Youth Journalism International respects your privacy. While we may collect information from you — especially if you apply to become a student — it is our policy to ensure that all personal information remains private and secure.
Our website address is: https://youthjournalism.org. We also have a variety of alternative URLs that reach this site.
We do not release personal information about anyone beyond what it is published by Youth Journalism International in furtherance of its mission, which may include stories and photographs that are the essence of the organization’s reason to exist. We do not knowingly collect or use personal identifying information from children younger than 13 without parental consent.
Visitors to YJI’s website should be aware that it may collect some information automatically, including your IP address (a unique signature for your computer), your operating system (such as Windows 10), your browser (such as Chrome), whether you are on a desktop or mobile device, your internet provider and your geographic location (such as Cairo, Egypt).
We occasionally study the information collected to get a sense of where our readers are and what they are looking at. There are temporary cookies — small text files placed on your computer’s drive — that help us monitor what you look at it and for how long. Since we do not have any advertising, none of this data is used to drive any advertising content, though we reserve the right to do so. We do not systematically compile or store any of this information.
If you leave a comment, sign up for YJI’s newsletter or send us an email, we will retain that information.
The only time where we deliberately gather and store a significant amount of information about anyone in particular is when a young person applies to become a student of YJI. In that case, there is a generic form that asks for such information as name, address, birth date and other data that can help us determine the eligibility of a student and help us add someone to our student ranks. An admitted student often provides us with much more data in the normal course of working with him or her. We retain all emails, private messages and other electronic data indefinitely.
The only financial data YJI collects is when people make donations to the organization or enter its annual contest. That is done almost entirely through online providers such as Donor Box, PayPal and Facebook, which actually keep and retain financial information. We typically learn only the names, payment totals and, usually, email addresses for donors. Sometimes we get addresses, too, if a donor provides one.
Though we have never received one, we would honor all legal requests from law enforcement in any nation that has a reputable legal system — unless we think it would put a student in jeopardy for work they did for YJI. We will never cooperate with authorities seeking to silence young people.
You may request a copy of any data we have about you, but please be aware most of it is not systematically organized. We are at this point an all-volunteer organization and our volunteers want to spend their time helping young people, not searching through old emails. Since we may have to pay someone to do the work required to comply, be aware that there will be a charge for anything more than a quick effort to check easily accessed databases.
All of the data we collect is kept on computers that have typical office security programs that are hooked into a password-protected wifi system. We try our best to protect all of our data, which is also routinely backed up onto external and online drives (from commercial vendors).
We endeavor to comply with all relevant privacy laws. We will work with anyone who has concerns. We will not, however, take down published work simply because someone mentioned in it is not happy. We adhere to the tenets of journalism.
Last updated: July 1, 2018