This Privacy Policy explains how the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) collects, uses, and discloses information about you. This Privacy Policy applies when you use our websites, mobile applications, and other online products and services that link to this Privacy Policy (collectively, our Services), contact our customer service team, engage with us on social media, or otherwise interact with us.
As a general premise, 4S collects only such personal data that our website users voluntarily share in order to participate in services and activities we transparently provide.
In the course of doing business with our members, 4S collects various types of personal information. For example, you share information directly with us when you create an account, fill out a form, submit or post content through our services, purchase a membership, communicate with us via third-party platforms, request customer support, or otherwise communicate with us. Very little of this business is done via 4sonline.org. The only personal information routinely collected via this web site is that voluntarily submitted via nominations forms.
The vast majority of our transactions with members and other customers is conducted through intermediary companies. Data collected in such transactions is governed by their respective privacy policies.
All membership and meeting registration transactions are conducted via 4smembers.org, which is entirely based on platform and services provided by yourmembership.com. Their privacy policy can be found at https://www.yourmembership.com/privacy-policy/.
Members may voluntarily provide information to generate a professional profile at 4smembers.org. We make this information available to the community via the member directory as a service. Members have highly granular control over the sharing of this information via their profile in the membership system.
On rare (< once a year) occasions, we have rented our postal mailing list (not email) to legitimate scholarly publishers, allowing them to send free books to members. We have also, on rare occasions, shared anonymized membership and registration data to legitimate researchers studying 4S customer behavior as a window into the field of STS. Other than these specific, circumscribed situations, we have not, do not, and will not share email addresses or other personal information.
Credit card transactions are managed entirely via third-party payment processors, Bluepay and CardePoint. At no time does 4S collect or possess credit card information submitted via the Web. We have administrative access to transaction data, but not to credit card numbers.
Meeting participants submit information via meeting services providers such as All Academic. This information is deemed professional information, not personal information, It is not shared outside of the context of the normal proceedings of a scholarly meeting. Login information to this third party provider is managed through a single sign-on arrangement with YourMembership, referenced above.
Our site may contain links to social media sites, video hosting companies, survey providers, etc. We do not convey any personal data to those companies, and we are not responsible for any tracking they may do via your existing relationship with them. Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
4S also participates on social media as a user, where we are subject to the same business practices that you are. We are not responsible for what you might share with the world via our social media presence.
Cookies are small pieces of text sent by your web browser by our website. A cookie file is stored in your web browser and allows us to recognize you and make your next visit easier and our service more useful to you.
You can control the use of cookies within your individual browser settings. If you reject non-essential cookies, you may still use our website, but your ability to use some features or areas of our website may be limited or unavailable. If you would like to delete cookies or instruct your web browser to delete or refuse cookies, please visit the help pages of your web browser.
We use technologies such as Google Analytics to analyze trends, administer our website, tracking users’ movements around the website, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. We may receive reports based on the use of these technologies by these companies on an aggregated basis. We do not track or retain data on individual behavior.
For more information about 4S privacy policy and data security matters, please contact the 4S Administrator at webmaster@4sonline.org.