Privacy
What the society records about its members, and what it does with it.
The Astronomical Society of Nevada is a small non-profit run by volunteers. This page says what we hold about you, why, who can see it, and how long we keep it. We have tried to describe what actually happens rather than what a template says should.
If anything here is unclear, or you want to know what we hold about you, write to info@astronomynv.org and a real person will answer.
If you are just reading the site
You can read everything here without telling us anything. We do not use analytics, advertising, tracking pixels or third-party scripts. Nobody is building a profile of you from these pages, because nothing here is capable of it.
The site sets one cookie, and only once you sign in. It keeps you signed in as you move between pages and does nothing else. It is not shared with anyone.
Our web server keeps ordinary access logs, as all web servers do — which page was asked for, when, and from what address. They are used to keep the site working and to notice attacks.
If you are a member
We hold your name, your email address, the dates your membership has run, and a record of your payments. If you have told us anything else — that you would rather not have the newsletter, or that an address has changed — we keep a note of that too.
Who can see it: the small number of board members who administer the site. Every sign-in to that part of the site is recorded, and access ends when somebody leaves the board. We do not sell, rent, share or trade the membership roll, and we never have.
Your photographs and your name
This is worth stating plainly, because it is the one place your name appears in public.
If you send us a photograph and we publish it, we put your name under it. That is a credit rather than an oversight — the work is yours and you should be known for it — but it does mean your name appears on a public page that search engines can read.
If you would rather your photographs appeared without your name, or not at all, tell us and we will change it. There is no argument to be had about it.
We publish only the photograph and the name. Not your email address, not where you live, and not where the picture was taken unless the picture itself is of a named public site.
Signing in
If you have an account, we hold your sign-in address and your password. Passwords are stored scrambled, in a form we cannot reverse. Nobody at the society can read your password, including whoever administers the site.
We also record when a sign-in happens — the time, whether it worked, and the address it came from. That is how somebody trying to break into accounts becomes visible. We never record the password that was tried, successful or not. These records are kept for twelve months and then deleted.
We should say that this is recent. Until September 2026 this site stored member passwords as ordinary readable text, which was wrong. Most have now been cleared and the remainder are being moved to the scrambled form. If you used a password here that you also use elsewhere, change it there.
Paying
Payments made through this site are handled by PayPal. Card numbers never reach our servers — we do not see them, and we could not store them if we wanted to. What we keep is the amount, the date, what it was for, and PayPal's reference for it.
If you pay in person by cash or check, the treasurer records the same things by hand.
PayPal handles your payment under their own privacy policy, which is worth reading if you have not.
We use your address to tell you when your membership is due, to reply when you write to us, and to send occasional news of what the society is doing. Every message has a working way to stop receiving them. You can also write and ask, and we will do it by hand.
How long we keep things
Membership and payment records are kept while you are a member and for a period afterwards, because a society needs its own history — who served on the board, what the accounts said, who has been part of this over the years. The board has agreed that records go to an archive after three years without any activity.
You can ask us to delete your record at any time and we will, apart from anything we must keep for the society's accounts. Write to info@astronomynv.org.
Other people's sites
We link to observatories, weather services, other societies and suppliers because they are useful. Once you follow a link you are on somebody else's site, under their privacy policy, not ours.
Our events calendar is provided by Google Calendar and shown on the calendar page. Opening that page loads content from Google, who may set their own cookies. The rest of the site does not.
Children
Children are welcome at our events, and we are glad when they come. We do not knowingly collect information about anybody under 13 through this site. If you believe we hold something about a child, tell us and we will remove it.
If something goes wrong
If we discover that member information has been exposed, we will say so — to the people affected, promptly, and in plain language about what happened and what to do. We would rather tell you about a problem than have you find out some other way.
Changes to this page
When this changes, the date at the foot of the page changes with it. We will not pretend you agreed to something by continuing to use the site.
Asking us anything
Write to info@astronomynv.org or use the contact page. If you want to know what we hold about you, ask and we will tell you.
Last reviewed 15 September 2026.