Privacy Policy

Last Updated Jan 2020

I. Introduction

The American Pharmacists Association (“APhA”, “we”, or “us”) respects the privacy of our members, subscribers, program participants, constituents, and our community. This Privacy Policy sets out the privacy principles that we follow with respect to the information collected, how that information is used, with whom it is shared, and how it is protected against unauthorized access in connection with the following (collectively referred as the “Site”):

Your use of the website www.pharmacist.com and all pharmacist.com subdomain websites
Your use of the website www.pharmacylibrary.com
Your participation in our ENGAGE online community
Your use of all APhA meeting websites
Your use of the websites aphadruginfoline.com
Your use of the websites pharmacistsprovidecare.com
Your use of our mobile apps
APhA events you may attend

To make this notice easy to locate, we make it available on our home page and throughout the Site.

Contact Details

APhA has designated a data privacy manager to answer any questions or concerns you may have regarding our Privacy Policy and our practices regarding information you provide to us. Please contact:

American Pharmacists Association
Attn: Data Privacy Manager
2215 Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20037
Email: infocenter@aphanet.org

II. Our Mission Purpose; Legitimate Interests

APhA is the largest association of pharmacists in the United States, with practicing pharmacists, pharmaceutical scientists, student pharmacists, pharmacy technicians as members. APhA inspires, innovates and creates opportunities for members and pharmacists worldwide to optimize medication use, patient care, and health for all. As such, information we collect serves to further our mission, including but not limited to the following:

Provide relevant information to our potential members, active members, constituents, and the public
Respond to inquiries relating to the APhA
Promote APhA events, programs, and activities
Perform our contractual obligations with members in good standing, registered attendees at our events, subscribers of our publications and other products/services, and customers who had purchased our products/services.
Understand how you interact with the Site so that the Site may be improved to better meet your needs.
For APhA subscribers, information you provide to us may be used to send you APhA periodicals, resource catalogs, information on programs such as the APhA Annual Meeting, educational programs, and announcements from APhA, and e-newsletters and ballots for APhA elections.
Conduct voluntary surveys of Site users (for example mailing or e-mailing you a questionnaire).

III. Information we collect

The information collected on the Site falls into two categories: (A) information that you provide when you engage in transactions on the Site, register for the Site, or enroll as an APhA member, and (B) information gathered about how you navigate the Site.

A. Information that you provide when engaging in transactions on the Site, registering for the Site, or enrolling as an APhA member

APhA only collects personal data you voluntarily submit to us, and the types of personal data we collect may vary based on the transaction, programs, services, and products you with to engage in, but generally includes the following:

Name
Primary mailing address
Primary telephone number
Primary fax number
E-mail address
Additional demographic information such as practice setting, job function, and license number is requested, but not required.

You may also provide, at your option, a secondary address, telephone number, or fax number. For example, you may provide your home address, telephone, and fax numbers as your primary contact information and a business address, telephone, and fax number as your secondary contact information.

If you decide to enroll as an APhA member on the Site, you will also be asked for the college(s) of pharmacy or other educational institutions from which you have earned degrees, your date(s) of graduation, and the APhA Academy and Section you wish to join. APhA members may also elect to join one or more special interest groups and to receive certain e-newsletters that are provided as a benefit of membership. APhA members may opt in or out of APhA e-newsletters by updating their profiles on the Site. After logging into the Site, click on your name to view your profile.

When you place an order on the Site, we may also collect information you provide about someone else to whom you wish to ship products. We do not share this information with outside parties except to the extent necessary to complete that order.

B. Information gathered about how you navigate the Site

The Site receives and stores certain types of information whenever you interact with us. The Site may collect and log your IP address and your browser information to determine how to facilitate services online and administer the Site. We may collect information on pages visited, frequency of visits, and length of time spent to make improvements that will enhance your experience with us.

We also use "cookies" and collect passwords to facilitate your navigation through the Site. Please review our Cookie Policy for additional information. Cookies are small files that your web browser places on your computer's hard drive. You can easily adjust your browser settings to prevent cookie data from being stored on your computer; however certain Site functions may not operate if you do so. We do not allow third parties to use cookies on the Site.

We use the information described in sub-section (B) in the form of summary statistics to help us make the Site more useful to visitors, members, and customers, such as assessing what information is of most and least interest.

IV. No Collection of Special Data

It is APhA’s policy not to collect any special categories of personal data such as personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, genetic data, etc. Nor do we collect any information about criminal convictions and offences.

V. With whom is the information you provide on the Site shared?

We do not share, sell, or rent information to any third party processors for their promotional use or for marketing purposes except in the following circumstances:

There are four ways in which information that you provide on the Site may be shared: (1) with agents of APhA who are performing services for APhA, including without limitation, web or internet, hosting and maintenance; data entry; customer service; product fulfillment tasks; or payment processing, under contract, (2) with organizations seeking to contact you about pharmacy-related news, professional information, or educational resources, (3) with research organizations, and (4) with a select few organizations offering professional services to pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, or pharmacy students. With the exception of (1), the Site offers you the option not to have your information shared. Further details regarding how and with whom APhA shares information are set forth below:

Name and address, telephone or fax number, e-mail address, and credit card information may be provided to third parties operating under contract to APhA for such purposes as fulfilling product orders, handling meeting registrations, or providing continuing education exam grading services. Contract terms specifically forbid these third parties from making any other use of your information. Credit card information provided on the Site is not permanently stored by APhA or the third parties that perform the functions listed in this paragraph.
Name and address information collected on the Site may be made available for limited, one-time use by organizations seeking to contact you with information about products, programs, or services relevant to the professional or educational needs of pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, or pharmacy students. E-mail addresses are not made available to any such third party. Requests for such use of your address information are reviewed to ensure that the information that is to be provided is consistent with the professional nature of APhA and the professional and educational needs of the pharmacy community. You may specify that your name and address information not be used for the purposes enumerated in this paragraph by sending an e-mail with the subject "no informational mailings" to infocenter@aphanet.org.
APhA may provide name and address, telephone, or e-mail information collected on the Site to research firms operating under contract to APhA, to researchers at colleges of pharmacy or other recognized educational, or to research organizations seeking to conduct studies on pharmacy practice, education, or training on a voluntary basis (that is, you may be asked but never required to participate in such studies). Such organizations will be permitted to use personally identifiable information only to contact you regarding the study. You may specify that your name and address information not be used for the purposes enumerated in this paragraph by sending an e-mail with the subject "no surveys" to infocenter@aphanet.org.
Name and address information collected on the Site may be made available to a small number of providers of professional liability or other insurance products, credit card, banking, or investment services, telephone discount, or automobile rental companies for the purpose of sending you mail about their products, programs, and services. You may specify that your name and address information not be used for the purposes enumerated in this paragraph by sending an e-mail with the subject "no offers" to infocenter@aphanet.org.

When you terminate your membership or cancel the website account access, APhA may continue to share information about you according to our legal and regulatory requirements.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, APhA may disclose your personal information as required by law or as needed in legal proceedings when APhA believes in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, protect your safety or the safety of others, investigate fraud, or respond to a government request.

In addition, in the event of a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale or transfer of some or all of our assets to a third party, we may also disclose your personal information to the third parties concerned or their professional advisors. In the event of such a transaction, the personal information held by APhA will be among the assets subject to the transaction.

VI. How we protect the information you provide on the Site

We will undertake commercially reasonable procedures to help to ensure that the information you provide to us is protected against loss, misuse, alteration, destruction, or unauthorized access. To prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the correct use of information, we have put in place commercially reasonable physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.

The information stored in your profile and Continue Education account is protected by the user name and password that you were provided when your pharmacist.com or pharmacylibrary.com account was created. You may change your user name and password at any time by logging onto the Site, clicking “Login” then “Request a New Password.” You are encouraged to change passwords periodically and to protect your user name and password as you would other personally sensitive information.

Whenever you are finished using the Site, you are encouraged to log out by clicking the "log out" button located on the home page and most other pages within the Site. To prevent others from accessing your personal account information, it is particularly important to log out if you are using a shared or publicly accessible computer.

All information that you provide on the Site is stored in a database residing on servers that employ commercially reasonable measures that utilize both software and physical means to secure against unauthorized access thereto. Access to your information by employees of APhA, and third parties working on the Site or providing services under contract to APhA is on a "need to know" basis, in which access is permitted only for specific jobs or job functions (for example, billing clerks, customer service representatives, website hosting and maintenance, and payment processing).

Credit card and other personal information that you provide on the Site is transmitted over the internet using a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection. SSL is the industry-standard method for protecting confidential web communications, such as credit card numbers, online forms, and financial data, from interception and hacking.

While APhA takes commercially reasonable steps to secure your information collected on the Site, you can do your part to protect the information collected on the Site about you by securing your pharmacist.com and/or pharmacylibrary.com user name and password as described above, and by logging out when you finish using the Site. However, you should be aware that despite the security procedures that APhA employs, no security system is impenetrable nor can we guarantee that the information you provide will not be intercepted while being transmitted over the internet or residing on or through the Site. You should particularly note that although it is illegal to intercept, disclose or otherwise access these messages and data under Federal law, e-mail is not secure, so you should not send confidential or personally sensitive information via e-mail.

VII. How you can access, correct, and delete information that you provide on the Site

APhA provides users with 24-hour access to their personal information after it has been collected. You can access all of your personally identifiable information that we collect online (your "profile") and maintain it by logging into the Site and clicking on your name. You may also send changes to APhA Membership Services Department, 2215 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20037. To further protect your privacy and security, we will also take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting access to make corrections. When you update information, we usually keep a record of the prior version for our records.

In some cases, our business requirements and legal obligations may prevent us from being able to delete your information. If we are unable to delete your information, we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.

VIII. Anonymous browsing

You are also given the option of visiting the Site without offering any information about yourself. Please note that you will not be able to purchase certain products or visit certain areas of the Site as an anonymous browser.

IX. Acceptance of Privacy Policy by user & Amendments

The use of this Site and submission of personal data to the Site constitute the User's acknowledgement that he or she has read, understood, and accepted this Privacy Policy, and agrees to its terms.

APhA may amend, modify or supplement this Privacy Policy statement at any time. Any changes to our Privacy Policy will be posted here so that users will know what information we gather, how we might use that information, and whether we will disclose it to anyone. We encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on our privacy practices and this Privacy Policy.

X. Children’s Information

The Site is not intended for children under 13 years of age. APhA does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 years of age. If APhA discovers that a child under the age of 13 has provided us with personal data, we will delete the child’s personal data unless a parent or guardian provides verifiable consent to APhA.

XI. International Website Access and Cross-Border Data Transfers

APhA’s principle place of business is in the United States. If you are visiting the website from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States where our servers are located and APhA is based. In addition, information that APhA collects may be stored and processed in and transferred between any of the countries in which APhA operates to enable the use of the information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. You agree to such cross-border transfers of personal information.

XII. Privacy Issues and Links to Other Sites

The Site may contain links to other third party websites that are not affiliated with APhA. APhA has no control over and is not responsible for the privacy policies or content of such sites.

XIII. Social Media Widgets

The Site includes social media features, such as the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube buttons, that run on the Site. These features may collect your Internet Protocol address and which page you are visiting on our website, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our Site. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy policy of the company providing it.

Cookie Policy

The American Pharmacists Association (“APhA”, “we”, “us”, “our”), uses cookies on the Site. This Cookie Policy explains what cookies are, how cookies are used on the Site and how you turn off cookies on the Site. It also explains the role of third party providers with respect to cookies on the Site.

A. What Is a Cookie?

Cookies are small text files stored on your device when you access most websites on the internet or open certain emails. We use the term “cookie” to refer to cookies and technologies that perform a similar function to cookies (e.g., tags, pixels, web beacons, etc.). Cookies can be read by the originating website on each subsequent visit and by any other website that recognizes the cookie. Cookies may be set by us (“first-party cookies”) or by a third-party (“third-party cookies”).

We use first party "functional" cookies to keep the content of our website up-to-date and running. This means that these cookies are essential to the proper functioning of this website. It is not possible to refuse these cookies if you want to visit our website. We use other first party cookies for analytical purposes. We install these analytical cookies to quantify the visits (traffic) on the website. This allows us to know how many times a particular page has been consulted. We use this information only to improve the content of our website or as a basis for a new campaign by determining certain topics of great interest.

Some cookies are “persistent” cookies. They remain on a device for the period of time specified in the cookie. Persistent cookies are activated each time the user visits the Site that created the particular cookie. Another type of cookie is a “session” or “transient” cookies. These cookies contain information that is stored on a temporary memory location and then deleted after the session is completed or the browser is closed.

B. Information Collected

The cookies we use collect certain information about users of the Site, including browser used to access the site, date and time, the URL of the page being loaded, users who have visited a particular website(s), any previously assigned cookie identification (a unique identifier assigned to a user to identify repeat visitors), browser window size, the geographic location of the user, device and operating system used to access the Site. The information we collect from these cookies is used to determine information about a user’s visit to our Site, including the number of visits, average time spent, pages viewed, navigation history through the website, and other statistics.

The information collected is used to enhance the users experience while visiting our Site and to improve the performance of our Site by, among other things, allowing us to monitor Site performance, making the Site easier to use, measuring the effectiveness of promotional placements, remembering settings, tracking activities, analyzing trends, and tailoring the Site (including the ads and offers a user receives) to better match a user’s interests and preferences. We also use cookies to understand users’ browsing and buying activities so that we can measure the success of online advertising campaigns we run on the Site. Our Site also uses a category of cookies called web beacons (either directly or from our partners) to determine if a user has visited a particular website.

C. How To Opt-Out

Users who prefer not to accept certain cookies can set their Internet browser to notify them when they receive a cookie or to prevent cookies from being placed on their hard drive. If you consent to our collection of cookies and you subsequently wish to withdraw your consent, you will need to manage the settings on your web browser to delete all cookies and disallow further acceptance of cookies. Please note that disabling cookies on your browser will prevent us from tracking your activities in relations to our Site, however, it may also disable some of the functions and features of the Site and the Site may not work properly.

You can choose to restrict or block cookies through your browser settings at any time. For more information about how to do this, and about cookies in general, you can visit www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu. Please note that certain cookies may be set as soon as you visit the Site, but you can remove them using your browser settings.

For more information about online behavioral advertising and to opt out of targeted advertising, visit: Network Advertising Initiative: http://www.optout.networkadvertising.org, Digital Advertising Alliance: http://www.aboutads.info/choices, European Interactive Digital Adverting Alliance (EDAA): http://www.youronlinechoices.eu and http://www.edaa.eu. However, please be aware that restricting or blocking cookies set on the Site may impact the functionality or performance of the Site, or prevent you from using certain services provided through the Site. It may also affect our ability to update the Site to cater for user preferences and improve performance.

D. Third Party Websites

Please note that when using our Site you may be directed to other websites. These websites may use their own cookies, and we do not have control over the placement and use of cookies on third party websites, even if we directed you to that website (e.g., social media platforms may have separate cookie practices).

E. Other Technologies

We may store certain information in server logs, including IP address and device information, and collect and store information on your device using local storage objects; other tracking technologies we use include scripts, tags, MAC address, IMEI device number and pixels. Certain pages on the Site and our emails may contain pixel tags (also referred to as web beacons, web bugs, tracking pixels, java tags and clear gifs). These other technologies allow us and our service providers to: customize communications that we send to you and content provided to you on our Site; collect usage statistics on the use of the Site and our emails; and collect statistics regarding the way you use our Site and interact with e-mails that we sent to you.

F. Third Party Providers

We use Feathr for online activity tracking for analysis and segmentation and to serve ads.Click here to learn more about Feathr’s privacy practices, and click here to access Feathr’s Privacy Platform.

We use Google Analytics and Siteimprove to measure how you interact with the Site to improve your experience. To learn more about Google Analytics’ privacy practices and opt-out mechanisms, click here. To learn more about Siteimprove’s privacy practices, click here.

We use Facebook Analytics to measure how you interact with our website to improve your experience. To learn more about Facebook Analytics’ privacy practices and opt-out mechanisms, click here.

G. Questions

Should you have any questions, concerns or a complaint about this Cookie Policy, please contact APhA’s Membership Services Department, 2215 Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20037, infocenter@aphanet.org or (800) 237-2742