Privacy policy

Maintaining Privacy

Oregon Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) staff realize that keeping financial and demographic information secure is one of our most important responsibilities. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect member and employer information. PERS employees are authorized to access member information for business purposes only. Our employees are bound by information security polices and a code of ethics that require confidential treatment of member information and are subject to disciplinary action if they fail to follow these requirements.

Sharing Information

PERS does not sell or share member information collected from our website with third parties who may want to offer you their own products and services. We may share member information we collect from you online with organizations that work for us in delivering our services to our members. All organizations that act on our behalf are contractually obligated to keep the information we provide to them confidential and to use the member information we share only to provide the services we ask them to perform for you and us. We may also share information we collect about you online to outside organizations when required by law. For example, member information may be disclosed in connection with a subpoena or similar legal process in the investigation of suspected fraudulent activity.

Public Disclosure

Some of the information collected at this site becomes a public record. This includes personal information PERS may request from you in order to provide requested services. However, certain information may be protected from general release by one or more Oregon laws. These laws include Oregon's Public Records Law (Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) 192.410-192.505). If information is protected under one of these laws, it will not be released unless a requestor qualifies to receive the information. Information that is specifically exempt from public disclosure includes:

• employee and retiree address,
• telephone number,
• other nonfinancial membership records, and
• employee financial records maintained by the Public Employees Retirement System pursuant to ORS chapters 238 and 238A.

Secure Transmission

For secured data transmission, this site uses the industry standard encryption methodology Secure Socket Layer (SSL). The URL in your browser will change to "HTTPS" instead of "HTTP" when this security feature is invoked. Your browser may also display a lock or key symbol on its task bar to indicate secure transmission mode has been invoked. If these indicators are not present, any information is susceptible to interception by other parties. Most email communication will not be secure. If you are communicating sensitive information, you might want to consider sending it in by postal mail.

Information Collected When You Browse

If you do nothing during your visit to this website but browse or download information, we automatically collect and store the standard data collected by all Web server software. That information is as follows:

1. The Internet Protocol (IP) address and domain name used (but not the email address). The IP address is a numerical identifier assigned either to your Internet service provider or directly to your computer. We use the Internet IP to respond to your browser request. Example: 122.125.36.42.
2. The domain name (DNS) assigned on the Internet to your IP address (if there is one). Example: somename.com.
3. The type of browser and operating system you used. Example: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible, MSIE 4.01, Windows NT, IE4WDUS-1998101501).
4. The date and time you visited this site.
5. The Web pages or services you accessed at this site.
6. The website you visited prior to coming to this website. (Note: This is included so summary analysis can be done on how visitors get to our site, i.e., from a search engine, from a link on another site, etc.).

We do not track individual user navigation choices. We do, however, summarize the information listed above to determine:

• what organizations are our most frequent users (item 2 above) to better target our content for the audience;
• what browsers are being used on our site to determine what techniques we can use to develop pages that will work with different browsers (item 3 above);
• how often our pages are being used (item 5 above); and
• by the traffic from organization names such things as the search engines that are good at directing people to the site (item 6 above).
  

For site security purposes and to ensure this service remains available to all users, this site may monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information or otherwise cause damage. If security monitoring reveals evidence of possible abuse or criminal activity, system personnel may provide the results of such monitoring to appropriate officials. Except for authorized law enforcement investigations, no attempts are made to identify individual users or their usage habits. Unauthorized attempts to upload or change information on this service are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the state law and federal statutes, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act of 1996.

Cookies

A cookie is a small text file created by a Web server and stored on your computer hard drive. PERS uses cookies to collect non-personal information and data for site and session management purposes.

These cookies are written in such a way that they are only used by our website management tools or our Web applications, and these only read the cookies they place on your computer. They neither retrieve information from other cookie files nor access any other information on your computer.

With cookies it is possible to save unique information that the Web server can then use either while you browse or when you return to the website. Typical data saved in cookies are things such as your site preferences, the date when you last looked at a specific page, or a random number used to identify your session at a particular website.

Also, cookies help us measure things like how many visitors come to our website, how many of these visitors are new, and how many visitors are returning for a repeat visit. If you do not want information collected through the use of cookies, there is a simple procedure in most browsers allowing you to deny or accept the cookie feature (refer to your browser's help function for details). While most browsers have the option allowing you to control the use of cookies, doing so might result in some features on the site not working correctly.

Email

If you send us an email message with a question or comment that contains personal information, we will only use the information to respond to your request. However, please note that emails received from this site are considered public record. Certain information contained in the email may be protected from general release under Oregon's Public Records Law (ORS 192.410-192.505) or Oregon's Record Privacy Law (ORS 802.175-802.191). This information may only be released if a requestor qualifies under the law to receive the information.