The Massachusetts Association of Accountants, Inc. (f/k/a/ The Massachusetts Association of Public Accountants, Inc.) (hereafter referred to as MAA) has established this privacy policy to demonstrate our commitment to the privacy of our members and the users of our website. Please read the following to learn more about our privacy policy, and how we treat personally identifiable information collected from our visitors and users
What this Privacy Policy Covers
- This privacy policy addresses the Massachusetts Association of Accountants’ treatment of personally identifiable information collected by the MAA through a website owned and operated by the MAA
- This privacy policy does not apply to the practices of those organizations or companies that the MAA does not own or control. Nor does it apply to persons that the MAA does not employ or manage, including any third-party content contributors bound by contract or any third-party websites to which the Massachusetts Association of Accountants websites may link with.
Collection and Use of Personal Information
- You can visit the websites of the Massachusetts Association of Accountants without revealing any personal information. In the event that you wish to purchase our products, register for any continuing education courses, receive MAA newsletters or publications, or use certain MAA services, it is reasonable that you should expect to provide us with certain personal information.
- Where required, this information may include your personal contact information and/or your company contact information. The MAA will use this information to reply to your inquiries, to provide you with requested products and services, to set up your member’s account, and to contact you regarding relevant news and information or new products, services or offerings.
- By accessing these services of the MAA and voluntarily providing us with the requested personal information, you are giving your consent to the collection and use of the information in accordance with this privacy policy.
Collection and Use of Non-Personal Information
- As part of our development, monitoring and management activities, the MAA automatically receives and records non-personal information on our server logs from your browser including your IP address, cookie information and the pages you requested. This non-personal data is viewed only as anonymous statistics to show the busiest times of the day or week, pages with errors and how effective our advertising has been. This information is not used for any other purpose. The MAA may use this information to help with site maintenance, improvements, customize the access, content or advertising that you will see and to respond to your requests for certain information, products and services. However, the MAA does not connect this non-personal data to any personal information collected from you. We are only simple, humble accountants and not data mining wizards, and it’s really not that important to us anyway. This is for your convenience, not ours.
- The MAA may also allow third party companies that are presenting advertisements on some of our pages to set and access their cookies on your computer. Again, these cookies are somewhat innocuous and not connected to any personal information. We don’t use cookies. However, some of our business partners may use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers). We really have no access to or control over these cookies, after we have given permission for them to set cookies for advertising.Third party cookie usage is subject to their own privacy policies, and the MAA assumes no responsibility or liability for this usage. If you are very concerned about cookies, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is an industry body that develops standards and guidelines to support online business processes. They have produced a series of web pages that explain how cookies work and how they can be managed.
Information Sharing and Disclosure
- On occasion, the MAA may disclose your personal information to third parties who work on behalf of the MAA to provide products and services that have been requested by you. We will share personal information for these purposes only with those third parties whose privacy policies are consistent with ours or who agree to abide by our policies with respect to personal information. We will check this as best as we can, but there’s no guarantee.
- You consent that MAA may otherwise disclose your personal information when:
- We have your express, or implied, consent to share the information for a specified purpose;
- We need to respond to subpoenas, court orders or such other legal process;
- We need to protect the personal safety of the users of our websites or defend the rights or property of the Massachusetts Association of Accountants;
- We find that your actions on our websites violate the MAA Terms of Use document or any of our usage guidelines for specific products or services.
Consent
- If you do not consent to the collection, use or disclosure of your personal information as outlined in this policy, get out, and please do not provide any personal information to Massachusetts Association of Accountants. If you have provided personal information to MAA and no longer consent to its use or disclosure as outlined herein, please notify the MAA at privacy@maacct.org. We will apply our best efforts to expunge your information, but, again, stuff happens.
Security
- Regrettably, no data transmission over the Internet can be considered 100% secure. However, the MAA makes every reasonable effort to protect your information and to safeguard your privacy and security. In certain areas of our websites, as identified on the site, MAA uses industry-standard SSL-encryption to protect data transmissions.
- We also safeguard your personal information from unauthorized access, through access control procedures, network firewalls and physical security measures.
- Further, the MAA retains your personal information only as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes identified above or as required by law.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
- The MAA may at any time, without notice to you and in its sole discretion, amend this policy from time to time. It your responsibility to review this policy periodically. Your continued use of MAA websites after any such amendments signifies your acceptance thereof.
Questions or Suggestions
- If you have questions or suggestions about this privacy policy, or if you feel it is necessary to correct, update or remove your own personal information, please e-mail us with the details of your request at privacy@maacct.org