document: title: the news-gazette online privacy policy
text: ## The News-Gazette Online Privacy Policy

  
The News-Gazette Online takes your privacy concerns seriously. The following policy explains our position on information gathering and how we use any user data we collect.

We will not give your phone number to any telemarketing department or sell your e-mail address to any company, for any mailing list, no matter how noble the cause. 

### Information about you specifically

You can access our Web site home page and browse our site without disclosing personal data. We collect your personal data only with your knowledge.

When you fill out a form on our site, we ask for this information: name, address, daytime phone, e-mail address and age. We use names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses to notify contest winners or to contact SportsFACTS subscribers to verify subscription information. We use some of the information in aggregate form to learn more about our visitors. 

We do not sell or use any of this personal information outside of our department (The News-Gazette Electronic Publishing Department). We do not disclose your personal information to any third party unless compelled by law. All of our employees who have access to your personal information are obliged to keep it confidential.

There is an option on the contest entry form to choose to be notified of future contests by e-mail. If you click "yes," we will e-mail you when we begin a new contest. If you click "no," we'll leave you alone. If you don't want to receive these e-mails any more, simply reply to the message with the word "remove" in either the subject line or the message or, if it makes you feel better, both.

### Information about you in general

We do collect statistics about our readers. For example, our statistical logs identify the browsers people use to get to our pages (e.g. Netscape Navigator, AOL or Internet Explorer), the IP addresses of the computers used to access our pages and the computers' operating systems (e.g., Windows '95 or Mac OS). It does not gather visitors' e-mail addresses or their identities. These are only collected in aggregate; we cannot identify individuals who simply look at our pages. 

We may share aggregate information with advertisers or business partners. For example, an advertiser may want to know the age breakdown of the people who enter our contests or whether the people who visit our births and deaths page are coming from local Internet service providers.

### Children's privacy

We are particularly concerned with providing a safe online environment for children. We do not knowingly collect or solicit personally identifiable information from or about children under 13 except in contest giveaways for children. The information is only used in connection with awarding contest prizes. If we discover that we have received any information from a child under 13 in violation of this policy, we will delete that information immediately. If you believe The News-Gazette Online has any information from or about anyone under 13, please contact us at epub@news-gazette.com.

We also do not allow anyone under the age of 13 to register for contest notification. We strongly recommend parental supervision when a child uses the Internet, particularly when a child uses e-mail. We also encourage parents to instruct their children not to give out personal information over the Internet.

### Information collection by other people

Our Web site may allow you to communicate with other visitors or to post information to be accessed by others. When you use these services, your data may be collected by other visitors. This includes resumes and any information you include in a classified ad that appears online.

In addition, we occasionally have banner advertising from advertising networks, such as ValueClick, which does use cookies. For more on ValueClick's privacy policy, go to http://valueclick.com/privacy.html.

### Cookies

Cookies are text files we place in your computer's browser to store your preferences. Cookies, by themselves, do not tell us your e-mail address or other personally identifiable information.

We use cookies in order to save passwords so they do not have to be re-entered. We only use cookies on our subscription-based SportsFACTS pages and only for our readers' convenience. Without them, you would have to re-enter your name and password for each story you wanted to read. With cookies, you only have to enter your name and password when you first log in. We do not collect any information from this limited use of cookies.

You can "turn off" cookies in the preferences section of your browser or set it so that you will see a warning dialog box every time a site tries to place a cookie on your hard drive.

### Credit card information

If you use a credit card to pay for subscriptions or merchandise, we will not keep your credit card information on any of our computers, once the transaction has been processed. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology from Verisign is used to encrypt and protect your credit card account information, and transactions are carried out on a secure server (please be sure that your own Web browser, such as Netscape or Explorer, is able to handle secure transactions).

### Secure transmission

Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100 percent secure, especially unencrypted information. We do our best to protect your personal information, but we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems. 

For more information about Internet privacy, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff.org/.

If you have questions about our privacy policy, please contact Jean McDonald at epub@news-gazette.com.

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