Explore 419 respects the privacy of visitors to our site. This statement tells you the privacy practices for Explore 419 Web site, explore419.org®. Questions regarding this statement should be directed to Director of Digital Media Operations, Explore 419, 541 North Superior Street, PO Box 921, Toledo, Ohio 43697-0921 or email the Director of New Media.

We are especially mindful of issues regarding children’s privacy. We encourage parents to be aware of what their children do on the Internet. As a rule, children should always get permission from their parents before sending, to us or anyone else, any information about themselves (such as their names, email addresses, and phone numbers) over the Internet. We won’t knowingly allow anyone under 13 to register with any of our sites, or to provide any other personally identifying information, or to access those features that require registration.

We gather two kinds of information: (1) information voluntarily supplied by visitors to our Web site through optional registration and (2) tracking information gathered as visitors navigate through our site.

You may have to register in order to use certain features on our site for example, polling and interactive forums. We may ask you to provide certain information as part of the registration process, such as your name, email address, sex, age, and zip code. And we might request some questions about your interests: sports, personal finance, the performing arts, and the like. What you tell us will help us offer you more useful features, including things specially tailored to your tastes.

The more you tell us about yourself, the more value we can offer you. But supplying such information is entirely voluntary. If you choose not to answer our question, that’s fine: you’ll still be able to make use of much of the rich and varied content available on our site without registration. But if you don’t register, we won’t be able to provide you with certain services we make available to other visitors to our site. For example, we can’t give you breaking-news alerts if you don’t tell us you’re interested in receiving them, and give us your email address. And we can’t notify you that you’ve been lucky enough to win a prize in a promotional contest if we don’t know how to contact you.

Pages in which you are asked to submit sensitive information, such as a credit card number (for ordering purposes), are protected by an encryption using Secure Sockets Layer Technology (SSL). SSL encrypts your information before it is transmitted to us to avoid the decoding of your information by anyone other than us. You can tell if a page is secure by looking for the Verisign seal somewhere on the page or by checking to see if the lock icon on your browser is locked. You may click on the Verisign seal wherever you may see it on our site to verify that our security certificate is valid.

To make our site more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we use a common feature, called a “cookie”. This cookie, which is sort of like a user ID, resides on your computer, and helps us recognize your computer when you visit our site. The cookie doesn’t tell us who you are or anything about you. We won’t know who you are unless you voluntarily identify yourself (through registration, for example). The only personal information a cookie can contain is information you voluntarily supply. A cookie can’t read data off your hard drive. Our advertisers may also assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we don’t control.

We use cookies to help meet your needs, by tailoring the site and services to your personal needs. As we expand the services we offer, cookies will help us deliver those services to you in a way you find useful: sports scores or stock quotes or weather reports, for instance. The possibilities are endless, and cookies help make them more useful to you. We also use cookies to track the pages on our sites visited by our users, usually as aggregated statistics. We can build a better site if we know which pages our users are visiting and how often. You can set your browser not to accept cookies, and you’re welcome to do so. But if you do, you may not be able to take advantage of the features enjoyed by other visitors to our site.

Our Web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer’s connection to the Internet, including your IP address, when you visit our sites (your IP address is a number that lets computers attached to the Internet know where to send you data — such as the Web pages you view). Your IP address does not identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our Web pages to you upon request, to tailor our sites to the interests of our users, and to measure traffic within our sites.

DoubleClick delivers online advertising for explore419.org®. To find out more about how DoubleClick manages the privacy of information in conjunction with serving ads on this site, please read the DoubleClick privacy statement or visit http://www.doubleclick.net.

Opting-out of online advertising cookies: DoubleClick, like other online advertising vendors, place cookies on users’ hard drives so that their systems can identify your computer. By placing such cookies on your system, DoubleClick is able, among other things, to determine whether you have seen a particular advertisement before and avoid sending you duplicate advertisements. Cookies also enable DoubleClick to serve you advertisements tailored to things you have shown interest in based on other sites you have visited. Some people are uncomfortable with this kind of information gathering. DoubleClick allows visitors to opt-out of advertising cookies. If you do not want the benefits of cookies, there is a simple procedure that allows you to deny or accept this feature. For more information about the effect of the DoubleClick cookies relative to online advertising, or opting out, please visit the DoubleClick web site.

Please note that opting out through the above procedure will affect not only the explore419.org® site, but other sites served by DoubleClick as well.

Often our advertisers contract with a third-party service to host their ads. In other words, our ad-serving vendor contacts their service for a particular advertisement. In that case, an independent cookie may be used by the third-party service. We do not have a mechanism to allow visitors to opt-out of vendors with whom we do not have a contractual relationship.

Some of the features we provide for your use are offered in conjunction with other providers, people and companies who specialize in providing these features and can therefore help us give you the best possible service. Our  email service, Gmail, for example, is made available through cooperative arrangements with providers that specialize in operating such services. These other providers have their own privacy policies that apply to the features they provide. And, of course, our site includes links to plenty of other Web sites whose privacy policies we don’t control. Remember: Our privacy statement applies only to our site. When you leave our site to visit another site, privacy issues and the use of information you provide to those sites are governed by the privacy policy of the operator of that site. That policy may differ from ours. We encourage you to read the privacy policy, and, if you can’t find it via a link from the site’s homepage, you should contact the site directly for more information.

We share certain information with our advertisers to help them understand our audience and confirm the value of advertising on our site. This information is usually in the form of aggregated statistics on site traffic. These aggregated statistics do not contain any personally identifying information. All information gathered on the explore419.org® Web site is stored within a explore419.org®-controlled database access to which is limited to authorized personnel. But, although explore419.org employs advanced and effective security measures to protect this information, no security system is fail-safe. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that information you supply won’t be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet. And, of course, any information you include in a message you post to a public-posting area is available to anyone with Internet access. If you don’t want people to know your email address, for example, don’t include it in any message you post publicly.

A final note: The Web and the world around it are changing rapidly. We may have or want to change our privacy policy at some point in the future. If we do so, we’ll post the changes before they take effect.Of course, our use of information gathered while the current policy is in effect will always be consistent with the current policy, even if we change that policy later.