Privacy Policy

Important changes effective January 15, 2007. There are various facilities accessible to the general public on the WMRA web pages. Some of these include forms where the user is requested to fill in some data or information on themselves (e.g., their e-mail address or name). In addition, our information services (www, ftp, mail/majordomo servers etc.) keep logs of certain information. WMRA's privacy policy can be stated simply: We will not collect any personal information about you when you access our network services unless you choose to provide that information to us. Please note that choosing to use a gmail account link on our website to contact WMRA is a choice to have personal information collected. The purpose of this page is to ensure that you are aware of, and understand what information may be collected when you use our public-access facilities, and what we do with that information. Common sense is the general rule here; we will endeavor to keep any personal information private, we won't spam you, and we won't publish any specific information about you without your prior permission. In General E-mail addresses obtained through any of the means below will NOT be sold or released to any third party, without prior written or authenticated e-mail consent from the owner of the e-mail address (see gmail exception below). Web Access As with most web servers on the net, our server will automatically record the following information routinely in a "log" file: Your IP address, and hostname if available; The date and time of your access; The pages you visit on our server; The type of browser and operating system you use (your browser will give this information automatically to all web servers); and The referring page, if there was one. These log files are private and confidential and will not be released to the general public. Statistics on what pages are the most popular, what domains are our biggest users, etc. may be viewed internally by our administrative staff, but these do not include any personal information. The intent of these statistics is simply to make our services better. For web forms, the privacy policy pertaining to the information you enter will be stated on the form only if it deviates from the following: your information will be treated as private and confidential unless you clearly state and request otherwise. FTP Access The policy in the Web section above applies here. In addition, our ftp server records whether your access was in binary or ASCII mode, and whatever e-mail address you enter as a "password" for anonymous ftp access (your browser may decide this; e.g., under Netscape, Edit Preferences, Advanced section, there is an option called "send email address as anonymous FTP password"). E-Mail Any incoming electronic mail to WMRA (see gmail exception below) will generate several log entries that include the routine information associated with normal SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) operation. Such log entries do NOT include the body (main text) of the message. In all cases, the information on mail transactions is collected and retained in log files which will not be made available to the general public. The log entries will contain the e-mail address of the sender, its size, the number of recipients, the message ID, and the actual recipient at WMRA and status of delivery (deferred, success, etc.) This information is kept purely to help us diagnose system problems, or activities that may violate our Acceptable Use Policy or other Operational or Employee rules and regulations. Any e-mails to or from WMRA accounts hosted by gmail.com will be scanned by a computer and that information may be used for targeted advertising purposes. See gmail privacy policy. Information retained by gmail may far exceed the simple logfiles retained by our regular email system. WMRA has no control over how that data may be used. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 applies only to commercial websites or online services that are targeted to children, and therefore is non-applicable to our facilities. However, in as much as possible, we will voluntarily delete identifying personal information from our system on any child under 13 upon parental request. Please note that this privacy policy applies only to pages hosted by WMRA on jmu.edu servers. WMRA also uses website content hosted by offsite content providers. While we may suggest that they employ similar policies, we offer no guarantee. If you are concerned, we suggest that you enable cookie alerts and other security features available on most standard browsers. Residual copies of e-mails sent to WMRA accounts hosted by gmail.com may be retained in the gmail system for up to 60 days after "deletion" and may also remain in the gmail offline backup system indefinitely. WMRA is licensed to the Board of Visitors of James Madison University, an agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Most of WMRA's computers, including those used as web servers and ftp hosts, are the property of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which has the right to access all files on computing facilities that it owns.