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Privacy Policy

by Roger Liwer ('68), President AALFNY and Alessandra Gagliardi ('86), Executive Vice-President AALFNY, Paris and New York

Your Privacy is Important to Us!

Since the inception of our Find-a-Classmate service about five years ago, we have received hundreds of email-address inquiries from alumni seeking to renew contact with their old friends. We have been happy to provide this service and have shared such addresses with bona-fide LFNY alumni upon request. Thanks to Google, many non-Lycée friends or acquaintances of alumni have had their search end up with us, and they have also submitted similar inquiries.

In view of the increasing frequency of these inquiries, we thought it would be helpful to restate our privacy policy and to share with you some of the things we do to protect yours.

First, the most important element of our privacy policy is that we share email addresses only --we never give out postal addresses, telephone numbers, etc. Some personal information appears in a few sections of the newsletter, but only if it was freely provided for publishing by alumni themselves (e.g., Services for Alumni, by Alumni section) or only if it otherwise appears on the Internet for public viewing (e.g., Alumni on the Internet section).

Second, we only share email addresses with bona-fide LFNY alumni (an alum is any former LFNY student, whether he/she completed Classe Terminale or not) and former professors/staff of the LFNY.

There are two implications to that policy. The first, of course, is that when we receive requests from persons who identify themselves as non-Lycée persons, or from someone whose status we are not sure of, we do not provide the information, but we do forward their inquiry to the alum in question.

The second is that we do everything possible to be sure that people to whom we do provide email addresses are, in fact, bona-fide alumni. For example, if a request comes from a known person but from an unknown email address, we first verify that the person we have on record did submit the request by writing back to him or her at the known address. Or, if someone who is not in our database writes to us, we ask him or her to register first. (This enables us to verify, to the extent possible, that the person is who he or she claims to be. We make frequest use of our Yearbook library to further verify information entered on the registration form.)

In addition, and not to belabor the obvious, we never sell or lend our email list to anyone (including alumni). Also, sometimes an alum might offer services of special interest and/or at a discount to alumni, but these offers only appear in ther 'Services for Alumni, by Alumni' section of the newsletter. Lastly, all of our emails have headings that start with "LFNY Alumni Association" or "Association des Anciens du Lycée Français de New York" (with further topical information that then follows such as ":Inquiry", or ":New Newsletter"). We have noticed a few attempts by scammers to 'spoof' our email address, so always look at the heading first before opening and responding to an email that looks like it came from us.

We hope that this information is helpful and will reassure you that we do everything possible to protect your privacy. We do apologize to those of you we have pestered by asking for verification when we were not sure who you were, and hope you will understand the reasons.








"... the most important element of our privacy policy is that we share email addresses only --we never give out postal addresses, telephone numbers, etc....and we only share email addresses with bona-fide LFNY alumni and former professors/staff of the LFNY."