Is the church selling our data?
A while ago I noticed a couple things that bothered me.
- Embedded data trackers our church apps
- Pixeled data trackers in our emails.
Today I was reading through the Church Privacy Policy and noticed that they provide our data to Third Parties and Church Entities for a variety of reasons:
"4. With whom do we share personal data?
We share your personal data with other parties in the following circumstances:
a. Third-party providers. We may provide personal data to third parties for their processing in performing functions on our behalf as data processors (for example, payment processing, maintenance, security, data analysis, hosting, measurement services, data-driven social media messaging, surveys, and so on). In such instances, in accordance with this Notice and applicable laws, the providers will be contractually required to protect personal data from additional processing (including for marketing purposes) and from transfer.
b. Church entities. We may transfer personal data to any Church entity to accomplish Church purposes."
And then I noticed the privacy policy on The Church News
https://www.thechurchnews.com/pages/privacy-policy/
Purposes For This Information. We and our third-party service providers use such Usage Data for a variety of purposes including to diagnose problems with our servers and software, to administer the Services, to gather demographic information and to target advertising to you on the Services and elsewhere online. Accordingly, our third-party advertising networks and ad servers will also provide us with information, including reports that will tell us how many ads were presented and clicked on the Services in a manner that does not identify personally any specific individual. The Usage Data we collect is generally non-identifying, but if we associate it with you as a specific and identifiable person, we will treat it as Personal Data.
So my question
So there they mention that they are contracting companies to collect our data for targeted advertising. So that they can advertise the church to us? It's members? But also, if they contract companies like Validity and Google to track data on us, is that data given only to the church? Or do Google and Validity and Chromebeat and all these other data brokers also get to sell our data as part of those deals?