Girl Scouts Heart of the South is committed to providing a safe, secure, and fun online experience for children who visit our site. We are dedicated to safeguarding any personally identifiable information collected online and to helping parents and children have positive experiences on the Internet.
We will never knowingly request personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13 without prior verifiable parental consent. With parental consent, we may collect information from children under the age of 13 such as: name, address, email address, account information, and user generated content. This information allows us to fulfill a requested transaction and facilitate participation in online programs, keep records, undertake certain marketing activities, or to otherwise customize or enhance the Web site experience for children.
Children under the age of 13 may be able to make certain content such as user generated content visible to others or the public. This could include, for example, a webpage or parts of webpages operated by children that have been designed for group or public viewing. However, absent parental consent, children under 13 would be allowed to display only limited information such as a first name or unique user name or other information that does not allow for online contacting by third parties.
Regardless of what information is displayed, parents can revoke their consent and ask that information about their children be deleted from the site by contacting our offices by phone at (800) GSUSA.4.U or via e-mail at www.girlscouts.org/contact/email.asp. To do this or to review personally identifiable information collected from children, we must verify the identity of the requesting parent. When a parent revokes consent, we will stop collecting, using, or disclosing information from that child. To respect the privacy of parents, information collected and used for the sole purpose of obtaining verifiable parental consent or providing notice is not maintained in retrievable form by the site if parental consent is not obtained after a reasonable time.
The information collected from or about children under the age of 13 or otherwise may be collected by or shared with the child's Girl Scout Council and troop. To find contact information for the relevant Council with whom information may be shared, please visit http://www.girlscouts.org/councilfinder/.
Submissions
Girl Scouts Heart of the South welcomes children to learn more about our organization and, where appropriate, participate in polls and surveys, as well as submit comments, artwork, writings, and other submissions for posting on our Web site. For this reason, Girl Scouts Heart of the South follows the guidelines for interactive electronic media published by the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the Better Business Bureau for pages targeted to children under 13. However, we encourage this be done only with their parent's knowledge and supervision. We also encourage children to use an alias (e.g., "Bookworm", "Skater", etc.), first name, nickname, initials, or other alternative to full names or screen names which correspond with an e-mail address for any activities which will involve public posting.
In keeping with CARU's Principle regarding respecting and fostering the parents' role in providing guidance for their children, we encourage parents to check and monitor their children's use of e-mail and other online activities regularly.
