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Thank you for visiting the Environmental Protection Agency Web site, a service of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This notice informs you how we will handle information we learn about you from your visit to our site. Additionally, this notice informs you that EPA monitors network traffic to ensure Web site security.

Privacy
Security


Privacy

Your Rights under the Privacy Act: The Privacy Act of 1974 protects the personal information the federal government keeps on you in “systems of records (SOR)” (information an agency controls that can be retrieved by name or some other personal identifier). The Privacy Act regulates how the government can disclose, share, provide access to, and maintain the personal information that it collects. Not all information collected online is covered by the Privacy Act.

The Act’s major provisions require agencies to:

Your viewing of EPA’s website does not result in the collection of any personal information that is contained in a Privacy Act System of Records as defined by the Privacy Act. Information concerning the Privacy Act can be found at: http://www.epa.gov/privacy/.

Children’s Privacy: Some EPA Web pages provide content to children. It is EPA policy, in compliance with the requirements of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), to collect no information online about or from children under the age of 13 except when it is needed to identify a submission or to answer a question. Any such instances where information is collected on Web pages for children will be clearly marked. Unless required by law, none of the information will be used for another purpose or shared with third parties, nor will personally identifying information be published on the EPA Web site. When EPA offices identify the work product of a child under thirteen on the EPA Public Access Web site, only the first name, age, and home state of the child will be stated (e.g., Mike, age 7, Kentucky) unless the parent makes a hardcopy request to have additional information posted.

EPA and Privacy: Please be assured that the privacy of our visitors is of utmost importance to us. We collect no personally identifiable information about you when you visit our site unless you choose to provide that information to us.

We want to inform you that, for each HTTP request (which is what your Web browser generates when you request a page or part of a page from a Web site) received, we collect and store only the following information, in what is called a log file:

We use the information that we automatically collect to measure the number of visitors to the different areas of our sites, and to help us make our pages 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 for each day, with no personal information, are maintained indefinitely.

Cookies: EPA does not use "persistent cookies" or any other persistent tracking methods to collect personally identifiable information about visitors to our Web pages. However, some EPA pages have “session cookies,” to facilitate use of that particular page. These disappear when the Web user terminates a Web session and closes the browser.

Cookies are small files that Web servers place on a user's hard drive. They can serve several functions, depending upon how they are designed:

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.

Other Information Collection: In addition to the information automatically collected by the server, EPA offices may collect other information from online visitors. Before collecting personally identifiable information through our Web pages, we will prominently disclose:

How the Information is Used: 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).

How e-mail is Handled: By sending us an electronic mail message (for example, an e-mail message containing an official Freedom of Information Act request), you may be sending us personally-identifying information, such as name and address. In these cases, we may retain the information as long as necessary to respond to your request or otherwise resolve the subject matter of your e-mail. Please be aware that email is not necessarily secure from 3rd party interception or misdirection. For your own protection you may wish to communicate sensitive information using a method other than email.

Personal Information via Forms: Some of our pages 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.

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Security

For site security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, EPA employs monitors and filters to identify and block unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage to the information on our Web pages. Unauthorized attempts to upload or change information on this site are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act. Except for these authorized law enforcement investigations, no other attempts are made to identify individual users or their usage habits.

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Content updated August 2007.


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