FHFB Privacy Policy

Our Commitment

Thank you for visiting the Federal Housing Finance Board website and reviewing our privacy policy explaining our online information practices.  Our privacy policy is clear: we will collect no personal information about you when you visit our website unless you voluntarily choose to provide that information to us.  We respect your right to privacy and will protect it when you visit our website.

Here is how we handle information about your visit to our website:

What We Collect Automatically

If during your visit you only browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we automatically collect and store only the following information about your visit:

1. The Internet domain (for example, "xcompany.com" if you use a private Internet access account, or "yourschool.edu" if you connect from a university's domain) and IP address (an IP address is a number that is assigned automatically to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web) from which you accessed our website;
2. The type of browser and operating system you used to access our site;
3. The date and time you accessed our site;
4. The pages you visited;
5. The type of actions you performed, such as information requests, and the searches you performed;
6. The number of bytes of information, if any, sent by our server; and
7. If you linked to the Finance Board website from another website, the address of that website

This information never identifies you personally.  We use this information to help us make our site more useful to visitors -- to learn about the number of visitors to our site and the types of technology our visitors use. We do not track or record information about individuals and their visits.

If You Send Us Personal Information

If you voluntarily choose to provide us with personal information -- as in an e-mail to the Finance Board, or by filling out a feedback form with your personal information and submitting it to us through our website -- we will use that information to respond to your message and to help us get you the information you have requested.  We do not collect this voluntarily submitted personal information for any purpose other than to respond to you.

If you register with a Finance Board online mailing list, we may use the information you provide to send you Finance Board communiqués or notify you about updates to our website.

If you submit a comment letter to the Finance Board, we will post your comment to the website Rules, Notices, and Public Comments page without change, including any personal information you provide, such as name and address and contact information.

Sharing Your Information

We only share the information you give us with another government agency if your inquiry relates to that agency, or as otherwise required by law, which may include authorized law enforcement, homeland security, and national security activities.  We do not create individual profiles with the information you provide or give it to private organizations.  We do not collect information for commercial marketing purposes.

If you submit resume information through jobs@fhfb.gov, we will share the information only with Finance Board employees involved in making hiring decisions.

Cookies or Other tracking Devices

A cookie is a small file that a website transfers to your computer to allow it to remember specific information about your session while you are connected.  Your computer will only share the information in the cookie with the website that provided it, and no other website can request it.  There are two types of cookies, session and persistent.  Session cookies last only as long as your web browser is open.  Once you close your browser, the cookie disappears.  Persistent cookies store information on your computer for longer periods of time.

The Finance Board website may use session cookies for technical purposes such as to enable better navigation through the site, or to allow you to customize your preferences for interacting with the site.  Finance Board websites do not use any persistent cookies to remember you between visits.

Securing Your Information

We take the following steps to properly secure the personal information you provide:

• Employ internal access controls to ensure that the only people who see your information are those with a need to do so to perform their official duties
• Train relevant personnel on our privacy and security measures
• Secure hard copies of information we collect online as appropriate
• Perform regular backups of the information we collect online to insure against loss
• Use technical controls to secure the information we collect online such as:
  • Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
  • Encryption
  • Firewalls
  • Password protections
• Periodically test our security procedures

Links to Other Sites

Our website has links to other federal agencies.  In a few cases, we link to private organizations, with their permission.  Once you link to another site, you are subject to the privacy policy of the new site. The new site may or may not collect cookies.

Security and Intrusion Detection Monitoring

For site security purposes, and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, the Finance Board employs software programs that monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information or otherwise cause damage.  Unauthorized attempts to upload information or change information on this service 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 authorized law enforcement investigations, the Finance Board does not attempt to identify individual users or their usage habits.  Raw data logs, which maintain the automatically collected and stored information described above, are used for no other purposes than those previously identified and are destroyed after 180 days.

Our Privacy Practices 

The Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. § 552a) regulates the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of personal information by federal agencies.  Click here for more information about the Privacy Act or here for more information on the Finance Board’s Privacy Act rule (12 C.F.R. part 913).

For more information or for comments and concerns on our online privacy practices, please contact our Chief Privacy Officer or our Privacy Act Official at privacy@fhfb.gov