General Disclaimer
The Office of the New York City Public Advocate (PAO) owns, produces and maintains this website. While PAO works to present current and accurate information, neither the City of New York nor PAO warrants or makes representations as to the quality, content, timeliness, accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information, text, graphics, links or other items displayed or distributed through the website. PAO assumes no liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in the content of the website. Reliance upon the content is voluntary, at the user’s sole risk, and should be done after an independent review of its accuracy, completeness, efficacy and timeliness. Neither the PAO, the City of New York nor any other party involved in creating, producing, or delivering the website is liable for any direct, incidental, consequential, indirect or punitive damages arising out of access to, or use of, the website.
PAO and the City of New York assume no responsibility or liability for any physical or electronic damages to the user’s computer equipment or other property on account of user’s access to, use of, or browsing the PAO’s website or user’s downloading of information, text, graphics, links or other items from the website.
PAO may correct errors or omissions in any portion of the website at any time, and may alter materials on the website at any time without notice. Users are deemed on notice regarding any corrections or changes made to the website. Commercial use of website materials is prohibited without written permission of PAO. Reference to specific commercial products, processes, or services by trade name, trademark, service mark, manufacturer, etc., does not constitute or imply endorsement, recommendation, or favor by PAO. Communications made through the website’s e-mail and messaging system shall in no way be deemed to constitute legal notice to PAO or any of its subdivisions, agents, or representatives with respect to any existing or potential claim or cause of action against PAO or any of its subdivisions, agents or representatives, where notice to PAO is required by any federal, state or local laws, rules or regulations.
General Privacy Notice
This privacy notice discloses the privacy practices for advocate.nyc.gov. This privacy notice applies solely to information collected by this website. It will notify you of the following:
Information Collection, Use, and Sharing
The Office of the New York City Public Advocate (PAO) is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We only have access to/collect information that you voluntarily give us via email or other direct contact from you. We will not sell or rent this information to anyone.
We will use your information to respond to you concerning the reason you contacted us. We will not share your information with any third party outside of our organization, other than as necessary to fulfill your request.
Unless you ask us not to, we may contact you via email in the future to tell you about opportunities to participate in events with the Public Advocate, to forward progress reports of the PAO, or to inform you of changes to this privacy policy.
Your Access to and Control Over Information
You may opt out of any future contacts from us at any time. You can change or correct any data we have about you, or express any concern you may have about our use of your date at any time by contacting us via the email address or phone number given on our website.
Information gathered in the course of resolving constituent complaints is retained in compliance with applicable privacy laws of the United States and of the State and City of New York and will only be disclosed in compliance with a lawful request made pursuant to such laws
Security
We take precautions to protect your information. When you submit sensitive information via the website, your information is protected both online and offline.
Sensitive or personally identifying information collected by PAO is encrypted and transmitted to us in a secure way. You can verify this by looking for a lock icon in the address bar and looking for "https" at the beginning of the address of the Web page.
While we use encryption to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect your information offline. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (for example, constituent service representatives) are granted access to personally identifiable information.
If you feel that we are not abiding by this privacy policy, you should contact us immediately via telephone at 212-669-7250 or via email at gethelp@advocate.nyc.gov.