The Endangered Languages Project

A project to support language preservation and documentation around the world

Privacy Policy

The Endangered Languages Project (ELP) is an evolving and collaborative effort. While the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa (UHM) currently administers the site with the support of partners, project administration and associated data may be transferred to a third party at a future date. By using the Endangered Languages Project site, you consent to the potential transfer of information collected during your use of the site. Should this transfer result in any material changes to how your personal information is dealt with or protected, you will be provided with reasonable notice and the opportunity to delete your data prior to the transfer. Content uploaded through another product or service, such as Google Docs or YouTube, will continue to be maintained by that product or service.

Moderation of the ELP site is undertaken in part by third-party volunteers. Certain content you provide on this site, such as content you report for review, editorial suggestions, or your application to be a moderator, may be associated with your profile and shared with these third parties.

Our Privacy Policy explains:

  • What information we collect and why we collect it.
  • How we use that information.
  • The choices we offer, including how to access and update information.
Information we collect

We collect information to provide better services to all of our users.

We collect information in four ways:

  • Information you give us. For example, many of our services require you to sign up for an ELP Account. When you do, we’ll ask for personal information, like your name, email address, or telephone number. If you want to take full advantage of the sharing features we offer, we might also ask you to create a publicly visible ELP Profile, which may include your name and photo.
  • Log Information

    When you use our services or view content provided by ELP, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include:

    • details of how you used our service, such as your search queries.
    • Internet protocol address.
    • device event information such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and referral URL.
    • cookies that may uniquely identify your browser or your ELP Account.
  • Local storage

    We may collect and store information (including personal information) locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML 5) and application data caches.

  • Cookies and anonymous identifiers

    We use various technologies to collect and store information when you interact with the ELP site, and this may include sending one or more cookies or anonymous identifiers to your device.

How we use information we collect

We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect ELP and our users. When you contact ELP, we may keep a record of your communication to help solve any issues you might be facing. We may use your email address to inform you about our services, such as letting you know about upcoming changes or improvements.

We use information collected from cookies and other technologies, like pixel tags, to improve your user experience and the overall quality of our services. For example, by saving your language preferences, we’ll be able to have our services appear in the language you prefer. Google Analytics helps us analyze the traffic to our website, by using cookies and anonymous identifiers to store non-personally identifiable information about user interactions. We have enabled Demographics and Interest Reporting, which uses data from Google Analytics to give us a general idea about the characteristics of ELP users, such as age range and gender. We use the information we get through Google Analytics for the sole purpose of improving ELP.

We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.

Transparency and choice

People have different privacy concerns. Our goal is to be clear about what information we collect, so that you can make meaningful choices about how it is used. For example, you can set your browser to block all cookies, including cookies associated with our services, or to indicate when a cookie is being set by us. However, it’s important to remember that some of our services may not function properly if your cookies are disabled. For example, we may not remember your language preferences.

Accessing and updating your personal information

Whenever you use our services, we aim to provide you with access to your personal information. If that information is wrong, we strive to give you ways to update it quickly or to delete it – unless we have to keep that information for legitimate business or legal purposes.

When updating your personal information, we may ask you to verify your identity before we can act on your request.

We may reject requests that are unreasonably repetitive, require disproportionate technical effort (for example, developing a new system or fundamentally changing an existing practice), risk the privacy of others, or would be extremely impractical (for instance, requests concerning information residing on backup tapes).

Where we can provide information access and correction, we will do so for free, except where it would require a disproportionate effort. We aim to maintain our services in a manner that protects information from accidental or malicious destruction. Because of this, after you delete information from our services, we may not immediately delete residual copies from our active servers and may not remove information from our backup systems.

Information we share

We do not share personal information with companies, organizations and individuals outside of ELP unless one of the following circumstances apply:

  • With your consent

    We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of ELP when we have your consent to do so. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.

  • For external processing

    We provide personal information to our affiliates or other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.

  • For legal reasons

    We will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of ELP if we have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:

    • meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
    • enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
    • detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues.
    • protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of ELP, our users or the public as required or permitted by law.
Information security

We work hard to protect ELP and our users from unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of information we hold. In particular:

  • We encrypt many of our services using SSL.
  • We review our information collection, storage and processing practices, including physical security measures, to guard against unauthorized access to systems.
  • We restrict access to personal information to ELP employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us, and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations.
Changes

Our Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Privacy Policy without your explicit consent. We will post any privacy policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of privacy policy changes). We will also keep prior versions of this Privacy Policy in an archive for your review.