Privacy Policy of The Mission of Maitreya

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The Privacy Policy below governs the Eternal Divine Path, The Mission Of Maitreya, and any information that has been provided by visitors to this site.

A. Introduction
B. Information We Collect
C. Our Use and Disclosure of Information
D. Information Security
E. Accessing and Changing Your Information
F. Contacting Us

A. Introduction

In order to reduce the risk of fraud, the Eternal Divine Path, The Mission Of Maitreya (“Mission” or “we”) must sometimes ask you to provide us information about yourself.  This Privacy Policy describes the information we collect and how we use that information.  The Mission takes the privacy of your personal information very seriously and will use your information only in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy.  We will not sell or rent your personal identifiable information or a list of our customers to third parties.  However, as described in more detail in Part C below, there are limited circumstances in which some of your information will be shared with third parties, under strict restrictions, so it is important for you to review this Privacy Policy.

Notification of Changes
This policy may be revised over time as new features are added to the Mission service or as we incorporate suggestions from our visitors.  If we are going to use or disclose your personally identifiable information in a manner materially different from that stated at the time we collected the information, you will have a choice as to whether or not we use or disclose your information in this new manner.  Any material changes will be effective only after we provide you by e-mail with at least 30 days notice of the amended Privacy Policy (if you have requested that your information be removed from the Mission mailing list, you will not be contacted to notify you of the amended Policy and your personal information will not be used or disclosed in this new manner).

If we ever amend this Privacy Policy, we will post the amended policy prominently on our web site so that you can always review what information we gather, how we might use that information, and whether we will disclose it to anyone.  Please check the Mission web site at www.maitreya.org at any time for the most current version of our Privacy Policy.

The Mission web site includes links to third party Web sites.  These sites are governed by their own privacy statements, and the Mission is not responsible for their operations, including but not limited to their information practices.  Users submitting information to or through these third party Web sites should review the privacy statements of these sites before providing them with personally identifiable information.

B. Information We Collect

Required Information
To receive the Mission Newsbrief and join the Mission mailing list, you are requested to provide your e-mail address.  To purchase our materials, you are requested to provide your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address.  In order to pay for the materials you buy, you may provide credit card information.  We also ask you to choose a password and a user name.  Besides our use of this information to complete your purchases, it may also be used to contact you should the need arise in administering your account and/or order.  Note: If you choose to pay for materials with a credit card, we do not see or handle any credit card information you provide.  The merchant account providers we use (Worldpay or PayPal) do that.  These companies have excellent security measures set up to secure your private and sensitive information. 

Web Site Traffic Information
Because of the way that World Wide Web communication standards work, our site provider might gather some statistical data of your visit.  We also might gather very basic information from your visit (what kind of browser you use, whether your browser is set to accept cookies, etc.).  We use this information only to try to understand our customers’ preferences better and to manage our site better, so as to improve our service and your experience with the Mission.  We do not track the web sites that you visit before or after you leave the Mission site.

Our Use of “Cookies”
A session cookie is sent automatically to your computer when you visit our e-commerce even if you enter nothing.  This cookie keeps no personal information.  Chiefly it keeps the session number (which allows the creation of a unique link between the client and the server during the whole session).  Some technical information is transmitted also.  We receive your personal information only after you complete your account information, even if your have visited our web site before.  This means no personal information is gathered while a visitor is visiting our web site.  Once you log out or close your browser, these session cookies, after twenty minutes, expire and no longer have any effect.

Third Party Cookies
Some of the third party services on our site, such as AddThis and Google Search, send cookies to your computer to gather non-personally identifiable information for purposes such as analytics and targeted web advertising.  These are persistent cookies, meaning they do not immediately expire and remain on your hard drive for an extended period of time (although they can easily be removed manually by deleting your browser cookies, or through various services provided by antivirus and utility-type programs).  These cookies may be sent even if you never use these third party services.  We are bound to allow these third party services to send cookies if we wish to use their services on our site.  In other words: We have no control over these cookies and their existence is not our doing.  In fact, any site that uses these services will have the same issue. 

The use of these cookies, and the collection and use of any information gained by them, is governed by the individual Privacy Policies of these third party services (for example, see the relevant section of the AddThis Privacy Policy).  We have no access or connection to the information they gather, with one exception: Some of these third party services share with us non-personally identifiable usage and volume statistical information (e.g. graphs showing what pages of the website are shared the most and how they are shared).  All such data is completely anonymous, is not shared with any other third parties, and is used by us only to gain information on site usage and improve our site's quality.

Customer Service Correspondence
If you send us correspondence, including e-mails and faxes, we retain such information in the records of your account.  We will also retain customer service correspondence and other correspondence from the Mission to you.  We retain these records in order to measure and improve our customer service, and to investigate potential fraud and violations of our Terms of Use.  We may, over time, delete these records if permitted by law.

C. Our Use and Disclosure of Information

Internal Uses
We use the information we collect about you in order to 1) provide our services and process your transactions, 2) provide customer service, 3) improve our products and services.

We give access to individually identifiable information about our users only to those employees who require it to fulfill customer service requests.

Disclosure to Third Parties
The Mission will not sell or rent any of your personally identifiable information to third parties.  The Mission will not share any of your personally identifiable information with third parties except in the limited circumstances described below, or with your express permission.  These third parties are limited by law or by contract from using the information for secondary purposes beyond the purposes for which the information is shared.

1. We disclose information that we in good faith believe is appropriate to cooperate in investigations of fraud or other illegal activity, or to conduct investigations of violations of our Terms of Use.
2. We disclose information in response to a subpoena, warrant, court order, levy, attachment, order of a court-appointed receiver or other comparable legal process, including subpoenas from private parties in a civil action.
3. We disclose information to your agent or legal representative (such as the holder of a power of attorney that you grant, or a guardian appointed for you).

Our Contacts with Mission Visitors
We communicate with our visitors on a regular basis via e-mail to provide requested services, and we also communicate by phone to resolve customer complaints or investigate suspicious transactions.  We use your e-mail address to confirm the validity of your information, to send you notice of payments that you send or receive through the Mission, to send information about important changes to our products and services, and to send notices and other disclosures required by law.  Generally, users cannot opt-out of these communications, but they will be informational in nature rather than promotional.

We also use your e-mail address to send you other types of communications that you can control, including the Mission Newsbrief.  You can choose whether to receive these emails, and can request removal from our mailing list at any time by using the "Unsubscribe" option provided in all of them.

D. Information Security

The Mission is committed to handling your customer information with high standards of information security.  We restrict access to your personally identifiable information to employees who need to know that information in order to provide products or services to you.

We strongly urge that you never share your login password and user name with anyone.  The Mission representatives will never ask you for your password, so any e-mail or other communication requesting your password should be treated as unauthorized and suspicious.  If you do share your log in password with a third party for any reason, including because the third party has promised to provide you additional services such as account aggregation, the third party will have access to your account and your personal information, and you may be responsible for actions taken using your password.  If you believe someone else has obtained access to your password, please change it immediately by logging in to your account at our e-commerce and changing your Profile settings, and also contact us right away as described in Section F below.

E. Accessing and Changing Your Information

You can review the personal information you provided at our e-commerce site and make any desired changes to such information at any time by logging in to your account and changing your preferences in the Profile page of your account.

F. Contacting Us

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the Mission’s information practices, or your dealings with the Mission, you can e-mail the Mission, call (505) 891-9595 Monday through Friday between the hours of 9 AM and 9 PM MST, or write us at Mission Of Maitreya, Eternal Divine Path, P.O. Box 44100, Albuquerque, NM 87174.

With respect to our privacy practices as a spiritual/educational institution and our compliance with this Privacy Policy, the Mission is regulated by the Non-Profit laws of the State of New Mexico and the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS).