Policies
Thank you for visiting the City and County of San Francisco website and reviewing our policies.
- General Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Accessibility Policy
- Privacy Policy
- Copyright
- Data Policies
Information presented on this Web site is collected, maintained, and provided for the convenience of the reader. While every effort is made to keep such information accurate and up-to-date, the City and County of San Francisco does not certify the authenticity of information that originates from third parties.
Under no circumstances shall the City and County of San Francisco be liable for any actions taken or omissions made from reliance on any information contained herein from whatever source nor shall the City and County be liable for any other consequences from any such reliance.
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Purpose and Disclaimer
The City permits the establishment of external hyperlinks on its official website only if the links strictly comply with this policy. In establishing and maintaining its official website, the City does not intend to create any forum or other means for public discourse. Rather, the sole and limited purpose of the permitted external links is to provide information about the City and its government for residents, businesses and visitors. The City does not endorse or provide preferential treatment to any third party websites or associated organizations or persons. Additionally, the City does not control third party sites and therefore does not warrant that third party sites are accurate or, reliable, or that they have operational links.
Linking Criteria
Consistent with the foregoing purpose, it is the City's policy to limit external links to the following: a) Other governmental agencies; b) Entities with which the City has an existing formal, contractual relationship; c) Entities or events that receive funding from the City or are otherwise sponsored by the City; d) Entities that contribute to City initiatives and that the City wishes to acknowledge; e) Applications that use datasets from DataSF.org; f) the City's Chamber of Commerce and the San Francisco Travel Association; and g) Webpages that provide free access to traffic and weather information for San Francisco. In addition, the City reserves the right, at any time and without notice, to: a) Deny a link that does not meet the criteria set forth in this policy; b) Deny or discontinue an external link at any time if the website provides or promotes false, slanderous, illegal, infringing or incorrect information; c) Deny or discontinue an external link at any time if a substantial purpose of the linked website is to support or oppose a candidate or ballot measure; d) Remove any external link if the nature of the organization to which the link relates no longer complies with the City's external link policy; e) Revise this policy without prior notice when the City considers such revision to be in its best interests.
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It is the policy of the City and County of San Francisco that information and services on City and County Web Sites be designed to be accessible to people with disabilities. It is the responsibility of the agency and its web page developers to become familiar with the guidelines for achieving universal accessibility and to apply these principles in designing and creating any official City and County of San Francisco Web site.
According to the latest statistics available from the Bureau of the Census, there are 9.7 million people in the United States who have difficulty seeing the words and letters in ordinary newsprint, equal to 5.0% of the total population. Another 10.9 million people, or nearly 6% of the total population, have difficulty hearing what is said in an ordinary conversation with another person.
The use of the City and County of San Francisco accessibility guidelines will ensure that web sites created by the City and County of San Francisco are developed to serve the largest possible audience. Compliance with these guidelines provides an added benefit to those users with text-based browsers, low-end processors, slow modem connections and/or no multi-media capabilities on their computer. It also allows for access to City and County of San Francisco web sites by new technologies, such as internet phones and personal organizers with internet connectivity.
Visit the Web Accessibility Web site
Cascading Style Sheets
This site implements cascading style sheets. Certain early versions of Netscape (4.x and earlier) and Internet Explorer (3.x and earlier) do not fully support this feature, so elements such as links may display differently. If you are experiencing this, you may wish to disable style sheets. You can do this through your browser. In Explorer (5.50), choose Tools, Internet Options, General Tab, Accessibility, and check the "Format documents using my style sheet" feature. In Netscape (4.75), choose Edit, Preferences, Advanced, and turn off the Enable Style Sheets feature.
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The Privacy Policy outlines the types of information we gather when you visit our website, as well as some of the steps we take to safeguard it.
Information Collection
- We do not collect personal information about you when you visit our website unless you choose to provide that information to us.
- We collect limited non-personally identifying information your browser makes available automatically whenever you visit a website. This information includes the Internet Address of your computer or network, the date, time, and page you visited on our site, your browser and operating system, and the referring page (the last webpage you visited before clicking on a link to our site).
- We use the aggregated information from all of our visitors to measure server performance, analyze user traffic patterns and improve the content of our site.
- We sometimes track the keywords that are entered into our search engine to measure interest in specific topics, but we do not track which terms a particular user enters.
- Some of our online services require you to register for an account. We ask you for some personal information in order to create an account (typically your name, email address and a password for your account) and we will use that information to provide the service. For certain services, such as our online payment services, we may request credit card or other payment information which may be stored temporarily in encrypted form on secure servers.
Information You Provide
- Information volunteered by you through your filling out of our optional online feedback form and contact us form is used to help us enhance our web sites, and may be shared with City and County of San Francisco employees and contractors for that purpose.
Cookies
- We use "cookies" when providing online services such as online payments. We use cookies to improve quality of our service and not to track any personal information.
- The use of cookies is a standard practice among Internet websites and most Internet web browsers may be customized to reject cookies, to only accept or reject cookies by user intervention, or to delete cookies. However, some features may not function properly without cookies.
Information Sharing
- We do not give, share, sell, rent or transfer any personal information to a third party, unless we have your consent.
Links
- The City and County of San Francisco uses link and search capabilities to navigate publicly available information from dozens of agencies that are not part of the City and County of San Francisco web site and over whom City exercises no control.
- The privacy policies and procedures described here do not necessarily apply to those sites.
- We suggest contacting these sites directly for information on their data collection and distribution policies.
Site Security
- We monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information or to otherwise cause damage to the site. Anyone using this Web site expressly consents to such monitoring.
- We take appropriate security measures to protect unauthorized access, alteration or destruction of data.
Policy Changes
- Please note this Privacy Policy can change from time to time. We expect most such changes to be minor, but we will post those changes as they occur.
All editorial and creative assets on this web site, including the code used to create web pages, are protected by US and international copyright laws. The City and County of San Francisco reserves all rights to this content.