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United States Environmental Protection Agency
Privacy and Security Notice
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Privacy and Security Notice

About Privacy and Security

  1. This World Wide Web (WWW) site is provided as a public service by the Environmental Protection Agency.

  2. Information presented on this WWW site is considered public information and may be distributed or copied. The U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce these documents, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. These documents may be freely distributed and used for non-commercial, scientific and educational purposes. Commercial use of the documents available from this server may be protected under the U.S. and Foreign Copyright Laws. Individual documents on this server may have different copyright conditions, and that will be noted in those documents.

  3. When you come to this web site to browse, you do so anonymously. EPA does not collect identifying information about you. We collect only summary information [see below] about the numbers of individuals who visit our web site and what those individuals look at. This government computer system uses industry-standard software to create summary statistics, which are used for such things as assessing what information is of most and least interest, determining technical design specifications, and identifying system performance or problem areas.

  4. Where identifying information is asked of you (to respond to an information request, etc.) that information is used only for responding to your comment or question and is not made available for other purposes. See our comments notice of use.

  5. For site security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, this government computer system employs industry-standard methods to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage.

  6. 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 guidelines.

  7. 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.

  8. If you have any questions or comments about the information presented here, please forward them to us through the address on our Comments Page.


Example of the 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 - - [28/Jan/1997:00:00:01 -0500]
"GET /sitename/news/nr012797.html HTTP/1.0" 200 16704
Mozilla 3.0/www.websitename.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 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 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 /sitename/news/nr012797.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

16704 -- 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.websitename.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. No other user-identifying information is collected.

 

 

 
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