Privacy Policy

Welcome to Students For Liberty’s Privacy Policy

This is the privacy policy for Students For Liberty, Inc. (SFL), located at 1750 Tysons Boulevard, Suite 1500, McLean, Virginia 22102, United States. This policy describes how SFL handles your personal information. It applies across all SFL’s platforms including StudentsForLiberty.org and affiliated sites (e.g., SFLAcademy.org, LibertyCon.com), the SFL Student Portal mobile app, and physical signup forms (otherwise known as the platforms).

What Personal Information Do We Collect?

We collect certain personal information about visitors and users of our platforms. The most common types of information we collect include things like: first and last name, email addresses, phone numbers, university/college details, professional contact details, physical address, IP addresses, survey responses, blogs, photos, payment information, transactional details, tax information, and web analytics data. If you use the SFL Student Portal app, we also collect the information described in “The SFL Student Portal App” below, including a device identifier used to send you notifications. We will also collect personal information from job and program applications (such as your resume/CV, the application answers itself, cover letter and interview notes).

How Does SFL Collect Personal Information?

We collect personal information directly when you provide it to us, whether online or in person, or automatically as you navigate through our platforms. This includes when you provide it to us by completing event registration, applying for one of our programs, submitted a donation, subscribing to a newsletter, opting in to SMS communications, submitting feedback, entering a contest, filling out a survey, attending an in person event, or sending us a communication.

What Personal Information Do We Get About You From Others?

Although we generally collect personal information directly from you, we also get certain information about you from other sources. That information can include:

financial and/or transaction details to process a transaction
third party service providers (like Google, Facebook) may provide information about you when you link, connect, or login to your account with the third party provider. The information varies and is controlled by that service provider as authorized by you via your privacy settings at that service provider
other third party sources and/or partners, where, as allowed by law, we receive additional information about you such as demographic data.

How Do We Use Personal Information?

We will use your personal information:

To fulfil a contractual obligation, or take necessary steps related to our contractual agreement. Most notably, when facilitating and processing transactions, such as when you purchase a ticket to our event or submit a donation.
Where it is necessary for purposes which are in our, or third parties, legitimate interests. These interests can include:
- operating our platforms
- providing you with services described on the platforms
- verifying your identity when you sign in to any of our platforms
- responding to support tickets and helping facilitate the resolution of any disputes
- updating you with operational news and information about our platforms and services (e.g. to notify you about changes to our platforms, website disruptions or security updates)
- carrying out technical analysis to determine how to improve our platforms and services we provide
- managing our relationship with you
- managing our legal and operational affairs
- training SFL staff about how to best serve our user community
- improving our products and services
- providing general administrative and performance functions and activities
- processing your job and program application
- reporting on our activities
- complying with financial and operations audits
When you give us consent, we will:
- provide you with information about our programs and events, organizational updates, partner organization opportunities, sponsorship and donation opportunities, and other products and services which we feel may interest you. This includes communications via email and SMS messaging.
- customize our services and websites – where this involves the use of cookies or similar technologies – to provide a more personalised experience.
For purposes which are required by law.

When Do We Share Your Personal Information?

We will disclose personal information to the following recipients:

Students For Liberty employees and contractors who are located around the world.
subcontractors and service providers who we contract with (e.g. website hosting providers, push notification services, recruitment agencies, marketing and analytics services; security and fraud prevention services, subscription management services, payment processing services, and identification verification services).
with select allied partner organizations, on a case by case basis. This allows your name to be under consideration for various opportunities including internships, employment, mailings and events.
our professional advisers (e.g. lawyers, accountants, financial advisers, etc.)
regulators and government authorities in connection with our compliance procedures and obligations.
a third party, to enforce or defend our rights, or to address financial or reputational risks.

Important Disclosure on Mobile Data: We value your privacy. Mobile data will not be sold, rented, or shared with 3rd parties for marketing or promotional purposes. Your SMS consent is strictly used for Students For Liberty communications and will not be shared with any other 3rd parties.

Where Do We Transfer and/or Store Your Personal Information?

We are based in the United States and data is processed in the United States. Some of the recipients we have described above, and to whom we disclose your personal information, included staff and contractors, are based inside and outside the United States. To protect your information, we take care where possible to work with contractors and service providers who we believe maintain an acceptable standard of data security compliance.

How Do We Keep Your Personal Information Secure?

We store personal information on secure servers that are managed by Salesforce or Google, or, in some limited cases, ourselves. We do not make hard copies of any files, and if we do, they are protected using industry standard encryption and are only used for backup purposes. Personal information that is transmitted is protected by security and access controls, including username and password authentication, two-factor authentication, and data encryption where appropriate.

How Can You Access Your Personal Information?

You have the right to:

make a request to access the personal information we hold about you and to request corrections of any errors in that data
close the account you have with us at any time
ask us to port your personal information (i.e. to transfer in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, to you), to erase it, or restrict its processing.
object to some processing that is based on our legitimate interests, such as profiling that we perform for the purposes of direct marketing, and, where we have asked for your consent to process your data, to withdraw this consent.

These rights are limited in some situations – for example, we can demonstrate that we have a legal requirement to process your personal information. In some instances, this means that we may retain some data even if you withdraw your consent.
Where we require your personal information to comply with legal or contractual obligations, then provision of such data is mandatory: if such data is not provided, then we will not be able to manage our contractual relationship with you, or to meet obligations placed on us.
To make an access or correction request, contact us at [email protected].

How Do You Control How We Communicate With You?

When we have your consent, we send you marketing communications by email about products and services that we feel may be of interest to you. You can ‘opt-out’ of such communications if you would prefer not to receive them in the future by using the “unsubscribe” link provided in the communication itself.
We never knowingly send our marketing material to individuals who have not personally signed up to receive them. If you do receive marketing emails from us without having signed up, please contact us.
You also have choices about cookies, as described below. By modifying your browser preferences, you have the choice to accept all cookies, to be notified when a cookie is set, or to reject all cookies. If you choose to reject cookies some parts of our platforms may not work properly in your case.

If you have consented to receive SMS messages, you can manage your preferences as follows:

To Unsubscribe: Reply “STOP” to any SMS message you receive from us. After you send the SMS message “STOP” to us, we will send you an SMS message to confirm that you have been unsubscribed.
For Help: Reply “HELP” for more information, or contact us directly.

Note: Message and data rates may apply. Message frequency may vary.

More Information About Cookies and Web Analytics

When you visit our platforms, there is certain information that is recorded which is generally anonymous information and does not reveal your identity. If you are logged into your account (e.g. on SFLAcademy.org), some of this information could be associated with your account. The following kinds of details are what tend to be collected:

your IP address or proxy server IP address
the domain name you requested
the name of your internet service provider is sometimes captured depending on the configuration of your ISP connection
the date and time of your visit to the website
the length of your session
the pages which you have accessed
the number of times you access our site within any month
the file URL you look at and information relating to it
the website which referred you to our platform
the operating system which your computer uses

Occasionally, we will use third party advertising companies to serve ads based on prior visits to our various platforms (i.e. our website, Facebook, etc.). For example, if you visit our platforms, you may later see an ad for our products and services when you visit a different site or use the Google Search Engine. You can revoke your cookies consent at any time.

The SFL Student Portal App

The SFL Student Portal app for iPhone and Android gives SFL’s student leaders and staff access to the SFL member portal. SFL creates each account; you cannot sign up in the app. This section describes what the app collects. The rest of this policy applies too. If you use the portal in a web browser instead, everything below applies except the parts about your phone and notifications.

Information linked to your account

When you use the app, we collect and store the following with your portal account:

your name and email address, from your member profile and from Google when you sign in with Google
your portal user ID
activity reports, surveys and success stories you submit, and photos or videos you upload with your activity reports
one-to-one chat messages you send to other members
expense reimbursement requests you submit, with the receipts you attach
a device record for each phone you use. It holds the push token that Google Firebase Cloud Messaging issues for your phone, whether the phone runs iOS or Android, the app version, whether you have allowed notifications, and when the app was last used.

Information not linked to you

To deliver notifications, the Firebase software in the app sends Google your phone’s model, operating system version, language and time zone. SFL does not receive these details or link them to your account.

What the app does not collect

The app does not read your phone’s location. The Nearby feature uses the city on your member profile. The app does not collect purchases, health information or browsing history. It contains no analytics or advertising software and does not access your phone’s advertising identifier.

How we use it

We use this information only to run the app and the portal for you: to sign you in, show your profile and activity, deliver your messages, handle reimbursement requests and send you notifications. We do not use it to track you or to show you advertising, and we never sell it.

Notifications

Notifications are optional. The app asks your permission before it can show any, and everything else works if you say no. You can turn them off at any time in your phone’s settings. The app registers your phone’s push token with us even when notifications are off, so that they can resume if you turn them back on. We stop sending to a phone once the app reports that its notifications are off. When you sign out, the app deletes its push token and we mark the phone’s record inactive.

Who handles it

Salesforce hosts the portal and stores all the information listed above.
Google Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers notifications. On iPhones, Firebase hands them to Apple’s push notification service. The text of each notification passes through these services on its way to your phone.
Google provides sign-in when you choose “Continue with Google”. Your Google account itself is covered by Google’s privacy policy.
When you submit an expense, Anthropic’s Claude service reads your receipts to fill in the details for you. The request is then emailed, through the Resend email service, to SFL’s finance team and to BILL (bill.com), SFL’s accounts-payable service.

Salesforce, Google Firebase, Anthropic, Resend and BILL handle this information for us under data processing terms that require them to protect it at least as well as this policy does. We do not share information collected through the app with partner organizations. The other disclosures listed under “When Do We Share Your Personal Information?”, such as to regulators where the law requires it, still apply. The app sends all data over encrypted connections.

How long we keep it

A phone’s device record is marked inactive after 90 days without use, when you sign out, or when your portal account is closed. It is deleted once the phone has gone 180 days without use. Everything else is kept as described in “How Long Do We Keep Your Personal Information?”

Your choices

You can turn notifications off in your phone’s settings, sign out to deactivate your phone’s record, or delete the app; its device record is then removed on the schedule above. To access, correct or delete your data, or to close your account, email [email protected]. Your rights are set out under “How Can You Access Your Personal Information?”

Information About Children

Our platforms are not suitable for children under 18 years of age. If you are under 18, we ask that you do not use our platforms or give us your personal information. It is the responsibility of parents or guardians to monitor their children’s use of our platforms.

How Long Do We Keep Your Personal Information?

We retain your personal information for as long as is necessary to provide services to you and others, and to comply with our legal and contractual obligations. If you no longer want us to use your personal information, you can request that we erase your personal information. Please note that if you request we erase your personal information, we will retain information from deleted accounts as necessary for our legitimate interests, to comply with the law, prevent fraud, collect fees, resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, assist with investigations, enforce the terms of service and take other actions permitted by law. The information we retain will be handled in accordance with this Privacy Policy. Device records for the SFL Student Portal app are kept for the shorter periods set out in “The SFL Student Portal App” above.

Updating the Privacy Policy

We will need to change this policy from time to time to make sure it stays up to date with the latest legal requirements and any changes to our privacy management practices. When we do change the policy, we will make sure to notify you about such changes, where required. A copy of the latest version of this policy will always be available on this page.

How Can You Contact Us?

If you have any questions about our privacy policy or practices, please contact us in writing at [email protected].

Students For Liberty Privacy Policy, last updated 16 October 2026. First effective 23 May 2018.