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My HealtheVet's Use of Cookies

The My Healthe system uses temporary session cookies to simplify the process of displaying your information. "Cookies" are pieces of information that are stored locally on your system. Some cookies are stored in a file on your hard drive, and can remain there for a long time. The My Healthe system does not use that kind of cookie. The only information stored on your system is a temporary session cookie that does not contain any personal information, but provides the ability for the My Healthe system to know who you are as you move from page to page without forcing you to reenter your information. As soon as you log off the My Healthe system or close the browser window, the temporary session cookie is erased. It is also erased whenever the connection is lost for any reason.

Here is an sample of a temporary session cookie on the My Healthe system

Name: "ASPSESSIONIDGGGGGHTK" Domain: www.health-evet.va.gov/ Path: "/" Expires: "End of session" Secure: "No" Data: "MLKLAOPCAMLGJNPEFDDNEDNO"

Our policy is to explain what information each cookie collects and how that information is used. If you encounter a cookie at the this Web site and there is no explanation or the explanation is not clear or reasonable, please let us know.

Information Collected for Statistical Purposes

Below is an example of the information collected based on a standard request for a World Wide Web document:

• xxx.yyy.com - - [23/Feb/1998:00:00:01 -0500]
• "GET /sitename/top10.html HTTP/1.0" 200 4695
• Mozilla 3.0/www.altavista.digital.com
• xxx.yyy.com (or 123.123.23.12) -- this is the host name or Internet Protocol (IP) address associated with the requester. In this case, (....com) the requester is coming from a commercial address. Depending on the requestor's method of network connection, the host name (or IP address) may or may not identify a specific computer.

Connections via many Internet Service Providers (ISP) assign different IP addresses for each session, so the host name identifies only the ISP. If the computer has a fixed IP address, that address may still be masked if your request is routed through a proxy server. Most ISPs and company Web sites use proxy servers to route Internet traffic. The host name (or IP address) may identify a specific computer only if that computer has a fixed IP address and is not routed through a proxy server.

• [23/Feb/1998:00:00:01 -0500] -- this is the date and time of the request
• "GET /sitename/top10.html HTTP/1.0" -- this is the location of the requested file
• 200 -- this is the status code - 200 indicates the request was filled
• 4695 -- this is the size of the requested file in bytes
• Mozilla 3.0 -- this identifies the type of browser software used to access the page, which indicates what design parameters to use in constructing the pages
• www.altavista.digital.com -- this indicates the last site the person visited, which indicates how people find this site

Requests for other types of documents use similar information.

Reviewed/Updated: August 2, 2001