WiredKids/Teens Privacy Policy

Your privacy is of utmost importance to WiredTeens and WiredSafety. Although the law doesn't cover not-for-profit organizations (WiredTeens is being operated as a 501(C)3 program under "Roads Without Ramps," a 501(C)3 based in Illinois. Application for separate 501(C)3 status is pending.), We believe strongly in protecting children's privacy and safety online and strive to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Only children and teenagers who are WiredKids' volunteers or WiredSafetyl volunteers may use our WiredKids and Teens communities. 

All those that belong to our Kids and Teens communities need the permission of their parent or legal guardian before we let them become members and provide information to us. Because we need your consent before we can collect information from your children, we have written this privacy policy to let you know what information we collect, what we do with it, and how to give your permission. If you want to contact us, our complete contact information is at the end of the policy.

We do not collect more information from your children than is reasonably necessary for them to participate in any activity at our site. Since we are an Internet safety program, we believe that certain off-line contact information for parents and their children is essential for your child/teen to be a member of WiredKids/Teens. This information includes a letter of good standing from their school (or substituted proof from a home-schooled child) that helps us confirm that your child is indeed a child, and registered in school. 

While we usually oppose the collection of too much information by a site, our collection of such information is key to the protection and safety or your child while visiting our site and being a member of WiredKids/Teens. Without it we cannot be assured that an adult will not be posing as a child for admission. While we cannot guarantee that adults will not infiltrate our programs, posing as a child, we will be educating our members how to deal with adults online and protect themselves online at all times.

Registration and Consent

In order for children to become members in either our Kids (under 13) or Teens/Teenangel online programs (13-18 year olds), we require their parents or legal guardians to send us a completed application. The form is available at the wiredkids.org site, and prints out with a copy of this privacy policy.

The application asks the parent for the parent's contact information (name, mailing address, telephone number, emergency telephone number, e-mail address), and the child's full name, online nickname, e-mail address, school, gender, grade and birthdate. Both the parent or legal guardian and the child/teen must sign the application after reading and agreeing to the Code of Conduct.

In order for a parent to give consent, simply print out the parental consent/application form, fill it out, sign it and mail it (together with a letter of good standing from your child's school) to:

Wiredkids Inc.
P.O. Box 3803
Jersey City, NJ 07303
U.S.A.

If your child is being home schooled, please contact wkdirector@wiredsafety.org to find a substitution for the school good standing letter. We may also in the future permit parents to fax the consent/application to use, together with the letter from the school. We will provide a fax number for this purpose if and when we offer this option. Once we have received the consent and necessary documents, your child's membership will be activated.

Your child will be known at our site by his or her special WiredKids or Teens online nickname, which will not be permitted to contain their real name or any personally identifiable information.

Features/Activities

Community Features

At our Kids and Teens members sites, we offer several features where the children can communicate with each other and with adult members of WiredKids or WiredPatrol and guests we provide from time to time to teach the members of WiredKids about different issues. At our chat, message boards, forums, and other community features, children can participate in discussions and online communications with all other members and these adults. As with all chat rooms and online discussion groups, children may disclose personal information about themselves with their e-mail and chat correspondents and in the discussion forums. That's why we advise all users to practice safe computing and urge parents to advise their children not to give out any personal information without their consent. We provide training on online safety and privacy as part of our WiredKids/Teens program to all members. Our service provides adult monitoring for many of these activities, but it is no substitute for parental guidance and supervision. WiredKids/Teens is all about safe and responsible surfing, and we will do everything we can to make sure that your child's online activities at WiredKids/Teens are rewarding and safe.

Profiles

We may offer the opportunity for our members to share limited information about themselves, such as hobbies and interests, with other members. We reserve the right to limit the kinds of information they may share with others, but your consenting to their membership, means you consent to their use of an online profile, which may contain information about where they live, their school, sports teams and other information which, taken with information they may provide in chat or via other interactive communications, allow people to have access to personally identifiable information about your child.

Submissions

We sometimes solicit or accept submissions from our children members, such as movie reviews, some of which may be posted at our sites. Such submissions may be made online or off-line We will retain all the information submitted to us. If personal information is contained in the submission, it may be posted, although we will endeavor to screen it out. All rights in or to any reviews, artwork or other submissions they provide to us become the property of WiredKids.

Newsletters, Contests and Surveys

We may offer members the opportunity to sign-up for newsletters or enter contests at our site, and may collect name, e-mail and mailing address for those purposes. We may also occasionally conduct surveys at the site that may ask for personally identifiable information about your child, their activities and preferences. This will not be shared with third parties, other than affiliated not -for-profits (WiredKids is being operated as a 501(C)3 program under "Roads Without Ramps," a 501(C)3 based in Illinois. Application for separate 501(C)3 status is pending), such as WiredPatrol, or academic institutions with which we are conducting the survey for statistical and other purposes relating to any studies conducted. In addition, each of our newsletters will come with instructions on how to remove your child's address from our mailing list. One newsletter is sent to all members, and your child may not be removed from this list while remaining a member. It is the way we contact our members and provide ongoing education and information to them about WiredKids and affiliated programs on online safety.

Additional newsletter may be offered to third parties who are not members of WiredKids/Teens or WiredPatrol. Parents will be notified that their child, under the age of thirteen, has signed up for such a newsletter and provided with both membership information about WiredKids/Teens and the ability to deregister their child from the newsletter list.

PARENTAL REVIEW OF INFORMATION

Other Data collection

For our internal purposes, we gather date, time, browser type and IP address of all visitors to our site. We keep this information simply for our internal security audit log. Many of the interactive programs work by using cookies that identify the IP address of the poster. This is for security purposes only, and will not be shared with third parties, except as necessary to keep the children, teens, members and site itself secure.

We reserve the right to use cookies, or other usage tracking technology to see how the children/teens use the site in order to provide better services and a better designed surfing experience for them. We also log their attendance at certain events and classes.

USE and SHARING

We may use the information we collect from you and your children for our internal purposes, such as making sure that children have attended the requisite classes, reviewed information we deem important for their WiredKids membership activities, and for conducting reviews, studies and surveys on how children and teens use the Internet, communicate and other related topics.

We do not share your children's personal information with other companies (other than our not-for-profit affiliates which may be working with us in a certain area), apart from those acting as our agents in providing our service to you, who agree to use it only for that purpose and to keep the information secure and confidential. Those agents may include the supplier of chat software or monitoring technology, e-mail service providers and the like. Any chat or e-mail technology service provider may keep records for their security purposes, or logs or certain activities for security purposes only, and may not share that information with third parties. Also, WiredPatrol, cyberlawenforcement.com, entities into which our company is merged, or to which our assets or our site has been transferred, will be able to use your personal information under the terms of this privacy policy. We will also disclose information we maintain when required to do so by law, for example, in response to a court order or a subpoena or other legal obligation. We also may disclose such information in response to a law enforcement agency's request. You should also be aware that courts of equity, such as US Bankruptcy Courts, may have the authority under certain circumstances to permit your information to be shared or transferred to third parties.

We may share aggregate information, which is not personally identifiable, with third parties to help them better understand our services. We also internally use similar aggregate information to give us demographic information about our audience in order to improve our service.

Links To Other Sites

We may also link to other sites. While we attempt to review those sites to make sure that they are appropriate for your child, sites may change hands or practices and content and we are not responsible for the privacy practices of those other sites, and we advise you to check their privacy policies as well. We teach our members to be very careful about what information they share with anyone online and how to review a privacy policy.

Security

We protect the confidentiality, security and integrity of the personal information we collect. This information is maintained on secure servers and is only accessible to qualified WiredKids/WiredPatrol personnel who require this information.

If you have any questions about our children's privacy practices, please feel free to contact us

President, WiredKids
www.wiredkids.org