RMC Sierra Club IT Security Policy

We ask for your personal information in a few places on our page. You have a right to know what we'll do with it.

Because of COPPA (Children's On-line Protection of Privacy Act), children under the age of 13 are prohibited from volunteering via the Sierra Club web page, or otherwise providing us with any personally identifiable information via our web pages, such as our volunteer form. If you are under 13 and wish to volunteer, please contact our office for a paper volunteer form.

We have a membership application page. That page is treated just like a paper membership application. Make sure that you specify that you don't want your contact info exchanged with other organizations, if that is your desire.

In several places, we give you the opportunity to subscribe to various discussion and announcement lists. These are all confirmed opt-in lists. That is, if you hit the subscribe button, you'll generate a subscription-request email showing what address you want to have added to the list. However, we will first send that address an email asking for a confirmation of the subscription request, which you must respond to. This prevents spammers from adding people to lists without their consent.

You may have made a verbal or email request to a live person to add you to a list. If it is via email, and expanded headers indicate minimal or no likelihood of forgery, we'll add it on your say so. You may also from time to time get a phone call from a club leader asking if you would like to be added to a list, based on your participation in some committee, or in the course of a broader phone call dealing with some issue. If you assent and provide your e-mail address in response to that request, your e-mail address will be added to the list.

If you are a club leader, such as a committee chair or member of the executive committee, we will have your email address listed on our page in relevant areas so that members wanting to contact you about matters related to your committee may do so. You may also be added to relevant chapter or national lists as appropriate and necessary to fulfill the responsibilities of any volunteer position that you have been appointed or elected to (eg - Executive Committee members are added to an on-line voting list). Participation in some lists may be a requirement of holding a leadership position.

In the interest of limiting spam to your regular address, we are in the process of changing all leader addresses on all web pages to rmc.sierraclub.org addresses which will be aliased (forwarded) to your true address. Upon completion of implementation of our new system, those addresses will be protected from most spammers through the use of various spam blocking databases. Details on those databases and how they work can be found by linking to them at the bottom of this page.

If you provide us with a credit card number on a payment form of some kind, that number appears solely on processing.net's secure server. Access to that server is limited to the treasurer (for handling credits and other issues) and the webmaster (for making sure applications are working correctly). The card number will not be passed on by them to any other person. Other information on those forms will be forwarded to other Sierra Club staff and/or volunteers for the purpose of fulfilling whatever order you placed (eg - register you for a conference, mail you a book or t-shirt, etc).

Note that this policy only applies to the Rocky Mountain Chapter. Third party sites, including Sierra Club sites not prefixed by rmc, may have different policies.

Anti-Spam Policy

Spam is defined as Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UBE). Because we publicize e-mail addresses on our web pages, some of our members occasionally get spammed by someone with inappropriate messages. The use of Sierra Club lists or any third party list by either Sierra Club members or others to transmit UBE is prohibited. And while we take some reasonable precautions to prevent the harvesting of addresses from our web page, we are aware that spammers do it. It is the position of the I.T. Committee of the Rocky Mountain Chapter that spammers are a scourge on the internet. Further, spammers generally violate their contracts with their own internet providers when they engage in spam. When someone spams a Sierra Club list, they should do so with a high degree of confidence that a complaint will be filed with their provider, and they will lose their connectivity. This prevents them from spamming again, at least from that address.

If you are spammed on a Sierra Club list, send email to the national abuse address. Please attach the spam with fully expanded headers. If the list starts with a prefix of RMC-, send a copy to the RMC abuse desk. We'll take it from there.