Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Privacy and Security Notice

1. These World Wide Web pages are provided as a public service by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
   
   
2. Information presented on these pages is considered public information and may be distributed or copied. Use of appropriate byline/photo/image credits is requested.
   
   
3. For site management, information is collected for statistical purposes. This government computer system uses software programs to create summary statistics, which are used for such purposes as assessing what information is of most and least interest, determining technical design specifications, and identifying system performance or problem areas.
   
   
4. For site security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, this government computer system employs software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage.
   
   
5. Except for authorized law enforcement investigations, no other attempts are made to identify individual users or their usage habits. Raw data logs are used for no other purposes and are scheduled for regular destruction in accordance with [National Archives and Records Administration General Schedule 20].
   
   
6. 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.
   
   
7. If you have any questions or comments about the information presented here, please forward them to the MBNMS webmaster.

Example of Information Collected

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

xxx.yyy.com - - [28/Jan/1997:00:00:01 -0500] "GET index.html HTTP/1.0" 200 1928 Mozilla 3.0/www.altavista.digital.com

xxx.yyy.com (or 123.123.23.12)-- this is the host name (or IP address) associated with the requester (you as the visitor). In this case, (....com) the requester is coming from a commercial address. Depending on the requester’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 assign different IP addresses for each session, so the host name identifies only the ISP. The host name (or IP address) will identify a specific computer if that computer has a fixed IP address.

[28/Jan/1997:00:00:01 -0500] -- this is the date and time of the request

"GET index.html HTTP/1.0" -- this is the location of the requested file

200 -- this is the status code - 200 is OK - the request was filled

1928 -- 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 our Web pages

Requests for other types of documents use similar information. No other user-identifying information is collected.