This policy was updated 9-21-2004. The previous policy is available here.
A summary of the changes in this revision 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 e-commerce systems which are aligned with those values and the privacy policies which 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. If you choose to post comments to our Privacy Blog, you may choose to enter your name, in which case it will be stored for association with your comment posting. Should we begin to do any other collection/storage of PII in the future, we will inform you of exactly what information we will collect and what we will do with it.

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. In the future, due to expected interest in the results of our user privacy surveys, we will invite visitors to subscribe to some form of Internet Privacy Newsletter. Email addresses shall be treated as confidential. 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 and stored anonymously and used solely for the purpose of research and education. The data collected will similarly be reported in an anomymous manner to help policy makers, practitioners and researchers help further the protection of consumer privacy and improve privacy practices.

Cookies
Only one cookie is used in the public areas of the site. This cookie allows us to classify new and return visits and to accurately quantify visitor sessions for website administration. The cookie consists of a data string that looks like this:

152.14.62.45.299641655213413131

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

Browser Information
We use Apache’s extended log configuration to record visits to our server. This includes information on the visitor’s browser and OS. In addition to the standard log information, the extended log also includes referrer information (the web page, if any, the visitor clicked through to arrive at the requested page).

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:

152.14.62.18 - - [15/Sep/2004:14:53:33 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 19414 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/85 (KHTML, like Gecko) OmniWeb/v496" "152.14.62.18.299641095274413131"

We honor valid law enforcement warrants or subpoenas for logs.

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

Security
This site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control.

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] eos . ncsu . edu