It has been our policy, since the sites went online in 1995, to never sell, rent, or share personally identifying information about our visitors.
In some cases, such as if you e-mail a question or a comment to us, we may request your name, e-mail address or other information so that we can, for example, e-mail you with a personal reply. If you choose to supply this information, we will use it only for the specific purpose for which you supply it.
We never share any of your personally identifying data with any other party without your explicit permission, nor use it for commercial purposes. Should we receive a valid subpoena or similar legal demand, we will comply to the extent required by law (so far, this has never happened).
About "cookies" - some websites use cookies which contain information such as registration information, or similar data, which is stored on your system and sent back to a site when you revisit it. We do not, as a rule, use cookies. Certain sections of our websites require cookies for operation. For example, the webmail interface uses cookies to maintain context for your login session. Such cookies are not placed by, or sent to, any third parties. The Help portion of the toolbar on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether.
Some links on our sites point to other websites not operated by us. When you click on such a link, you are leaving our site (which will be shown in the address bar of your web browser). External sites may have their own privacy policies which may differ from ours.
We never request a credit card number or any other financial information about you.
You have the option of browsing most of our websites with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which encrypts the data transmissions between your browser and this server.
We do not restrict access based on your Internet Protocol (IP) address, your geographic location, or your use of anonymizing (VPN) servers to connect to us.
Finally, while your individual information is protected as outlined above, we do analyze our web logs to see how we're doing. However, we only use aggregated, anonymous data about our users as a group. For instance, we like to see what search words people use to find our websites. Examples of the information we collect and analyze include the IP address used to connect to us, computer and connection information such as browser type and version, operating system, and platform. Many web browsers support (either natively or via plugins) changing the data that is reported to us - we only log what your browser tells us. If you configure your browser to report that it is a PalmPilot running CP/M on a Cray-1, that's fine.
Our privacy policy may be modified from time to time; the last update was on March 4th, 2021 to correct spelling. The last actual policy change was when this page was originally posted on September 28th, 2005.
If you ever have any concerns or questions about our privacy policy, please contact us. We welcome your feedback. Contact information is displayed in the footer of most web pages on our websites, including this one.