Privacy Policy

Thank you for visiting the The City of Hawthorne web site and reviewing our privacy policy. Our privacy policy is clear: We will collect no personally identifiable information about you when you visit our web site unless you choose to provide that information to us.

Email

Email addresses are considered public record under Florida Law and are not exempt from public-records requirements. If you do not want your email address to be available for release via a public-records request do not send email to the City or its employees. Instead, contact us by standard mail or telephone.

Information Collected and Stored

If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the web site, read pages, or download information, we will gather and store certain information about your visit automatically. This information does not identify you personally. We automatically collect and store only the following information about your visit:
 
  • The Internet domain (for example, "xcompany.com") and IP address (an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web) from which you access our web site.
  • The type of browser and operating system used to access our site.
  • The date and time you access our site;
  • The pages you visit, and if you linked to the The City of Hawthorne web site from another web site, the address of that web site.
  • Cookies - The The City of Hawthorne uses cookies to help provide a more usable and engaging website. A cookie is a small text file (typically only a few bytes) that we place on your hard drive to allow our server to identify your computer. Our cookies will not attempt to read any additional information on your hard drive, and we do not combine information collected through cookies with other personal information to determine your identity or your email address.
We use this information to help us make our site more useful to visitors -- to learn about the number of visitors to our site and the types of technology our visitors use. We do not link any of the automatically obtained information with any personally identifiable information.

If You Send Us Personal Information

If you choose to provide us with personal information -- as in an e-mail to City staff, or by filling out a form with your personal information and submitting it to us through our web site -- we use that information to respond to your message and to help us get you the information you have requested. We treat emails the same way we treat letters sent to the City offices. We are required to maintain many documents for historical purposes, but we do not collect personal information for any purpose other than to respond to you. However, information we receive may be considered public information which is subject to disclosure under Florida law. Except for information disclosure required by Florida law, we only share the information you give us with another government agency, if your inquiry relates to that agency. Moreover, we do not create individual profiles with the information you provide, or provide such information to any private organizations. The The City of Hawthorne does not collect information for commercial marketing.

Protection of Minors

We are especially concerned about protecting children's privacy. We hope parents are involved in children's Internet explorations. It is particularly important for parents to guide their children when children are providing personal information on line. We specifically ask children to get their parents' permission before providing any information on line -- at our site or any other site -- and recommend parents always be involved in those decisions. Most importantly, when children do provide information through the The City of Hawthorne web site, it is only used to enable us to respond to the writer, and not to create profiles of children.

External Sites

The City of Hawthorne’s privacy policy extends to city government websites only. If you access another organization's website through the www.cityofhawthorne.net website, you should read that organization's privacy policy to determine its website practices.
 
While we are diligent in our review of external sites before linking to them, we do not exercise controls over the sites and their content. These other sites may place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data or solicit personal information from you.