Here at GTR, your online privacy is important to us. We understand, more than most sites, the importance of privacy to queer youth, which is why we have instituted the following policy. We will not give any information you supply us to anybody - not even your parents.*

*Exception If we feel that with-holding this information poses a risk to your life (exp. if you were contemplating suicide); we will not hesitate to take any appropriate actions in order to save your life.

Children's Online Protection Act of 1998

In accordance with COPA, we do not solicit personal information from people under the age of 13 in order to permit access to any area of GTR.

The message board may ask for personal information, but disclosing any information to the message board is completely voluntary, and in no way does the nondisclosure of said information affect the performance of the boards. If any users are under the age of 13, we highly encourage them not to disclose their age on the message board or its "profile" function until they reach their thirteenth birthday.

If you are under the age of 13, and sign up for any of our services, and you disclose your true age, then we are obligated, by Federal law, to inform your parents. This is obviously not something you want us to do, since we are a gay organization; so we re-iterate: you are highly, highly encouraged not to disclose your age to us until you're at least 13 years old.

Disclosure of information to third parties

Under no circumstances, will GTR ever sell your email address or other personal information to third parties for profit, or any other purpose. Any information of yours that is stored on our server, will remain hidden from view unless you choose to make it visible through the "profile" function of the message board (you can always change that, at your discretion).

Subscribing to the gTeen Discussion List will make your email address available to the other list members each time you send an email to the list. The gTeen Archive will also disclose your email address; but only gTeen list members are able to access the archive, and only gTeen list members will be able to see your email address from there. If you are not comfortable releasing such information we suggest you sign up for one of the many free email service options; such as, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo among others.

Your email address or other contact information will not be given to third parties without your prior consent, except in the situations outlined below. The reason for this is to prevent your outage to friends and/or family, as your safety may then be at risk.

If we believe that your safety or life is in immediate danger, and contacting third parties is the only way to prevent a tragedy, we may do so at our discretion. Normally, situations such as these are suicide-related and your information may be passed onto or others for emergency assistance.

We will not disclose information to third parties who approach us for it, unless you have given us prior permission.

What we collect

We collect the following information on this site (only if you give it to us), which is subject to the conditions as stated above:
Email Address
Name
Age
IM (Instant Messaging) Information
Geographic Location
Hobbies and Interests
Your Web Browser

The web browser information is used only for the time you spend on the site, and is used to generate the proper web pages for your browser. Different web browsers will display slightly different pages, in order to allow everyone access to all areas of the site.

Use of cookies

We use cookies on the message boards (the "Forums" link on the left). These cookies are used only for logging into the message board, and we cannot track your travels on the web, we cannot read your hard drive, nor can we get any other information about you from this cookie. The cookie identifies itself with a gayteenresources.org address in your cookies file, so you may want to make sure you do not accept this cookie if you share your computer with family.

We may use cookies for other purposes in the future; if we do, those purposes will be clearly stated in this section. We will also not set cookies on your computer without your knowledge - you will have to explicitly "ask" for the cookie (normally for logging into a portion of the site).