The Linguistic Society of America is committed to protecting the privacy of its members and users of its services and has adopted the following policy about the gathering and dissemination of personal information at the LSA’s network of websites, which includes but is not limited to: www.linguisticsociety.org, journals.linguisticsociety.org, semanticsarchive.net, and www.semprag.org.



In general, you may visit the LSA websites without submitting any personal information. However, to provide certain services, the LSA may request personal information in one or more of the ways listed below. Users are told when information is to be collected, and you have the option not to submit this information.

Information We Collect:  We may collect personal information about you, such as your full name, email address, and postal address, when you join the LSA, register for a meeting, make a donation, submit a paper to or register as an online reader of a journal, become registered for one of our publication or meeting services, become listed as a departmental contact or chair in our Directory of Linguistics Programs and Departments, or purchase a product such as an annual meeting sponsorship or an institutional subscription to Language. We or our third-party processors will collect your payment information.

Why We Collect Your Information: If you are an LSA member, an attendee at an Annual Meeting, a donor, a submitter of an article to an LSA publication, or a purchaser of an LSA product, we have some basic information about you. We understand that some of this information is private, which is why we collect personal information only for the following purposes:

  • To establish and maintain a responsible commercial relationship with you. For example, when you apply for membership, we collect information that allows us to confirm your identity so that we can accurately bill and collect for your membership dues.
  • To develop, enhance, market or provide benefits to LSA members and meeting attendees.
  • To send you communications relating to your membership, meeting attendance, donation, purchase, subscription, or use of our publication services.
  • To meet legal requirements or obligations.  For example, we may collect information in response to a court order, or to satisfy a request by a government agency.

How We Use Your Information:  We use the information that we collect to operate and maintain our websites; to track membership, meeting attendance, authorship, and demographic trends in linguistics programs/departments; to send you communications relating to your membership, meeting attendance, donation, purchase, subscription, or use of our publication services; to respond to your questions and concerns; and to fulfill our contractual obligations.

How We Share Your Information:   The LSA will not rent or sell your personal information to others unless you have opted in to allowing third-party vendors to have access to it, and in these cases the information provided will be limited to a hard-copy set of mailing labels.  We may store personal information in locations outside the direct control of the LSA (for example, on servers or databases co-located with hosting providers).  Any personal information you elect to make publicly available on our sites, such as commenting on a web page, will be available to others.  If you remove information that you have made public on our sites, copies may remain viewable in cached and archived pages of our sites, or if other users have copied or saved that information. Demographic data that you provide in the aggregate about the students or faculty affiliated with your linguistics department or program is visible to readers of the LSA websites.

Cookies Policy:  We may use cookies in order to customize the sites for return visitors.  These cookies are not required for site functionality.  Additionally, third-party widgets such as YouTube or Flickr may install cookies depending on their configuration.  You are not required to accept any cookies to use our sites.  You can disable cookies on your browser to prevent being recognized on return visits to the LSA websites.

We use a tool called “Google Analytics” to collect information about use of the LSA’s websites. Google Analytics collects information such as how often users visit these sites, what pages they visit when they do so, and what other sites they used prior to coming to these sites. We use the information we get from Google Analytics only to improve the LSA websites. Google Analytics collects only the IP address assigned to you on the date you visit these sites, rather than your name or other identifying information. We do not combine the information collected through the use of Google Analytics with personal information. Although Google Analytics plants a permanent cookie on your web browser to identify you as a unique user the next time you visit a site, the cookie cannot be used by anyone but Google. Google’s ability to use and share information collected by Google Analytics about your visits to this site is restricted by the Google Analytics Terms of Use and the Google Privacy Policy. You can prevent Google Analytics from recognizing you on return visits to our sites by disabling cookies on your browser.

How We Store Your Information:  Your information collected through the LSA websites is stored and processed on servers in the United States.  Our processors are compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

How We Retain Your Information.  We retain the personal data collected from members, meeting attendees, donors, users of our publication and meeting services, institutional subscribers, or purchasers of LSA products for as long as the membership, meeting, donation, meeting or publication use, or purchase is active and for a period of time after that as long as we need it to fulfill the purposes for which we have initially corrected it, unless otherwise required by law. See the LSA’s Record Retention and Document Destruction Policy (Addendum B in the LSA's Financial and Administrative Policy and Procedures Manual).

How We Protect Your Information: The LSA is concerned with protecting your privacy and data, but we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to the LSA or guarantee that your information may not be accessed, disclosed, altered or destroyed by breach of any of our industry-standard physical, technical or managerial safeguards.  When you enter sensitive information (such as log in credentials) on our websites, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL).  No method of transmission over the internet or method of electronic storage is 100% secure, however.  Therefore, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.  If you have any questions about security on our sites you can contact us at [email protected].  We use an outside credit card processing company to process payments made through our websites.  These companies do not retain, share, store or use personal information for any other purposes

Your Rights With Regard to Your information:  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 LSA websites.  If you wish to access or amend any personal data we hold about you, you may update it at any time by accessing the “Account Settings” tab on your member profile (for LSA members) or by contacting LSA staff (see contact information below).  Any changes you make, or that LSA staff make on your behalf, 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.  To request that we delete any information about you that we have, please contact LSA staff at: Linguistic Society of America, 522 21st St, NW, Suite 120, Washington, DC  20006; Ph: 202-835-1714; [email protected].

 

 

Approved by the Executive Committee, May 2018