For information about how we handle patient health information please review our Notice of Privacy Practices. The Patient Portal is not part of this Website and is also governed by our Notice of Privacy Practices.
Website Privacy Policy and Terms of Service Agreement
Protecting your privacy is important for Lone Star Circle of Care. We realize that health is a personal, private subject matter, and we want you to be comfortable while visiting our Website. This privacy policy applies solely to information collected by and through this Website. It will notify you of the following:
- What personally identifiable information is collected from you through the Website, how it is used and with whom it may be shared.
- What choices are available to you regarding the use of your data.
- The security procedures in place to protect the misuse of your information.
This document is also an agreement by you regarding the terms and conditions of your use of the Website. Do not use the Website if you do not agree to these terms and conditions and consent to our practices described herein. This Privacy Policy and Terms of Service does not cover our practices or services other than the Website.
By using the Lone Star Circle of Care Website, you agree to acceptance of this Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
Information Submitted to Our Website
When you visit our site, we may ask you to give us your name, e-mail address, telephone number and other pertinent personally identifiable information. This information is considered “Personal Information”, and we may use it to contact you. We will collect this information from you only if you voluntarily provide it. Providing this information is not necessary in order to use the Website.
While visiting our Website, you may have the option to select whether you’d like to receive more information from Lone Star Circle of Care. If you select this option, we may send you e-mails (“Commercial Emails”) introducing a new service or information that we think might be of interest to you. We may also request Personal Information from you in connection with your use of, or participation in, requests for suggestions, customer feedback, and surveys. If you send us an e-mail with questions or comments, we may respond using the information you provided.
If, at any time, you decide that you no longer wish to receive Commercial Emails from Lone Star Circle of Care, you may opt-out by sending us an e-mail, letter or by calling us at the Contact Us information below. Opting out from Commercial Emails will not affect other e-mails you have consented to receive from us, such as responding to a request or receiving health education updates and appointment reminders. and we may still communicate with you in other ways, such as text messages you’ve opted to receive. If you later subscribe to Commercial Emails from us again, that will terminate your prior opt-out. However, you can always opt-out again later.
Information We Collect from Our Website
In addition to any Personal Information or other information that you choose to submit to us the website, we and third parties may use a variety of technologies that automatically (or passively) store or collect certain information whenever you visit or interact with our site (“Usage Information”). This Usage Information may be stored or accessed using a variety of technologies that may be downloaded to your personal computer, browser, laptop, tablet, mobile phone or other device (a “Device”) whenever you visit or interact with our website. To the extent we associate Usage Information with your Personal Information we collect directly from you on the website, we will treat it as Personal Information. Otherwise we do not treat it as Personal Information.
This Usage Information may include:
- your IP address, UDID or other unique identifier (“Device Identifier”). We do not consider Device Identifier to be Personal Information. A Device Identifier is a number that is automatically assigned to your Device used to access the Website, and our computers identify your Device by its Device Identifier;
- your Device functionality (including browser, operating system, hardware, mobile network information);
- the URL that referred you to our website;
- the areas within our Website that you visit and your activities there, including remembering you and your preferences;
- your Device location;
- your Device characteristics; and
- certain other Device data, including the time of day, among other information.
We may collect information in various places when you visit our Website. For instance, we may collect Usage Information about what pages on our site you visited and for how long for record-keeping purposes.
We may generate reports using certain kinds of non-identifying site Usage Information, such as the number of page views to our site. This information may be used for various reasons such as to monitor what the public likes and doesn’t like about our Website and may be used by technical support staff to provide better services for our visitors. However, these statistics do not contain any Personal Information.
How and When Do We Share Information with Third Parties?
We may share non-Personal Information, such as aggregated user statistics, with third parties. We may share your Device Identifiers with third parties along with data other than Personal Information related to you and your activities. We do not share your Personal Information that we have collected directly from you on our website with third parties for those third parties’ direct marketing purposes unless we have given you the choice to consent or withhold consent to such sharing at the time you provide your Personal Information, in which case we will honor your choice. If we de-identify data about you, it is not treated as Personal Information by us, and we may share it with others freely.
In addition, we may share Personal Information and Usage Information as disclosed at the time you provide your information and as described below or otherwise in this Privacy Policy. Further, Lone Star Circle of Care may disclose your information as follows:
(a) When You Request Information from or Provide Information to Third Parties. You may be presented with an option on our Website to receive certain information and/or marketing offers directly from third parties or to have us send certain information to third parties or give them access to it. If you choose to do so, your Personal Information and other information may be disclosed to such third parties and all information you disclose will be subject to the third-party privacy policies and practices of such third parties. In addition, third parties may store, collect or otherwise have access to your information when you interact with their Tracking Technologies (defined below), content, tools apps or ads on our Website or link to them from our Website. This may include using third-party tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or other third-party posting or content sharing tools and by so interacting you consent to such third-party practices. We are not responsible for the privacy policies and practices of such third parties and, therefore, you should review such third-party privacy policies and practices of such third parties prior to requesting information from or otherwise interacting with them.
(b) Third Parties Providing Websites on Our Behalf. We may use third-party vendors to perform certain services on behalf of us or the Website, such as hosting the Website, designing and/or operating the Website’s features, tracking the Website’s activities and analytics, and enabling us to send you special offers, collect charitable donations, or perform other administrative services. We may provide these vendors with access to user information, including Device Identifiers and Personal Information, to carry out the services they are performing for you or for us. Third-party analytics and other service providers may set and access their own Tracking Technologies on your Device and they may otherwise collect or have access to information about you, potentially including Personal Information, about you. We are not responsible for those third-party technologies or activities arising out of them. However, some may offer you certain choices regarding their practices, and information we have been informed of regarding such choices is available in the table below. We are not responsible for the effectiveness of or compliance with any third parties’ opt-out or other choice options.
(c) To Protect the Lone Star Circle of Care and Others. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, we may also disclose your information if we believe in good faith that doing so is necessary or appropriate to: (i) protect or defend the rights, safety or property of Lone Star Circle of Care or third parties (including through the enforcement of this Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, and other applicable agreements and policies); or (ii) comply with legal and regulatory obligations (e.g., pursuant to law enforcement inquiries, subpoenas or court orders). To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, we have complete discretion in electing to make or not make such disclosures, and to contest or not contest requests for such disclosures, all without notice to you.
(d) Affiliates and Business Transfer. We may share your information, including your Device Identifiers and Personal Information, Demographic Information and Usage Information with our parent, subsidiaries and affiliates (“Affiliates”), if any. We also reserve the right to disclose and transfer all such information: (i) to a subsequent owner, co-owner or operator of the Website or applicable database; or (ii) in connection with a merger, consolidation, restructuring, the sale of substantially all of our interests and/or assets or other corporate change, including, during the course of any due diligence process.
(e) Interactions with Third-Party Websites. The Website may include functionality that allows certain kinds of interactions between the Website and a third-party web site or application. The use of this functionality may involve the third-party operator providing certain information, including Personal Information, to us. For example, if you donate money to Lone Star Circle of Care or our partners, you may have an option to use your Facebook, Google or other account provided by a third-party site or application to facilitate the registration and log-in or transaction process on the Website, or otherwise link accounts. If we offer and you choose to use this functionality to access or use our Website, the third-party site or application may send Personal Information about you to us. If so, we will then treat it as Personal Information under this Privacy Policy, since we are collecting it as a result of your accessing of and interaction on our Website. In addition, we may provide third-party service interfaces or links on the Website to facilitate your sending a communication from the Website. For example, we may use third parties to facilitate emails, tweets or Facebook postings. These third parties may retain any information used or provided in any such communications or other activities and these third parties’ practices are not subject to our Privacy Policy. Lone Star Circle of Care may not control or have access to your communications through these third parties. Further, when you use third-party sites or services, you are using their services and not our services and they, not we, are responsible for their practices. You should review the applicable third-party privacy policies before using such third-party tools on our Website.
Changing Your Information
You may change or update your Personal Information at any time. You may do so by sending us an e-mail, sending us a letter or by calling us at the Contact Us information below. This process will not change your health information. It only affects information collected via our website.
How to Contact Us
Lone Star Circle of Care
Attn: Privacy Officer
205 E. University, Suite 200
Austin, TX
512.686.0152
[email protected]
Cookies and Tracking Technologies
We may use various methods and technologies to store or collect Usage Information (“Tracking Technologies”). Tracking Technologies may set, change, alter or modify settings or configurations on your Device. A few of the Tracking Technologies include, without limitation, the following (and subsequent technology and methods later developed):
Cookies. A cookie is a data file placed on a Device when it is used to visit the Website. HTML5 cookies can be programmed through HTML5 local storage.
Web Beacons. Small graphic images or other web programming code called web beacons (also known as “1×1 GIFs” or “clear GIFs”) may be included in our Website’s pages and messages. Web beacons may be invisible to you, but any electronic image or other web programming code inserted into a page or e-mail can act as a web beacon. Web beacons or similar technologies may be used for a number of purposes, including, without limitation, to count visitors to the Website, to monitor how users navigate the Website, to count how many e-mails that were sent were actually opened or to count how many particular articles or links were actually viewed.
Embedded Scripts. An embedded script is programming code that is designed to collect information about your interactions with the Website, such as the links you click on. The code is temporarily downloaded onto your Device from our web server or a third party service provider, is active only while you are connected to the Website, and is deactivated or deleted thereafter.
Browser Fingerprinting. Collection and analysis of information from your Device, such as, without limitation, your operating system, plug-ins, system fonts and other data, for purposes of identification.
ETag, or Entity Tag. A feature of the cache in browsers. It is an opaque identifier assigned by a web server to a specific version of a resource found at a URL. If the resource content at that URL ever changes, a new and different ETag is assigned. Used in this manner ETags are a form of Device Identifier. ETag tracking may generate unique tracking values even where the consumer blocks HTTP and/or HTML5 cookies.
Recognition Technologies. Technologies, including application of statistical probability to data sets, which attempt to recognize or make assumptions about users and devices (e.g., that a user of multiple devices is the same user).
There may be other Tracking Technologies now and later devised and used by us in connection with the Website.
Tracking Technologies Choices and Consent
We are giving you notice of the Tracking Technologies and your limited choices regarding them so that your consent is meaningfully informed.
Regular cookies may generally be disabled or removed by tools that are available as part of most commercial browsers, and in some but not all instances can be blocked in the future by selecting certain settings. Each browser you use will need to be set separately and different browsers offer different functionality and options in this regard.
Third Party Tracking and Do Not Track
Third parties may use Tracking Technologies in connection with our Website, which may include the collection of information about your online activities over time and across third-party web sites or online services. We may not control those Tracking Technologies and we are not responsible for them. However, you consent to potentially encountering third party Tracking Technologies in connection with use of our Website and accept that our statements under this Privacy Policy do not apply to the Tracking Technologies or practices of such third parties. More information on our vendors, their Tracking Technologies and choices they may offer on tracking, see the table below. Also, various third parties are developing or have developed signals or other mechanisms known as “do not track signals”. For instance, some browsers may have such signal options, though they differ as to if the signal is set as default or must be turned on by the user. Further, there is currently no standard as to what sites and app operators should do with regard to these signals. Currently, we do not monitor or take any action with respect to these signals or other mechanisms, though we may consider doing so if an understandable and practical standard is developed and widely adopted. Instead, we suggest that users interested in information on third party programs that may permit you to exercise choice regarding targeted advertising refer to the table below.
Information on Our Website
All material contained within our Website is the sole property of Lone Star Circle of Care or its licensors. Any reproduction or redistribution of this material is prohibited without the expressed written consent of Lone Star Circle of Care. Any reproduction of illustrations or photographs appearing on these pages is strictly prohibited.
External Links
As part of our effort to provide you with as much health-related information as possible, we feature external links from our Website to other sites on the Internet. We believe that you will find these websites useful; however, we do not endorse these sites. We are not responsible for their content or privacy practices. If you’re asked to supply Personal Information to those sites, we encourage you to carefully read their privacy policies.
Advertisements
At this time, we do not display third party advertisements on our Website. However, we may associate Tracking Technology with you when you are on our Website to enable us to send you ads about us when you are on third party sites or services, and we may use third-party analytics and other service providers to evaluate and provide us and/or third parties with information about the use of the Website and viewing of ads and of our content. Third party ad servers are third parties that display advertisements, which may be based on your visits to the Website and other apps and sites you have visited. Third-party ad serving enables us to target advertisements to you for products and services in which you might be interested.
The Website’s third-party ad network and exchange providers, traffic measurement services and other third parties may themselves set and access their own cookies, web beacons and other Tracking Technologies on your Device and track certain behavioral Usage Information regarding users of your Device via a Device Identifier. These third-party Tracking Technologies may be set to, among other things: (a) help deliver advertisements to you that you might be interested in; (b) prevent you from seeing the same advertisements too many times; and (c) understand the usefulness to you of the advertisements that have been delivered to you. You acknowledge and agree that associated technology may access and use your Device and may set or change settings on your Device in connection with the associated operations. Note that any images (or any other parts of content) served by third parties in association with third-party ads or other content may serve as web beacons, which enable third parties to carry out the previously described activities.
Third-party Tracking Technologies are not controlled by us, even if they are associated with our Website or our ads. Statements regarding our practices do not apply to the methods for collecting information used by these third-parties and others or the use of the information that such third parties collect. We do however work with third parties to make efforts to have you provided with information on their practices and any available opportunity to exercise choice. The relevant third party’s terms of service, privacy policy, permissions, notices and choices should be reviewed regarding their collection, storage and sharing practices. We make no representations regarding the policies or practices of third-party advertisers or advertising networks or exchanges or related third parties.
In addition, we may serve ads on third party services that are targeted to reach people on those services that are identified on one of more of our data bases. This is done by matching common factors between our data bases and the data bases of third party operators. For instance, we may use Facebook “Custom Audience” services or Twitter conversion tracking and tailored audience products. If we use Facebook “Custom Audience” services, you can hover over the box in the right corner of such a Facebook ad and find out how to opt-out with us from such “Custom Audience” list. If you opt-out from Facebook “Custom Audience” services, we will remove the matching Personal Information from that list, however, this will not take effect immediately and if you have multiple e-mails or other accounts you may have to opt-out separately for each one. If we use Twitter conversion tracking and tailored audience products, you can opt-out through your account settings on Twitter. If you opt-out from Twitter conversion tracking and tailored audience products, you will be removed from that list, however, this will not take effect immediately and if you have multiple e-mails or other accounts you may have to opt-out separately for each one. We are not responsible for such third party services’ failure to comply with your or our opt-out instructions.
Age Policy
We are a general audience service and do not use the Website to knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of thirteen (13) that requires parental notice and consent under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA“) without such parental consent. If you are a child under 13 years of age, you are not permitted to use the Website and should not send any information about yourself to us through the Website.
In the event that we become aware that we have collected personal information, as defined by COPPA, from any child, we will dispose of that information in accordance with COPPA and other applicable laws and regulations. If you are a parent or guardian and you believe that your child under the age of 13 has provided us with personal information without COPPA-required consent, please contact us as set forth in Contact Us above.
Jurisdiction
This Website is not intended to constitute doing business in any other jurisdiction other than Texas, nor to be a solicitation of business anywhere on behalf of Lone Star Circle of Care, nor to constitute any contacts with any jurisdiction outside of Texas.
This Privacy Policy and Terms of Service agreement is entered into and performed in the State of Texas, United States of America, and is governed by and shall be construed in all respects under the laws of Texas, exclusive of its choice of law or conflict of laws provisions that would apply other than Texas law.
What About Changes to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service?
We reserve the right to change this Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at any time. Any changes will be effective immediately upon the posting of the revised Privacy Policy and Terms of Service and your use of our Website indicates your consent to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service posted at the time of use. However, we will not use your previously collected Personal Information in a manner materially different than represented at the time it was collected without your consent.
Third Party Policies and Information
The following third parties that collect information from you on or in connection with our Website have given us notice that you may obtain information on their policies and practices, and in some instances opt-out of certain of their activities. Each of these make use of tracing technologies referenced above.
Party | Website | For More Information | Privacy Choices |
---|---|---|---|
Ad-serving technology, including, Google Analytics, Google Ad Words and Google Tag Manager | Terms of Use; Privacy Policy, and Google Analytics information. | Certain opt-out options are available and described here. | |
Ad-serving and re-targeting ads | Privacy Policy; and About Ads |
About Ads; and/or Facebook Ad settings |
|
Clicky | Heat maps that analyze how visitors use our site, allowing us to improve content we present | Privacy Policy | Opt-Out options |
PLEASE NOTE: We are not responsible for third-party policies or practices. We try to keep this information current, and will add to and subtract from the chart above as appropriate, but it is provided as a courtesy and may not be current or accurate. Please contact the applicable third parties regarding their privacy and data security policies and practices.
Updated June 15, 2021.