Privacy Policy

*Please read this Privacy Policy before using ACSA’s website or submitting information to ACSA through the website or other submission channels.

I. How to Contact ACSA

If you have any questions or concerns about this Notice, please contact us by phone at 202-785-2324, by email to info@acsa-arch.org or by mail to 611 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, #514, Washington, DC 20003.

II. ACSA’s Mission Purpose; Legitimate Interests

ACSA’s mission is to lead architectural education and research, and provides a forum for ideas on the leading edge of architectural thought. As such, any information we collect serves to further our mission, including but not limited to the following:

• Provide relevant information to our potential members, active members, and the public
• Respond to inquiries relating to ACSA
• Promote ACAS events, programs, and activities
• Perform our contractual obligations with members in good standing, registered attendees at our events, and subscribers of our publications and other products/services.

III. Information We Collect About You

“Personal Data” is any information that enables us to identify you, directly or indirectly, by reference to an identifier such as your name, identification number, location data, online identifier or one or more factors specific to your physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity.

A. How We Collect Personal Data

Personal Data That You Voluntarily Provide to Us. It is ACSA’s policy to collect personal data you voluntarily submit to ACSA. We may collect and process Personal Data through normal business practices. These include but are not limited to:

1. Telephone and in-person interactions at events where ACSA staff and volunteers are present.

2. Website interactions, including but not limited to: mailing list sign-up; online profile updates; membership applications; online purchases; online submission of materials for conferences, competitions, publications, and awards; and event registrations.

3. Data about faculty and staff at our member schools, contributed by faculty and staff at these schools member schools, or collected via public sources, such as university websites.

Information Received from Other Sources. We may receive information about you from publicly available and third-party databases or services that provide information about schools, professionals, and companies, and combine this data with information we already have about you. This helps us to update, expand, and analyze our records, identify new potential members, and provide products and services that may be of interest to you.

Automatically Collected Data. When you visit the website, we collect and store certain other information automatically that may not identify you personally, which include, but are not limited, the following:

• Technical information, including the Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to the computer you are using whenever you access the Internet.
• Information about your visit, including the type of browser and operating system used to access our website, date and time you access our website, and the pages on our website that you access
• Location information

We use the foregoing information in the form of summary statistics to help us make our website more useful to our visitors, such as assessing what information is of most and least interest.

B. What Information Do We Collect?

1. Overview

Users and members must register to obtain any product or service (tangible or virtual) offered by the ACSA. Some products and services also require ACSA membership. Registration may require a valid mailing address be submitted to appropriately fulfill a product or service request. Online registration requires a valid email be provided because an online profile is created during the registration process.

As outlined below, ACSA may ask for additional demographics such as race, age, gender, birth date, and education.

Users purchasing a product or service online are asked to provide a credit card number. ACSA does not store credit card information after the transaction is complete. However, it does maintain a reference number provided by its credit card gateway. ACSA follows Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards for all sales.

2. ACSA Faculty and Supporting Member Data

ACSA collects demographic and professional information about our members—that is, individual faculty at ACSA full and affiliate member schools and Supporting category members of the ACSA.

Because the large majority of ACSA members have an appointment at an ACSA member architecture education program, we have collected membership information about faculty, staff, and administrators from the programs themselves. The source for this information may be the school’s faculty, staff, or administrators, or public sources of information, such as the university website. ACSA collects other information directly from our individual members and from website users. Below are three categories of information that we collect and who is able to change or access this information.

a. Faculty Appointment Information Supplied by Member Program
Due to our membership structure, ACSA relies on program administrators (i.e., deans, directors, chairs, department heads, etc.) to identify faculty and staff members and supply information about their appointment to the architecture program (e.g., full-time, part-time, tenured/nontenured, etc.). The program’s head administrator receives online access to the program’s roster of faculty in our database. The head administrator is able to add or delete faculty members from the roster, and can add and change data about these faculty and staff members. If a member believes the academic appointment information is erroneous, please contact the membership department at ACSA, membership@acsa-arch.org.

b. Optional Demographic Data
ACSA collects demographic information from website users and members. This information is supplied by the individual user or member on a voluntary basis and may include, but may not be limited to, race, ethnicity, LGBT status, and disability status. The optional demographic information supplied by an individual will remain confidential within ACSA’s uses, as described below.

c. Optional Professional Information
ACSA also collects optional information on the professional background of faculty and administrators. This information includes, but may not be limited to, courses taught, research and practice expertise, licensure status, terminal degree, and faculty appointment information such as rank, time commitment, and various roles within an architecture education program.

3. Contact Information

ACSA members may maintain multiple addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers with the organization; one of these should be identified as the primary contact information for correspondence with the organization.

4. Cookies

A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to a user’s browser from a Web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive. ACSA uses what is referred to as Essential or Required Cookies to support the basic functionality of the site (e.g., login, authentication, authorization, cart, etc.). Our websites are not set up to track, collect, or distribute personal information not entered by visitors. Users can still access ACSA’s website with a browser set to reject cookies.

C. How Do We Use Your Information?

1. Email and Mail Contacts

a. All electronic communications from ACSA adhere to the CAN SPAM Rule, and recipients may follow the unsubscribe instructions to opt-out of receiving promotional electronic messages from ACSA.

b. ACSA Use. ACSA maintains an email contact list for weekly ACSA Update mailings as well as other electronic correspondence. Individual users either add themselves to this list by signing up to receive emails, or their emails are provided by the program administrator to identify them as members. In cases where ACSA receives new-member contact information from a member program administrator, the new member is contacted and asked to confirm they are willing to receive regular mailings from ACSA.

2. Online Directories

a. ACSA maintains online directories of schools and individual members. Information provided in these directories has been provided by the program administrators of the schools or voluntarily by individuals themselves.

b. Individuals already included in a directory may opt out of being included by contacting ACSA by email at membership@acsa-arch.org.

3. Research

a. ACSA will make use of the data collected about its individual users and members and about its schools for the purposes of analysis and publication of information about architectural education and practice. ACSA may also analyze its user and member data for internal purposes.

b. Demographic data will not be released on an individual basis and will be reported only in aggregate. Access to individual demographic data is restricted to ACSA staff for internal purposes.

c. Professional information and information about faculty appointments may be disclosed through online directories.

d. ACSA may combine other external data about architecture schools, faculty, and other individuals with ACSA’s own data for research purposes.

4. Peer Review Platform

a. ACSA provides software platforms for submission and review of scholarly manuscripts, design projects, and awards.

b. ACSA will make use of the data submitted to these platforms for the purposes of analysis and publication of information about architectural education and practice.

c. ACSA will make use of personal information provided by authors to send them relevant information about ACSA’s products and services , and may share this information with business partners and affiliates as described in below.

D. How Do We Share and Disclose Information

We do not share, sell, or rent information to any third party processors for their promotional use or for marketing purposes except in the following circumstances:

1. ACSA Agents/Selected Vendors: your personal information may be used within ACSA or by a company acting as an agent of ACSA for operational support purposes, including but not limited to event registration, content management and analysis, system maintenance, email distribution, printing, and mailing.

2. Business Partners and Affiliates: ACSA may share your information with carefully selected business partners and affiliates whose products and services may be of interest to our members and community. All ACSA business partners and affiliates are obligated to implement opt-out mechanisms and honor any opt-out requests by recipients in compliance with applicable laws.

3. The list of ACSA conference and meeting registrants, including the attendees contact information provided as part of registration, may be provided for one-time use to authorized exhibitors for that one conference/meeting. Attendees may opt-out of being included on the foregoing list at the time of registration.

4. ACSA membership lists and third-party emails: ACSA allows for the rental of mailing lists and partner “third-party” emails to members and organizations whose products and services may be of interest to our members. ACSA does not sell email lists in any case. ACSA members may opt-out of being included on mailing lists or third-party emails by logging into “My ACSA” and checking the appropriate box in the demographics tab of their account.

IV. Commitment to Privacy & Data Security

A. Security Measures

To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, ACSA has implemented the appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online and by paper. However, we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted to us over the internet.

The portions of our Web site requiring login or data entry by Web users are protected by SSL. All paper applications are scanned and maintained in a secure server environment.

B. Transfer of Personal Data Outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”) and International Users

We are headquartered in the United States. Your Personal Data may be accessed by us or transferred to us in the United States or to our affiliates, partners, merchants, or service providers who are located worldwide. If you are visiting our Site from outside the United States, be aware that your information may be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States where our servers are located, and our central database is operated. By using our Service, you consent to any transfer of this information.

C. How Long We Store your Personal Data

We will store your Personal Data, in a form which permits us to identify you, for no longer than is necessary for the purpose for which the Personal Data is processed. We may retain and use your Personal Data as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements and rights, or if it is not technically reasonably feasible to remove it. Consistent with these requirements, we will try to delete your Personal Data quickly upon request.

D. Retention

We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you with our Site. If you wish to cancel your account or request that we no longer use your information to provide you service, contact us at info@acsa-arch.org. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. We maintain one or more databases to store your Personal Data and may keep such information indefinitely.

E. Children’s Privacy

Our Sites are not directed to children under the age of 13, if you are not 13 years or older, do not use our Site. We do not knowingly collect Personal Data from children under the age of 13. If we learn that Personal Data of persons less than 13 years-of-age has been collected through our Site, we will take the appropriate steps to delete this information. If you are a parent or guardian and discover that your child or a minor under the age of 13 has posted, submitted or otherwise communicated Personal Data to our Site without your consent, then you may alert us at info@acsa-arch.org so that we may take appropriate action to remove the minor’s Personal Data from our systems.

V. How to Access, Correct, Update, and Delete Information; Notice to EEA Residents

A. Correction and removal

All records in our database are accessible online by their individual or company owner. If any of the information that we have about you is incorrect, or you wish to have information (including Personal Data) corrected, updated, or removed from our records, you may do so by visiting the your ACSA Profile, or contacting us at info@acsa-arch.org. We may ask you to provide sufficient evidence of your identity for your own protection so we can ensure that information is being released to the correct person. We will respond to your request to access your information within 30 days. In some cases, our business requirements and legal obligations may prevent us from being able to delete your information. If we are unable to delete your information, we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.

B. Opting Out

Additionally, if you prefer not to receive marketing messages from us, please let us know by clicking on the unsubscribe link within any marketing message that you receive, or by sending a message to us at infoacsa-arch.org.

C. EEA Residents Only

You have the right to ask us not to process your Personal Data for marketing purposes. We will usually inform you (before collecting your Personal Data) if we intend to use your Personal Data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by checking certain boxes on the forms we use to collect your Personal Data. You can also exercise the right by contacting us by phone, email, or mail listed in section II above.

Under European data protection law, in certain circumstances, you have the right to:

• Request access to your Personal Data. You may have the right to request access to any Personal Data we hold about you as well as related information, including the purposes for processing the Personal Data, the recipients or categories of recipients with whom the Personal Data has been shared, where possible, the period for which the Personal Data will be stored, the source of the Personal Data, and the existence of any automated decision making.
• Request correction of your Personal Data. You may have the right to obtain without undue delay the rectification of any inaccurate Personal Data we hold about you.
• Request erasure of your Personal Data. You may have the right to request that Personal Data held about you is deleted.
• Object to processing of your Personal Data. You may have the right to prevent or restrict processing of your Personal Data.
• Request restriction of processing your Personal Data Request transfer of your Personal Data. You may have the right to request transfer of Personal Data directly to a third party where this is technically feasible.
• Withdraw your consent

In addition, where you believe that ACSA has not complied with its obligations under this Notice or European law, you have the right to make a complaint to an EU Data Protection Authority, such as the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.

You can exercise any of these rights by contacting us by phone, email, or mail listed in section II above.

D. California Residents Only

Section 1798.83 of the California Civil Code requires select businesses to disclose policies relating to the sharing of certain categories of your Personal Data with third parties. If you reside in California and have provided your Personal Data to ACSA, you may request information about our disclosures of certain categories of Personal Data to third parties for direct marketing purposes. Such requests must be submitted to us at one of the following addresses: info@acsa-arch.org.

ACSA
Attn: California Privacy Rights
611 Pennsylvania Ave. SE, #514, Washington DC 20003

VI. Links to Third Party Sites and Services

Our Sites may contain links to third party websites, applications and services not operated by us. These links are provided as a service and do not imply any endorsement by us of the activities or content of these sites, applications or services nor any association with their operators. ACSA is not responsible for the privacy policies or practices of any third party including websites or services directly linked to our Service. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any third party site that you link from our Service.

VII. Social Media Widgets

The website includes social media features, such as the Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and LinkedIn buttons, that run on our website. These features may collect your Internet Protocol address and which page you are visiting on our website, and may set a cookie to enable 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 company providing it.

VIII. Amendments and Updates

ACSA will occasionally update this Privacy Policy. Any changes to our Privacy Policy will be posted here so that users will know what information we gather, how we might use that information, and whether we will disclose it to anyone. We encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on our privacy practices and this Privacy Policy.

Effective Date: June 2019