Privacy Policy

The Museum of Science, Boston (“the Museum,” “we,” or “us”), is dedicated to providing the best possible experience for our visitors. To that end, we are committed to protecting the private information of those who interact with us online. The Museum of Science website adheres to the following policy for ensuring the privacy of your — and your children's — personally identifiable information (such as full name, address, email address, telephone number, and/or other identifiable information).

Collection of Information

1. We will not collect personally identifiable information from you, other than what you supply to us on a voluntary basis, except as stated in this privacy policy.
2. You might be asked to provide some personally identifiable information in order to participate in some online activities. This could be in connection with the following:
   • contest or sweepstakes registration;
   • subscription registration for services such as email newsletters or events, courses, or other museum programming;
   • transactions in our Online Ticket Store
   • donations made via our website; and/or
   • content submissions, community postings (i.e., forums or bulletin boards), comments and suggestions, voting, or online surveys
3. When you use our website, we automatically receive and record certain information from your computer (or other device) and your browser. This may include such data as your IP address and domain name, the pages you visit on the site, the date and time of your visit, the files that you download, the URLs from the websites you visit before and after navigating to the site, your software and hardware attributes (including device IDs), and your general geographic location (e.g., your city, state, or metropolitan region). To obtain such information, we may use web logs or applications that recognize your computer and gather information about its online activity.
4. We also use cookies on our website, as discussed below in the section titled “Cookies and Analytics.”
5. The website or the emails that you receive from the Museum may use an application known as a “web beacon” (also known as a “clear gif” or “web bug”). A web beacon is an electronic file that usually consists of a single-pixel image. It can be embedded in a web page or in an email to transmit information, which could include personal information. For example, it can allow an email sender to determine whether a user has opened a particular email.
6. We may also receive personally identifiable information about you if you contact us in other ways, such as by phone or email.
7. We may compile and combine information about you from different sources. Any information that we maintain together with personally identifiable information will be treated as personally identifiable information.

Use of Information

1. The Museum of Science may use your personally identifiable information to provide our services to you, including managing contests, events, and subscriptions that you choose to participate in.
2. We may use your information to analyze and improve our services, including as described below in the section titled “Cookies and Analytics.”
3. The Museum of Science may use your personally identifiable information to extend promotional offers (such as invitations to Museum events) or to send administrative or service-related announcements.
4. When you disclose personal information on the Museum website, we may use your address internally to inform you of events and opportunities at the Museum.
5. If you make a purchase or donation on our website, we will use the payment information provided to complete the transaction.
6. We may use personally identifiable information in order to prevent improper use of our site, or as otherwise necessary to defend against or assist in the investigation of improper or illegal activity on the website.
7. We may use certain non-identifiable information to serve advertisements to people who we believe may be interested in the Museum or Museum events. This may include, for example, working with a third party to provide advertisements for the Museum to individuals whose devices are located in a certain general geographic area. For more information on online advertising practices and how you can opt out, please see the section below titled “Cookies and Analytics.”

Disclosure of Personal Information

1. The Museum generally will not disclose your personally identifiable information to outside parties without your consent or where necessary to perform services or provide products that you have requested.
2. On occasion, the Museum uses trusted 3rd-party providers to provide its services or to communicate with you. For example, we may use a vendor to send emails on our behalf. The Museum only uses providers that we believe impose reasonable safeguards on the privacy of your information.
3. We also may disclose your personally identifiable information:
   • as required by law;
   • when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights;
   • to protect the rights, safety, or property of others;
   • to participate in a judicial proceeding, comply with a court order, or respond to other legal process served on us or our website; and/or
   • to complete a transaction involving the transfer of the Museum operations to which the information pertains, or due diligence and preparatory work relating to such a transaction.

Opt-Out Option

If you do not wish to receive the communications described above, you may choose to "opt out." Opting out may prevent your participation in activities for which personal information is needed (such as Museum programming or contests). You may choose to restrict our use of your information to maintaining your registration on our website, or may ask us to refrain from disclosing your information to others. You may request that we receive information by telephone or postal mail. You may make such an opt-out request by sending an email to privacy@mos.org describing your request. We may, in our sole discretion, elect to delete your electronic information entirely rather than implementing a request to opt-out of certain data uses while continuing others.

You may opt out of receiving promotional emails from the Museum by clicking the “Unsubscribe” button at the bottom of any such email. If you do so, we may still contact you for other reasons, such as in connection with a purchase you make on the site.

Children (persons 12 years old or younger)

If your child submits stories, artwork, comments, or anything else that is posted on our site, he or she will be identified only by first name, age, and state.

Before we collect or allow the submission of any personally identifying information or any free-response in which personal information might reasonably be included, we require the user to specify his or her age. When a user indicates an age of 12 years old or younger, a parental consent form appears on the user's screen. This form describes the personal information to be collected from or to be submitted by the child, and the proposed uses of such information. No personal information is collected from children 12 and under except in accordance with parental consent as required by law.

A consent form is not required when a child subscribes to email newsletters from the Museum of Science. If a child 12 years old or younger provides his or her email address to receive an email newsletter, the child is also required to submit the email address of a parent or guardian. The parent or guardian is sent a notice by email and given the option to unsubscribe the child from the email newsletter.

Users under 18 years of age cannot make credit card purchases on our website.

By contacting us at privacy@mos.org at any time, parents or guardians of users 12 years old or younger may review any personal information we have regarding their children, require us to change such information, or prohibit us from collecting or maintaining any such information.

User-Created Content

Our website may offer bulletin boards, chat rooms, or other public forum-type features that enable you to post information, comments, computer file uploads, recommendations, ratings, personal web logs (blogs) or other information. If you elect to post information to our site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these features, which are open to the general public. Any identifiable information could be widely disclosed, posted elsewhere on the Internet, or used to contact you or send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums and urge users to exercise caution before publicly posting any personally identifiable information.

Cookies and Analytics

The Museum of Science website uses a technology tool called a "cookie." The cookie is a small text file that our website temporarily stores on your hard drive. When you return to our site your Web browser passes the cookie from your computer back to our website, so we can recognize you as you move through our site (for instance, the cookie tells our website which shopping basket is yours). At no time will the cookie reveal to others your name, email address, street address, or telephone number (even if you have submitted this information to other areas of our website).

We use cookies and similar technologies to analyze how users interact with our website, which helps us modify the site and improve our visitors’ experiences. We also may provide advertisements to users who have visited our site on other websites. In particular, the Museum’s website uses Google Analytics. You may learn more about Google Analytics’ data practices by clicking here and opt out of the use of cookies in web browsers by Google Analytics by clicking here.

The Museum’s website also enables third-party tracking mechanisms to collect information about you and your computing devices for use in online interest-based advertising. For example, third parties may use the fact that you visited our site to target online ads to you. In addition, third-party advertising networks might use information about your use of our Site to help target advertisements based on your online activity in general. For information about interest-based advertising practices, including privacy and confidentiality, visit the Network Advertising Initiative website or the Digital Advertising Alliance website.

The use of online tracking mechanisms by third parties is subject to those third parties’ own privacy policies, and not this Policy. If you prefer to prevent third parties from setting and accessing cookies on your computer or other device, you may set your browser to block cookies. Additionally, you may remove yourself from the targeted advertising of companies within the Network Advertising Initiative by opting out here, or of companies participating in the Digital Advertising Alliance by opting out here. Although our Site currently does not respond to “do not track” browser headers, you can limit tracking through these third-party programs and by taking the other steps discussed above.

We may also provide third parties with aggregate profiles of our user groups and their activities and preferences. Such collective profiles may also be disclosed in describing our site and services to prospective partners, advertisers, and other third parties, and for other lawful purposes.

Museum of Science Website Security

To ensure that that your credit card transaction with the Museum of Science is secure, the Museum has implemented industry-standard commercial data security tools. The information you submit to the Online Ticket Store or for any other products or services is protected by an encryption technology called the Secure Sockets Layer Protocol. This security software encrypts your credit card information so that it cannot be read as your ticketing order travels over the Internet. To ensure that you are on a secure page, look for the closed key or lock on the bottom of your Web browser during the Museum of Science ticketing checkout process. Notwithstanding our security measures, no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. Accordingly, we cannot guarantee the security of information provided via Internet or through our website.

Links

The Museum of Science site may contain links to other websites. Please note that when you click on one of these links, you are clicking to the site of another organization. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other websites. Accordingly, we encourage you to read the privacy statements of other websites, as their policies may differ from ours.

Policy Changes

As our website grows, it may be necessary for us to change our privacy policy to reflect new online activities and programs. Any changes will be posted here. To keep informed about our information practices, please check this page periodically.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about this privacy statement, our online practices, or your dealings with this website, please contact:

Museum of Science

Online Privacy

1 Science Park

Boston, MA 02114

617-723-2500

privacy@mos.org

Effective Date

This privacy policy is effective as of October 19, 2020.