Information We Collect
When you register on our website, we store the information you give us in our online database. Please take the time to view the way this information is displayed on our site to make sure that you are comfortable with what is displayed. The site itself allows you to control some aspects of the display of your information (for example, you can control whether your email address will be shown (a) to anyone viewing your profile, (b) only logged-in NPI members, or (c) no one. The same control is offered for your home phone number.
We also collect some information which is not visible on anyone’s profile: e.g., your date of birth. We would like to have that information (in order to learn about the age profile of our membership), but you are not required to provide it. Only the site administrators will have access to it. It will not be made public (except as aggregated with other data — e.g., “our ages range from x to y”, or “x% of NPI members are in their 50s”
We also collect records on registrations for NPI events, but this is only for conducting these events efficiently. This should not be considered a substitute for keeping your own records of professional expenses or of continuing education credits.
If you use our website to make payments to NPI (e.g., for dues or events), we do NOT retain or even ever receive any credit card information. We use PayPal to process credit card payments — but we do not EVER receive the credit card information.
Our webserver [glaze over beginning here if this is of no interest to you] automatically collects the I.P. address of each visitor to our site. If you log in as a member, it also connects your I.P. address with your “username”. Our webserver also keeps track of which pages are visited [the following figures are from September 2009], the operating system (for the past month: 65% Windows; 31% Apple OS X) and browser (for the past month: 50% Internet Explorer; 32% Firefox; 13% Safari; 2% Google Chrome; 3% other) used, and how long each user spends on our site (for the past month, the average has been 4 minutes 19 seconds). This information is also passed by us to Google Analytics which is able to produce a bewildering multitude of statistics and graphs for us. Our webserver retains this information for a while and then discards it.
Use of this Information
NPI has long had a policy of sometimes, at the discretion of the board, entering into reciprocal agreements to share mailing lists with similar organizations so as to publicize one-another’s events. In the internet age, we have not agreed to sell or give our email list to other groups. We have, as members know, permitted NPI members to post notices on our email list about training events of other professional organizations they themselves belong to and vouch for. But we do not sell or give the information collected on our website to other organizations, businesses, or individuals.
Nevertheless, the information that is on display in your profile — if it is on display for the general public (test this out by going to the site without logging in and then doing a search in the directory for yourself, see what information is there and how it is displayed) — can be harvested by others to use. You are in control of what information is in your profile.
Note of Caution
Information in public portions of the site is likely to show up in internet search engines. This includes the information you have made public in your profile. For instance, try doing a google search on your phone number. Your NPI profile is likely to show up as one of the top hits. If your name has ever been mentioned in an article on the site, it will show up in many internet searches.
Some information is available only in parts of the site that are open only to members who are logged in. Comments posted on the site should only be visible to members who are logged in. They should not show up in Google searches, for instance. We cannot, however, insure that this will always be the case. Exercise discretion in comments or articles you post on the site. Other than a few sample photos, the gallery of photos from NPI events is available only to members who are logged in. If you object to the posting of a photo of you at an NPI event, please contact us and it will be fairly easy to remove it.
It is NEVER advisable to post ANY clinical information on the site. Each member is responsible for not including clinical information of his or her own.