The current version of this privacy policy was finalized August 25, 2007. The previous policy is available here. A summary of the changes in this revision can be found here. More information about the revision history of this document can be found here.

The Privacy Place is committed to promoting online privacy and is the product of an academic project, funded by the National Science Foundation. Our research focuses on consumer privacy values and developing information systems which are aligned with those values as well as the privacy policies and privacy laws that govern them. This mission is reflected by our privacy policies.

The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for this website: The Privacy Place (theprivacyplace.org).

Personally Identifiable Information
We do not ask for, collect or store personally-identifying information (PII) about you (e.g. name and address) when you visit our site. Should we begin to do any collection or storage of PII in the future, we will inform you of exactly what information we will collect and what we will do with it. For example, although comments are disabled for our Privacy Blog, if we were to allow them in the future, this privacy policy would be updated to reflect that practice.

IP Addresses
We collect and store only the following information about you: the date and time you access our site, and your IP address. We use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server, and to administer the Web site.

Email Addresses
We currently do not collect email addresses, unless you send us email, in which case your email address will be used for our reply. Should we begin to collect email addresses on this site in the future, we will inform you and treat them confidentially. They will not be sold or distributed to other parties nor will they be used for unsolicited mass-mail advertising.

Links to Other Sites
This site contains links to other sites. The Privacy Place is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such web sites.

Surveys
The information collected via our surveys is considered private information and is used solely for purposes of research and education. Specifically, our online surveys ask visitors for information about their demographics, computing platform(s), web surfing habits, educational experience and privacy values/concerns. This information is collected, stored and used solely for the purpose of research and education. The data collected will similarly be reported in an anonymous manner to help policy makers, practitioners and researchers help further the protection of consumer privacy and improve privacy practices.

We retain the anonymous responses to our surveys indefinitely and report the aggregate results in peer-reviewed journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.

Cookies
ThePrivacyPlace.org is run using the Wordpress blog and content management system. Wordpress uses cookies to manage logged-in users and commenters. ThePrivacyPlace.org does not currently allow anyone to register or comment, so the cookies collected by our site only affect members of The Privacy Place staff who have been specifically granted accounts.

Cookies are used for our surveys solely to ensure that survey participants complete each survey only once.

Browser Information
We use Apache’s combined log configuration to record visits to our server. This includes information on the visitor’s browser and operating system. In addition to the standard log information, we collect referrer information (the web page, if any, the visitor clicked through to arrive at the requested page). More information about this format is available on the Apache documentation site. This information is retained indefinitely for server maintenance purposes.

Web Site Traffic
Web site traffic is logged, for statistical purposes, only in standard log format. Logged information includes IP addresses and/or domain names, browser and operating system information, and information on the action performed on the web server.

A typical log entry looks like this:

74.6.19.215 - - [24/Jul/2007:10:00:20 -0400] "GET /Workshops/spring2005/spr05_eisenhauer.pdf HTTP/1.0" 404 329 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"

We honor valid law enforcement warrants or subpoenas for logs.

Suspicious Activity
Logs of suspicious activity and access information may be kept indefinitely for site security purposes. Evidence of attacks or other malicious activity may be shared with law enforcement agencies as necessary to apprehend and prosecute individuals who abuse our resources.

Contacting the Web Site
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this web site, please contact:

Annie I. Antón
NC State University
Campus Box 8207
NC State University
Raleigh NC 27695
USA
aianton [at] ncsu . edu

Policy Revision History
There have been two updates to the privacy policy of this website since it was launched.

The original privacy policy was valid from the website launch to September 20, 2004. You can see a brief summary of the changes made when this privacy policy was updated here.

The first revised privacy policy was valid from September 21, 2004 to August 24, 2007. You can see a brief summary of the changes made when this privacy policy was updated here.

The second revised privacy policy is this document. It is the current, valid privacy policy for this website.