Privacy Policy

Thank you for being a part of Discover Brookline (“We”, “Us , or “Our”). Our website address is: https://discoverbrookline.com. We are a project of the Brookline Chamber of Commerce supported by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism and the My Local MA initiative. The purpose of this website is to market Brookline businesses to the larger community. Participation is completely voluntary.

Discover Brookline takes the protection of your personal information seriously. We collect and maintain only the information necessary to market Brookline businesses. We protect this information from unauthorized use, and provide you with a means to remove personally-identifiable information from our systems if you choose to do so. You may remove your listing at any time.

What personal data we collect and why

Business Listing Owners

We collect information about you when you add a listing to our site (either by filling out the form directly on our website, or by filling out the Google form sent to you directly from the Brookline Chamber of Commerce). By submitting one of these forms, you consent to having your business information listed on the Discover Brookline website. This information may include, but is not limited to, your business name, email address, phone number, business address, website and social media URLS, and any other details that might be requested from you for the purpose of adding your business listing. The accuracy of the information listed is the responsibility of the business owner, and a means to update it has been provided.

Other data that may be collected includes IP address and locations details (including GPS co-ordinates).

In order to be listed, all business owners will be registered on our website and we store the personal information they provide in their user profile. Website administrators can see and edit that information. Any profile information provided to this site may be displayed publicly. If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

Handling this data allows us to:

  • Display this information in a public facing manner (such as a web page or API request) and allow website users to search and view submitted listing information.
  • Send you important account/order/service information.
  • Provide a way for users to contact your listing via the provided contact information.
  • Notify you of user interactions such as but not limited to review and contact notifications.
  • Respond to your queries or complaints.
  • Set up and administer your account, provide technical and/or customer support, spam prevention and to verify your identity. We do this on the basis of our legitimate business interests.

Contact Form Users

We also collect information about you when you submit a contact form on our Contact page. This information may include, but is not limited to, your name, email address, IP address and contact text. We do not use this information for any purpose other than to reply to the submitted request.

Handling this data also allows us to:

  • Send your contact message and details to Discover Brookline staff.
  • Monitor the contact system for spam and abuse.

Postcards

We use EcardWidget for sending e-postcards.​ Emails collected for the postcards are only used for sending the ecard. They are not stored anywhere.

EcardWidget’s email providers Sendgrid and Postmark both keep a log of emails but they are only used for sending.

In regard to how EcardWidget protect the emails and names it stores, EcardWidget follows industry standards to secure its servers. They use Digital Ocean to host their infrastructure. They have strict security protocols that you can read about on their website:

​​”DigitalOcean is committed to working with third-party data center providers that maintain industry-leading access control, including video surveillance, security, access lists, and exit procedures. We regularly audit our data centers to meet our regulatory requirements and validate proper implementation of our security requirements.”

​https://www.digitalocean.com/trust/faq/

ECard Widget Privacy Policy

How long we retain your data

We keep contact form entries for a year but we do not use them for marketing purposes. We keep business listing information throughout the duration of the public-facing website. We keep analytics records throughout the duration of the public-facing website. We do not retain the email addresses used for the postcards.

Who we share your data with

We do not share your personally-identifiable data with anyone outside of the Discover Brookline and My Local MA organizations, unless you expressly give us permission. We may share aggregated, non-personally-identifiable information with our sponsors and participating businesses for the purposes of measuring project impact

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site because your business is listed, 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. You can remove your business listing from our site at any time.

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.

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.

Cookies

If you visit our login page, 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.

Third Party Tools

We use Google Analytics and Google Maps on our site. Both may use cookies to  collect data about you such as your location, browser, operating system, device, IP address and URL of pages you visit. Google may set cookies on your browser or read cookies that are already there. For more information about how Google uses your personal data, visit How Google Uses Information From Sites or Apps that Use Our Services.

We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users’ experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behavior and their devices. This includes a device’s IP address (processed during your session and stored in a de-identified form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), and the preferred language used to display our website. Hotjar stores this information on our behalf in a pseudonymized user profile. Hotjar is contractually forbidden to sell any of the data collected on our behalf.