Privacy Practices

The Library is committed to protecting the privacy of visitors to its websites. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices:

Visits to the Library’s website (https://somersetcolibrary.org) or social media pages result in collection and storage of only information requested and submitted via comments or website forms and information to measure usage and to assist us in making our sites more useful to visitors, such as:

The address (IP) of your computer or Internet provider.
The date and time the site was accessed.
The Internet address of the website that referred you to our site.
We will not sell, lease, or otherwise distribute or disclose your email address, postal address, phone number, borrower records or other personal information for non-library purposes to outside parties unless required by law.

The Library will not disclose a minor’s full name or contact information without written approval from a parent or legal guardian, in accordance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The Library’s websites use “cookies” to allow you access to certain functions (such as the online catalog and online resources, etc.) within our sites. These cookie files do not capture any personal user information (such as email address or user passwords).

Photos, comments, and videos that appear on the Library’s websites may be gathered from public programs, events, comments made on the Library’s social media sites and Library spaces. Photos, images, comments, and videos submitted by users for online galleries or contests may also be used by the Library for promotional purposes. To ensure the privacy of individuals and children, images will not be identified using full names or personal identifying information without written approval from the photographed subject, parent or legal guardian.

Some Library websites/pages or social media pages contain links to external sites not maintained by the Library. The Library cannot be responsible for your privacy when you disclose information to outside websites. Third parties linked from the Library’s websites may serve content and advertisements, collect information directly from site visitors, and place or recognize cookies on the visitors’ browsers. It is your responsibility to protect your personal information.

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.

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.

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 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 have permissions to do so and edit or publish an article on our website, 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.

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

If you have any concerns about how your information is used, please submit a question via our Contact Us form at https://somersetcolibrary.org/about/contact-us/.