Coblentz Society Privacy Policy

The Coblentz Society recognizes the right to privacy of individuals. We aim to minimize the data collected, and comply with all applicable laws and directives. The European Union passed a regulation on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union (the GDPR (EU) 2016/679). We have updated our privacy policy to comply with this new regulation.

Data Subject Rights

Data Breach Notification

In case of any data breaches, we will notify you within 72 hours of first having become aware of the breach.

Right to Access

We will provide confirmation as to whether or not personal data concerning you is being processed, where and for what purpose. Further, we shall provide a copy of the personal data, free of charge, in an electronic format. The membership data Coblentz stores can be viewed online through the membership portal or by contacting the membership manager.

Right to be Forgotten

Also known as Data Erasure, the right to be forgotten entitles you to withdraw consent, and have us erase your personal data, have us cease further dissemination of the data, and have third parties halt processing of your data obtained through the Coblentz Society.

Data Portability

You have the right to receive the personal data concerning yourself, which you have previously provided in a commonly used and machine readable format. This data can be retrieved through the membership portal or by contacting the membership manager.

Privacy by Design

Our organization follows the principles of data protection from the onset of the designing of our systems. We hold and process only the data absolutely necessary for the completion of our duties (data minimisation), as well as limit the access to personal data to those needing to carry out our business.

We use membership data to carry out our organizational mandate, to foster the understanding and application of vibrational spectroscopy. The main ways we do this are organizing conference sessions, awards, and membership meetings. We periodically send out messages, and this requires us to retain and process personal contact information (telephone numbers, email, print mailing address, etc). We store data related to payments made, and use this to renew memberships and to send out automated reminder emails. We also have photos of some events posted on the web site, and publish newsletters related to society activities. We retain your data indefinitely, until we receive notification that the data should be erased, at which point we will remove your data from all our systems.

We also retain information about award candidates until they are no longer eligible for the awards.

We use several services to facilitate our organizational management. We use the following online tools, where personal information is securely stored:

• Google Sites, Google Analytics, and Google Apps (to manage the web site and society)
• Wild Apricot (to manage the membership portal)
• PayPal (to process payments)

We share our membership data with the FACSS organization (http://facss.org), the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies, of which the Coblentz Society is a founding member. The Coblentz Society annual membership meeting is held at the annual SciX (https://www.scixconference.org) which is organized by FACSS. Coblentz Society contact information is used for SciX marketing purposes to notify members of the meeting. We also allow members to view the contact information for other members from within our secured membership portal. For those members who opt to renew their Coblentz membership through the Society for Applied Spectroscopy, their Coblentz-related data is also stored by the SAS (https://s-a-s.org).

The Coblentz Society does not otherwise share or sell information about our members.

Consent

We are implementing a positive “consent” (opt-in), for all members and individuals for whom we have data to explicitly authorize us to hold and to process their data as described above. Consent may be withdrawn at any time, at no charge.

Data Protection Officer

We do not have, nor are we required to have, a specific data protection officer (DPO), but our membership manager can be contacted regarding accessing or removing your own personal data.

For more information:

EU General Data Protection Regulation Compliance

EU GDRP web site (https://www.eugdpr.org)

Google Analytics Data Retention

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7667196

The Coblentz Society uses a 14 month data retention period, and does not collect advanced metrics. We minimize the amount of data collected through Google Analytics, and periodically review this data to better understand where our web site visitors are from and what the major topical interests are.