Who We Are
Railcar Technical Services Association (RTSA) is the only non-profit organization dedicated to continuing education of the railcar mechanical professional.

We value individual privacy and we want to give our website visitors the opportunity to know what information we collect about them and how they can limit the use of personally-identifiable information beyond the purposes for which they first provided it. At all times, however, RTSA reserves the right to disclose information where required by law or to comply with valid legal process (such as a search warrant, subpoena or court order), to protect MARTS’ rights or property, including without limitation in the event of a transfer of control of MARTS or substantially all of its assets, or during emergencies when safety is at risk.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

1. Personally Identifiable Information. RTSA does not collect your personally identifiable information without your consent. For example, you may have the option to provide contact information such as your name, organization name, address, e-mail address. Providing this optional information is voluntary on your part, and in the absence of providing such information you remain anonymous to MARTS. You may also have the option of providing additional information in a comment or message box, in which case we may collect a record of that information in a file specific to you.

2. Anonymous Information. RTSA does not directly collect anonymous information (such as your Internet Protocol address, Web browser information, and your actions while as you navigate the Site); However, the Site’s storage, hosting and/or applications may be provided by third party outsourcers who collect such information through the use of commonly-used information-gathering tools, such as cookies and Web beacons. Standing alone, this information does not personally identify you. Currently, MARTS uses WordPress for its content management needs, and its privacy policy can be found at https://wordpress.org/about/privacy/

What types of cookies does RTSA use and why?
A cookie is used in website system administration to keep track of movement of an individual user from one screen to another and through Google Analytics. This information may be used by our staff to detect and resolve website problems and to assist with customer support. We do not collect any personally identifiable information about site visitors in this process. Our web server automatically collects information from your computer and navigation patterns when you visit our site, including your Internet Protocol (IP) address, the computer’s operating system, the type of browser you use, and the specific web pages visited during your connection. We may also track data such as the total number of visits to our website and the number of visitors to each page of our website. We may use this information, in aggregate form, for system maintenance and to better understand how our visitors use our site and services so that we can make them better. This aggregate data will not contain any information that personally identifies you.

Cookies are grouped into the following categories:
Essential – these are cookies that are required for the regular operation of our websites. For example, some cookies allow us to ensure that people can access the subscription pages in the correct region and language for them, access the log-in pages, or carry out fraud detection and security checks (along with other similar things). These are essential for the website to work properly.

Functional – these remember your preferences, and are intended to make your experience on our websites better for you. For example, a functional cookie is used to provide social media features or to remember your log-in details securely if you have ticked the “Stay logged-in” box. This makes it possible for users and subscribers to return to our sites without having to log in every time.

Analytics – these cookies are used for performance measurement to understand things including how many people visit our websites, how they navigate our sites, and what content is popular. This allows us to improve your experience with us. Full details of the cookies we use for analytics purposes can be found in our cookie consent tool. Additionally, you can see how Google Analytics (one of our analytics tools) uses cookie information when you use our partners’ sites by visiting www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners, or any other URL Google may provide from time to time.

Commenting
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, 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 (if any), 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 an account on this site, or have left comments, 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.

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.) from outside services like Youtube. 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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Third party links
Pages and posts on this site may contain links to third party websites. Unless otherwise stated, this Privacy Policy only covers information that we collect from you here. Any other link will be covered by the privacy policy of that specific website.

What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, 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.

Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Contact Information
Railcar Technical Services Association
2146 Windsor Ave SW
Roanoke, VA 24015

For privacy-specific concerns, contact us at http://railcar-tech.org/contact/