Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: https://bhusa.org, hereafter referred to as The Website. The Website is the only official representation of Beacon House USA or Beacon House Ghana on the Internet. For more information on BHUSA/BHGhana please contact us here.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Unless you are a donor to BHUSA we do not collect any identifiable information other than your IP address. The only reason we collect IP addresses is to aid in protecting our website from malicious attacks from countries outside of the United States. Our site is blocked, as much as is technically possible, from anyone outside of the United States; except for those IPs who are cleared to access the site in advance.

If you donate to BHUSA through PayPal The Website collects only the information that PayPal and you provide, i.e. email address and name. Absolutely, under no circumstances will we share, sell, or otherwise distribute your personal information to anyone, any national entity, or organization.

If you also connect to us through our Facebook page, BHUSA will not share, sell, or otherwise distribute your personal information to anyone, any national entity, or organization without your express written permission. We are, however, not responsible at any level for what Facebook decides to share.

Comments

As a general rule this website is for information only and will not invite comments. If the occasion arises that we do open a discussion then the following applies. When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

Our Contact Form is simple, name and email address. We do not need anything else from you and will never ask. We are not in the business of collecting your information to sell or otherwise use other than to send you our newsletters and the occasional email updates. Therefore there is no need to require more information on our contact forms. We desire to have meaningful relationships with our donors and that requires a real person on the other end of the communication. You will ALWAYS have a real person to talk to in the event you deem it necessary. Just remember, we do live most of the time in Ghana so it may take a few days sometimes to get back to you. If it is urgent, then contact our Forwarding Agent in the US.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

Who we share your data with

BHUSA will absolutely never, ever, ever knowingly share your personal information with anyone, any national entity, or organization. PERIOD!

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

If you have any concerns about the security of your personal information, or other privacy related concerns please contact us here.