosure or access, and other unlawful forms of processing of your data in our possession.

This includes, for example, firewalls, password protection and other access and authentication controls. We use SSL technology to encrypt data during transmission through public internet.

However, no method of transmission electronic storage over the Internet is 100% secure. We cannot ensure the complete security of any information you transmit to us or store on the Services, and you do so at your own risk. We also cannot guarantee that such information may not be accessed, disclosed, altered, or destroyed by breach of any of our l safeguards.

If you believe your data has been compromised, please contact us using the information in the “How to Contact Us” section. If we learn of a security breach, we will take measures to inform you.

Data Retention

We keep the Data collected from a User for as long as the User’s account is active or otherwise for a period of time as long as we need it to fulfill the purposes for which we have initially collected it, unless otherwise required by law. We will retain and use information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. If you are a visitor to our Site, we will retain your information for as long as necessary.

Children’s Privacy

Protecting the privacy of minors and young children is important to us. For that reason, we do not knowingly collect or solicit personal information from anyone under the age of 13. In the event that we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13, we will delete that information.

Settings

Please be aware that no security measures are perfect. We are not responsible for the breach of any privacy settings or security measures on the Services. Additionally, we cannot control the actions of other third-party users with whom you may choose to share your information.

Further, even after information posted on the Services is removed, caching and/or archiving services may have preserved that information, and/or other users or third parties may have copied or stored the information available on the Services. Consequently, we cannot and do not guarantee that information you post on or transmit to the Services will not be viewed by unauthorized persons.

Social Media Widgets

Social media features, such as social sharing buttons integrated with Facebook and Twitter, as well as other widgets, run on our Site. These features may collect your IP address and which page you are visiting on our Site, and may set tracking technologies such as cookies or custom audience pixels that allow the feature to function properly.

Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our Site. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy of the organization providing it.

Changes and Updates to this Policy

We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we do this, we will post the changes to this page and indicate at the top of the page the date the Policy was last revised. You can access this document at any time by selecting the Privacy link located at the bottom of every page on our Site.

Unless stated otherwise, our current Privacy Notice applies to all information that we have about you and your account. Your use of our Services after changes are made to this Policy means that you agree to be bound by such changes.

We stand behind the promises we make, however, and will never materially change our policies and practices to make them less protective of customer information collected in the past without the consent of affected customers.

How to Contact Us

You may contact us with any questions, concerns or comments in the following ways:

Our postal address is:

Ophthalmic Edge
c/o Dr. Yale Fisher
950 Third Avenue 3rd Floor
NY, NY 10022

We can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].