Maintaining your privacy is important to establish trust in your interaction with the Knights of Columbus Web site. At the same time, it's important for us to understand how you interact with the site, so we can understand your needs better. Part of this process includes collecting information about you.

The Knights of Columbus Web site does not collect any personal identifying information about individuals except when actively provided by such individuals. The Knights of Columbus will not release any of said information about you without your permission, unless required by law.

The Knights of Columbus gathers two types of information about people who visit our site: data you provide through voluntary contact and customer service forms; anonymous traffic and survey information.

When you would like to have a Knights of Columbus agent contact you, we will ask you for:

• Full name
• Preferred method of contact
• Phone number and/or e-mail address, depending on your preferred method of contact
• Council number
• Type of inquiry or area of interest.

The Find a Council application on the Knights of Columbus Web site enables a public site visitor, usually a current member looking to transfer to another council or a prospective member looking for councils close to him, to find a council based on country, city, state or postal code. 

This information will be used to search and provide you with councils that come closest to matching your criteria.

If you would like a representative from a Knights of Columbus council to contact you, use the Find a Council contact form to enter the following information:

• Complete Name
• Current council and council number (if an existing member)
• Telephone number and/or e-mail address, depending on preferred method of contact
• Type of inquiry or area of interest.

Your information will be routed through to a representative of the council you select.

It is the Knights of Columbus intent to maintain the information you provide in a confidential manner. However, because the information is sent either by telephone or e-mail to a council, the Order cannot guarantee the absolute security of the information.

Although we check local Knights of Columbus sites periodically, we do not guarantee that these sites in any way reflect the usage and privacy commitment made by sites owned by the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus. Neither do we endorse materials, claims or products not specifically provided by the Supreme Council when such  materials, claims or products are promoted on Web sites maintained by state or local councils or assemblies.

To provide you with the service you need in the most efficient way possible, we provide a number of customer service forms on the Web site. The forms will generally ask you for the following:

• Full name
• Street address
• Home/work/fax phone numbers
• E-mail address
• Preferred method of contact (if appropriate)
• Membership status (yes/no) .

This information is for our internal use to service your request, and is not shared with any third party, unless required by law.

Any calculators on this Web site are there for your information only. The Knights of Columbus captures the data input into these forms, for the purposes of ensuring the calculator is meeting the needs of our users and returning the proper output. The data is not in any way linked to you as an individual.

The Knights of Columbus collects information on the usage of the Web site and the pages and functionality held within. The information collected in this process allows the site operators to understand how the site is being used and how we might improve the site to enhance the experience. The information is collected on an anonymous basis, IP addresses are not linked to individuals.

A cookie is a small piece of information a Web site can store on your computer as a text file. The text file is very small and contains a unique identification number that is transferred from a Web site to the hard drive of a user's computer to aid the site operators to passively track the user's behavior on the web site. A cookie will not allow a Web site to learn any personal information (such as your name and address) that you have not otherwise disclosed.

This site uses two types of cookies. A session cookie is a small text file that is sent to your browser when you access the site and is then stored temporarily in memory. Session cookies are used to maximize performance and to aid in securing specific areas of the Web site. The session cookie is available only during the course of the browser session; the information is not sent to or stored on your computer's hard drive. Closing your browser or logging off will invalidate the session cookie.

The second type of cookie used is called a persistent cookie. Persistent cookies are used to identify your choice of language for the use of the Knights of Columbus web site. When you return to the Web site this cookie is queried and the proper language site is delivered to your browser. If you select a different language site via the language selector in the upper left hand corner of the Web site, this cookie is reset to reflect your latest choice of language.