Security Matters
Need for Website Security
Unfortunately, the web not only is inherently insecure, but the openness allows individuals, organizations and nations access to unsecured information. Such information is of value to those actors who seek to gather whatever is available. More than ever your personal information is of interest to them.
In setting up this website, our purpose was to gather such information on the neighborhood as would be of importance to first responders and to each of you for survival in time of disaster. We rcognized that we would have to rely on each other. But, in order to do this, we would have to take as many precautions as possible to protect any information you made available to us.
Keeping any information you share was seen as a key component of the project.
The Harrison Grade Neighborhood Emergency Preparedness Group (HGNERG) takes precautions to protect your information no matter how it is collected. When you submit sensitive information, your information is protected both online and offline.
Registration
We ask you to register as a user on this website. The primary purpose is to help in time of disaster. In order to do this, we need to collect information that will help us help each other. The secondary purpose is so that we can secure anything you share to the greatest extent possible.
Registration is simple. Initialy we ask only for 2 things, a username and an email address. Once we have verified those, we ask for a little more in a second phase of the process. Almost everything you provide is voluntary - don't provide any items if you don't wish to do so. In fact the only things we do need are your name, street address and a password. Your password is key to the safety of the website, so choose well! We do not know what your password is, so we cannot retrieve it for you later, but you will be able to reset it.
Collecting Data
Wherever we collect potentially sensitive information (such as names, contact information, local physical property information and any other information relating to it and its protection), that information is encrypted and transmitted to our website in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a lock icon in the address bar and looking for "https" at the beginning of the address of the Web page. In addition to this encryption we encrypt your data kept on our servers. To further verify your identity, we use multi-factor authorization (MFA). MFA involves two or more ways of verifying your identity - something that you know (such as a password or other secret shared with us) and something that you have (such as an email address to which we can send an email with a secure link to our server).
While we use encryption to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect your information offline. Only HGNERG volunteers, employees and affiliated emergency organizations who need information to perform a specific job are granted access to your information. The computers/servers in which we store personally identifiable information are kept in a secure environment.
Cookies
Cookies are small pieces of information that a website puts on your computer. Their original intent was so that a website would remember things that you had done on the site. However, they can be examined by other websites and used to see which other websites you may have visited.
Our web site does not use cookies. We do not track or store any undisclosed information about you or your browsing history. If you feel that HGNERG is not abiding by this privacy policy, you should contact us immediately via the email address or phone number given on our website.
Links to Other Websites
This website contains links to other sites. Such links are only to provide original material useful to you (such as content on Sonoma Fire Safe's web site.) Please be aware that we are not responsible for the content or privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of any other site that collects personally identifiable information.