Privacy Statement

We collect no personally identifiable information about you when you visit our site unless you choose to provide that information to us.

Any information you provide at our website will be used internally and will not be passed to any other party. We respect your privacy.

Automatic Collections: For each HTTP (which is what your Web browser generates when you request a page or part of a page from a Web site) request received, we may collect and store only the following information:

• the date and time
• the originating IP address
• the type of browser and operating system used (if provided by the browser)
• the URL of the referring page (if provided by the browser)
• the object requested
• completion status of the request
• pages visited

How the Information is Used: We use the information that we collect to measure the number of visitors to the different areas of our sites, and to help us make our sites more useful to visitors. This includes analyzing these logs periodically to determine the traffic through our servers, the number of pages served, and the level of demand for pages and topics of interest.

How Long is the Information Retained: The logs may be preserved indefinitely and used at any time and in any way necessary to prevent security breaches and to insure the integrity of the data on our servers.

Cookies: The Office of the Secretary does not use "persistent cookies" or any other persistant tracking methods to collect personally identifiable information about visitors to its Web sites.

Cookies are small files that Web servers place on a user's hard drive. They can serve several functions:

• they allow the Web site to identify you as a previous visitor each time you access a site;
• they track what information you view at a site (important to commercial sites trying to determine your buying preferences);
• advertisers use them to determine the effectiveness of their marketing and offer insights into consumer preferences and tastes by collecting data from many Web sites; and
• they can be used to help a Web site tailor screens for each customer's preference.
  

To protect your privacy, be sure to close your browser completely after you have finished conducting business with a Web site that does use cookies. If you are concerned about the potential use of the information gathered from your computer by cookies, you can set your browser to prompt you before it accepts a cookie. Most Internet browsers have settings that let you identify and/or reject cookies.

Personal Information via Forms: Some of our sites provide forms allowing visitors to submit search engine queries, questionnaires, feedback, or other information. Some of these forms may request personally identifiable information (e.g., name, address, e-mail address) for specific purposes, such as when the submitter is requesting a personal response, registering for a conference, or subscribing to a mailing list. All information submitted by visitors is voluntary.

We may store non-personally identifiable information we collect (such as search engine queries and anonymous survey responses) indefinitely to help us better understand and meet the needs of our visitors. We may share non-personally identifiable information with others, including the public, in aggregated form (for instance, in a list of our most popular search engine queries), in partial or edited form (such as in a report summarizing responses to a questionnaire), or verbatim (for example, in a complete listing of survey responses).

Before collecting personally identifiable information, we will prominently disclose:

• why we are requesting the information;
• how it will be used;
• how long it may be retained; and
• under what conditions, and with whom, it may be shared.