Privacy Policy

Who we are

WWW WASHME TV, Inc. — Work And Save Human Minority Entrepreneurs — is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Enterprise, Alabama (EIN 65-1113553). We run free entrepreneurship training, financial literacy courses, and mentorship for aspiring and early-stage business owners, with a focus on minority and low-income founders in Coffee County and the wider Wiregrass region.

This policy covers wwwwashmetv.org, every page on it, the installable app version of the site, and the forms, notifications, and tools built into them. It explains what happens to information you share with us, and it applies whether you are applying to a program, sending a resume, making a gift, or simply reading.

We are a small nonprofit, not an advertising business. We have no interest in building a profile of you, and there is nothing in this document that says otherwise.

The short version

A summary for orientation only — the sections that follow are the actual policy, and they govern where the two differ.

What you give us

The site has a handful of forms, and each one exists for a stated purpose. The information below is what those forms ask for and what we do with the answers.

Form submissions are delivered to us by our hosting provider, Netlify, which holds them in its submission store, and we are notified by email. Some forms also send you an automatic acknowledgment so you know the message arrived; that email is sent through Resend, our email delivery provider.

Collected automatically

Server logs

Like every website, ours is served by computers that keep records of the requests they answer. Our host, Netlify, logs the IP address the request came from, the page or file requested, the time, the response, and the browser's user-agent string. These logs are how outages get diagnosed and abuse gets blocked. We do not use them to identify individual readers, and they are retained by Netlify under its own retention schedule rather than copied into our records.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand how the site is used in aggregate — which pages are read, whether people find the application form, whether the site works on the phones people actually own. It sets cookies on your device and reports to Google information including your approximate location derived from your IP address, your device and browser type, the pages you view, and how you arrived. We see summaries and counts, not the identity of individual visitors.

We do not run advertising or retargeting tags, we do not operate a "people who visited this page" audience anywhere, and we do not combine analytics data with the information you type into forms.

Fonts

The site's typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser contacts Google's servers and Google receives your IP address as part of that request. This is presentation only; nothing about you is sent along with it.

Stored on your own device

Several conveniences work by remembering something locally, in your own browser, rather than on our servers. These are not tracking identifiers and none of them is sent to us for analysis:

• Background music setting — whether you turned the player on and at what volume, so it does not surprise you on the next page.
• Install prompt — the date you dismissed the "install the app" banner, so it stops asking for a while.
• Chat transcript — your conversation with the WASHME Assistant is kept for the life of the browser tab so it survives moving between pages. Closing the tab discards it.
• Saved application link — if you save a job application to finish later, the private link to that draft is kept in your browser so a return visit picks up where you stopped.
• Offline copy — the installable version of the site stores pages and images so it still works without a signal.

Clearing your browser's site data for wwwwashmetv.org, or uninstalling the app, removes all of it.

Push notifications

You can ask to be told when we publish news. If you agree to notifications, your browser — not us — creates a subscription with its own push service (Google for Chrome, Mozilla for Firefox, Apple for Safari) and hands us a subscription address and two encryption keys. We store those, along with a shortened description of your browser, whether you are using the installed app or a browser tab, and which story we last sent you.

There is deliberately no name, email address, or account attached to a notification subscription. We cannot tell who a subscriber is, only that a device asked to be notified. The keys exist so the notification can be encrypted such that only your device can read it.

Turn notifications off at any time in your browser or device settings, or from the notification control on our news page. When a push service tells us a subscription is gone — you revoked permission, uninstalled the app, or cleared your site data — we delete the record rather than keep it.

Job applications and saved drafts

Applying for a posted role is handled a little differently from the other forms, because applications take a while to fill in and people move between a phone and a computer while doing it.

Saving a draft

If you save an unfinished application, the answers you have entered so far — and the resume file, if you attached one — are stored on our side so you can return to them. Access is by a long random link that is generated when you save and is not listed, indexed, or searchable anywhere. Anyone holding that link can read, change, or delete that draft, so treat it as a password and be careful where you forward it.

A draft is deleted as soon as you actually submit the application; from then on the submission itself is the record. Drafts that are never submitted are deleted automatically after a period of inactivity, so an abandoned one does not sit on our servers indefinitely.

Applicant accounts

You may optionally create an applicant account so your saved applications are listed back to you without keeping a link. Accounts are handled by Netlify Identity: you provide an email address and a password, and the password is stored and verified by that service — we never see it. Ask us and we will close the account and remove its drafts.

What we do with applications

Applications are read by the people at WASHME TV involved in hiring for that role, and are used to evaluate you for it. We do not publish them, sell them, or pass them to recruiters. Information such as how you heard about the role is used to understand which postings reach people, not as part of the hiring decision.

The WASHME Assistant

The WASHME Assistant is the automated chat helper available on every page. It answers questions about WASHME TV and this website — programs, training, classes and events, jobs, news, donating, and the app — and gives general guidance on starting and running a small business. When you send it a message, your message, the recent turns of that same conversation, and the address and title of the page you are on are passed to an external AI model provider, which generates the reply and returns it. The conversation itself is not written into our records; the only copy is the one in your browser tab, which disappears when the tab closes.

Talking to the assistant. If you use the microphone or "Talk with me", your speech is turned into text by your own browser's speech recognition feature — some browsers do this on your device, and others (such as Chrome) send the audio to the browser maker's speech service under that company's privacy policy. We never receive or store your audio, only the resulting text you send. Spoken replies are read aloud by your device's built-in voice. Your choice to have replies read aloud is remembered on your device only.

The live classroom

Live training sessions run on Zoom, joined either through our classroom page or through a Zoom link. When you join, Zoom receives the display name you enter and the technical information it needs to connect you — including your IP address and device details — and handles it under Zoom's own privacy policy. If a session is being recorded, the host will tell you in the session before recording starts.

What you say and share in a live session is visible to the instructor and the other participants. Please treat other people's contributions as theirs, and do not record or redistribute a session without the host's permission.

Donations

Online gifts are processed by GiveButter, a third-party fundraising platform, which accepts cards, PayPal, Venmo, and bank transfers. You enter payment details on GiveButter's own secure form — those details never pass through, and are never stored on, our servers. GiveButter provides us with the information a nonprofit needs to record and acknowledge a gift: typically the donor's name, email address, amount, and date, unless you choose to give anonymously.

Gifts made by check are recorded by our staff for accounting, acknowledgment, and the recordkeeping that tax-exempt organizations are required to keep. Donor records are kept as long as our nonprofit reporting obligations require, and we do not trade or rent donor lists to anyone.

Who we share information with

We do not sell your personal information. We share it in four narrow circumstances: with the service providers that make the site work, when you ask us to, when the law requires it, and in aggregate form that identifies nobody.

Each of these handles information under its own terms and privacy policy, and we ask them for what the feature needs rather than everything we have.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to — a subpoena, a court order, a law enforcement request we are obliged to honor — or where it is necessary to investigate fraud or abuse, protect our rights, or protect someone's safety. Grant reporting, which nonprofits must do, uses counts and outcomes: how many people enrolled, how many completed, what the program achieved. It does not name participants unless you have specifically agreed to be named, for example in a success story.

If WASHME TV ever merges with or transfers its programs to another organization, information may transfer with the programs; we would tell you first, and this policy would continue to apply to information collected under it.

How long we keep it

How we protect it

The entire site is served over an encrypted connection. The pages where staff post jobs, publish news, or change site content require signing in, and the credentials our services need are held as protected configuration rather than written into the site's code. Uploaded files are stored in access-controlled storage rather than as public files on the web. Access to submissions is limited to the people at WASHME TV who need it for the program or role in question.

That said, no website can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach ever affects your information, we will notify affected people and the authorities as required by Alabama law.

Your choices and rights

Regardless of where you live, you may ask us to:

• Tell you what we hold about you, and why we hold it.
• Correct anything that is wrong or out of date.
• Delete it, where we are not required to keep it for accounting, tax, or legal reasons.
• Stop contacting you, or withdraw an application or enrollment.

Email jefffiffie@wwwwashmetv.org with the request. We will respond within 30 days, and we will not treat you differently for asking. We may need to confirm your identity before releasing or deleting information — usually by replying from the address you originally used.

You can also act without asking us: turn notifications off in your browser or device settings, clear our site's data from your browser to remove everything stored locally, uninstall the app, or block analytics with your browser's tracking protection or the Google Analytics opt-out add-on. None of these will keep you out of the site's content.

Residents of states with their own privacy statutes may have additional rights, including the right to know, delete, correct, and opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell or share personal information for advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of — but the access, correction, and deletion requests above are available to you on the same terms.

Children's privacy

Our programs serve adult entrepreneurs, and this site is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If a child has sent us information, email jefffiffie@wwwwashmetv.org and we will delete it.

Where a youth or family activity is offered, enrollment goes through a parent or guardian, and any information collected for it is used only to run that activity.

Links to other sites

We link to our partners, our donation platform, our social media, and to government resources such as the Alabama Department of Public Health. Once you follow a link, you are on someone else's site, under their privacy policy and their terms. We are not responsible for their practices, and being linked from here is not an endorsement of how they handle your information.

Changes to this policy

We will update this page when our practices change — when a feature is added, when a service provider changes, or when the law requires something different. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we use information you have already given us, we will say so prominently on the site rather than quietly editing this page. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated policy.

How to reach us

Questions about this policy, or a request about your own information, go to our CEO and Program Director, who handles privacy questions for the organization: