Privacy Policy

WAO is committed to protecting your personal privacy and takes all reasonable care to prevent unauthorized access to your personal data. This notice governs all aspects of WAO, including WAO services, communications, and all web pages hosted by WAO, including the worldallergyweek.com and waojournal.com websites and any other websites owned by WAO now or in the future. It does not apply to pages hosted by other organizations, including member society websites, which have their own privacy policies. This notice may be amended at any time.

Why your personal information is collected and how it is used
Select personal information is needed by WAO to enable us to properly manage our member and customer files. These files are used to enable WAO to fulfil our role of providing a wide range of services to our members, contributors, volunteers, and customers including, but not limited to, providing services that you request, communicating information that may be considered of interest to you, processing applications, managing meeting registration, or to better understand how our websites and services are used so we may improve these member and customer offerings.

What personal information is collected
The type and amount of information received and stored by WAO depends on how you use the website and WAO’s other services. WAO does not collect information identifying you personally (such as your name, address, phone number or e-mail address) unless that information is voluntarily disclosed, such as in the case of membership applications, Junior member applications, registering for a meeting, registering for an online learning module, submitting an abstract, grant request, or otherwise providing this information to WAO. You can access most WAO webpages without stating who you are and without revealing any personal information.

How your personal information is collected
To fulfil member and customer requests and services, WAO collects personal information in a number of ways from a number of sources. This information may be provided to WAO on paper forms, fax, electronically through the WAO website or WAO’s online services, or through other electronic forms made available through partner platforms and websites, such as meeting registration or submission of an abstract. The sources of personal information received by WAO are:

  • The individuals themselves
  • Third parties acting on behalf of individuals (example: an assistant or agent arranging registration or hotel accommodation for a WAO meeting or event)
  • WAO Member Societies providing details of their Members (Note: Members of WAO’s member societies are also individual members of WAO by virtue of their association’s affiliation with WAO).

When WAO receives personal information about individuals from sources other than the individuals themselves, we will take all practical steps to contact the person concerned to advise the individual of their rights to oppose the use of their data or to correct it.

With whom your personal information is shared
WAO does not distribute, sell or rent personal information to others, except with your prior permission, where required by law, or to supply your information to WAO’s contractors to perform specific services. In this context, your personal data may be disclosed to third party vendors who manage WAO’s meeting registration, abstract management system, speaker management system, hotel bookings, flight bookings, etc.

How long your personal information is kept
Personal information is kept for a reasonable period of time, and may be stored indefinitely, dependent upon the nature of the information and its intended use.

How you can access, update or delete your personal information
You have the right to access, amend, oppose the use of, or protest collection of your personal data. If you change your e-mail address, discover inaccurate information, wish to unsubscribe, or would like to file a complaint, please send an e-mail message to info@worldallergy.org.

How your personal information is treated and data security
WAO ensures to the best of its ability that any personal information provided to WAO is secure on its systems. However, it cannot guarantee that submitting information over the Internet is 100% secure. As a result, WAO does not confirm or warrant the security of personal information submitted; you do so at your own risk.

Cookies
Like many other websites, the WAO websites use cookies in order to provide you with a more personalized web experience.

A cookie is a text-only string of information that is created and stored on your computer by your browser. It contains information about your visit that your browser uses to personalize certain pages or elements. For statistical analysis purposes, a cookie may also be used to pass a randomly generated and anonymous unique number to our servers. Cookies cannot be used by themselves to identify you. A cookie will typically contain the name of the domain from which the cookie has come, the "lifetime" of the cookie, and a value, usually a text value or a randomly generated unique number.

If you do not wish to receive cookies, you can easily modify your browser to reject all cookies or to notify you whenever one is about to be placed on your computer. However, if cookies are not accepted you may not be able to use all the interactive features of the WAO website.

Automatically collected information

Log files
Most standard web servers, including WAO’s, use log files, which record information such as:

  • service provider IP addresses;
  • browser versions;
  • referring web sites;
  • search terms used;
  • average number of pages requested;
  • average duration of visit;
  • total visitor traffic;
  • information gathered for aggregate use.

Google Analytics
Currently WAO uses Google Analytics to analyze the audience of the website and improve our content. All data is being collected in anonymized form for the purpose of analyzing traffic to our website and plan updates and improvements according to actual usage. The collected data is transmitted to, stored and analyzed on Google Analytics servers. No personally identifying information is collected from Google Analytics.

You may opt out of Google Analytics using the official instructions or you can access their own Privacy Notice, which can be found on their website here.

Protecting Children
The website is not intended for people under 16 years of age. WAO does not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from people under 16. If you are under 16, do not use or provide any information on the Website or provide any information about yourself to us, including your name, telephone number, email address or any screen name or user name you may use. If we learn we have collected or received personally identifiable information from a person under 16 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a person under 16, please contact us at info@worldallergy.org.

Governing Law
This Privacy Notice and any disputes related thereto shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Wisconsin, exclusive of its choice of law rules.

Disclaimer
This site contains hypertext links to other sites. WAO is not responsible for any third-party content or privacy practices accessible through this website. We do not endorse any of the companies or opinions listed in or linked to or from the website. Our website also does not host any form of advertisement.