WETA Online Privacy Policy

Protecting the privacy of our web site visitors is very important to us. Because we gather certain types of information about our users, we want to make sure you understand the ways in which we may and may not use the information you transmit to us when you visit WETA Online. This statement discloses the privacy practices for all WETA Web sites.

The information gathered by WETA falls into two categories: (1) information voluntarily supplied by visitors to WETA Online and (2) tracking information routinely gathered as visitors navigate through our site.

Voluntarily-Supplied Information
To make use of certain features on WETA Online you need to register and to provide certain information as part of the registration process. The information you supply will help us to offer you more personalized features, to tailor our sites to your interests and make them more useful to you. WETA Online does not collect any personally-identifying information unless you choose to provide that information to us.

The more you tell us about yourself, the more value we can offer you. Supplying such information is entirely voluntary. But if you don't supply the information we need, we may be unable to provide you with services we make available to other visitors to our sites. For example, we can't offer you participation in online auctions and/or subscription to electronic newsletters. And we can't send you email alerting you to any new service we're offering, or breaking news that may interest you if you don't tell us your preferences and give us your email address. Of course, even if you want to remain completely anonymous you're still free to take advantage of the wealth of content available on our site without registration.

The areas of the site in which we collect information, the information collected and the purpose for collecting that information are described below:

Subscription to electronic newsletters
WETA TV and FM offer free electronic newsletters to users. These newsletters include highlights of WETA programming, and other information of interest to WETA viewers and listeners. To subscribe, you must provide your email address. To remove yourself from the mailing list, follow the instructions at the bottom of any newsletter.

Online pledging
You have the option of making a financial contribution to help support WETA. When making an online pledge, you must provide your name, email address, mailing address, home telephone number, contribution level and credit card or other payment information. This information is used for the purpose of processing the pledge, and within WETA for marketing and promotional purposes. In addition, you have the option of supplying a work telephone number, a thank-you gift request, and answering survey questions about your household and interests. These survey questions are not correlated to any personally-identifying information and are used in aggregate form to help us tailor WETA’s broadcast and online services. Unless you instruct us otherwise, we may exchange your name and mailing address with other organizations that may interest you. To correct or change information relating to an online pledge, contact the WETA Membership Department.

Posting to bulletin boards or voting in online surveys To use WETA Online’s message boards you must register with a unique username. This username and posts made under that username are not correlated to any personally-identifying information collected elsewhere in the site.

Sending feedback to WETA through the "Contact Us" page
To send email to WETA through the "Contact Us" page, you must enter a name and email address, and of course, your comments. In addition, you have the option of entering a city and state. This information is used to respond to your comments, and in aggregate form for statistical purposes.

Visitors under the age of 18 must obtain permission from their parents or guardians before sending any personally-identifying information to WETA Online.

Tracking Information
WETA Online’s Web server automatically collects and logs limited information about your computer’s connection to the Internet when you visit our site. The information collected in these log files allows us to make our site more useful to our visitors. The access logs do NOT record your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, credit card number, or any other personally-identifying information. Rather, they contain some or all of the following information:

• The Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) of the machine you used to access our Web site*
• The date and time you visited
• The pages you visited on our site
• The brand and version of browser you used, and the type of computer you used.
• A list of files you downloaded or viewed
• The amount of time you spent viewing or listening to streaming media files
• Any errors you encountered

*Your IP address is a number that lets computers attached to the Internet know where to send you data.Your IP address does not identify you personally. Most Internet Service Providers use a "dynamic" form of assigning IP Addresses. This means that you may have a different IP Address each time you visit WETA Online. Also, many Internet Service Providers, including America Online, use "Proxy servers" which provide even more anonymity for visitors. For example, all visitors accessing WETA Online through America Online will be recorded in our access logs as having the same IP Address.

About Cookies
To help make our sites more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we invoke a standard feature found in browser software, called a "cookie," to assign each visitor a unique, random number, a sort of anonymous user ID that resides on your computer. The cookie doesn't actually identify the visitor, just the computer that a visitor uses to access our site. Unless you voluntarily identify yourself (through registration, for example), we won't know who you are, even if we assign a cookie to your computer. The only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply. A cookie can't read data off your hard drive, and our cookie can’t read the cookie files created by other sites. Our sponsors may also assign their own cookies to your browser to track which ads you have viewed, a process that we don't control.

We use cookies to help us tailor our site to your needs, to deliver a better, more personalized service. It is a cookie, for example, that allows you to post messages in the Bulletin Boards area without having to login and give your password every time you come back, even if you've been away for awhile. We may also use cookies to track the pages on our site visited by our users. We can build a better site if we know which pages our users are visiting and how often.

You can refuse cookies by turning them off in your browser. You do not need to have cookies enabled to use WETA Online. However, some features of our site will not work properly if you refuse cookies.

Information sharing and sites beyond WETA
To make our site more valuable to our visitors, we offer some features in conjunction with other providers. Features such as our Career Center, for example, are made available through cooperative arrangements with providers that specialize in operating such services. And, of course, our site includes links to plenty of other web sites whose privacy policies we don't control. Once you leave our server (you can tell where you are by checking the URL in the location bar on your browser), use of any information you provide is governed by the privacy policy of the operator of the site you're visiting. That policy may differ from ours. If you can't find the privacy policy of any of these sites via a link from the site's homepage, you should contact the site directly for more information.

Encryption and Security
WETA Online offers you the convenience of making purchases and membership contributions via credit card. WETA takes seriously the need for credit card account information security. Our Web financial transaction forms are stored and served from a secure server. This means that each page you view and any information you submit is encrypted on its way between computers (yours and ours). Even in the highly unlikely event that your transmission is intercepted, it will not be usable. Your peace of mind and the safeguarding of your credit card information is a top priority for WETA. All online credit card transactions are done through a Netscape Secure Server using 256-bit SSL; you know you're on a secure page when the Web address starts with "https" (the "s" is for "secure"). Your credit card information is used only for your intended purpose — that is, for the purchase or contribution you wish to make.

Mailing List Exchange Policy
From time to time, we exchange member names and mailing addresses with other organizations. This allows us to invite new members to join WETA keeping the cost of acquiring those new members as low as possible. You have the option of instructing us to not exchange your name and address with other organizations.

Some members have already instructed us to code their membership. If the label on your WETA magazine has an X at the beginning of the coded line, your membership record has already been coded "no exchange."

Acceptance of the WETA Online Privacy Policy
By using this site, you signify your agreement to the terms and conditions of this WETA Online Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to these terms and conditions, please do not use this site. We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions of this policy at any time. Please check this page periodically for any changes. Your continued use of WETA Online following the posting of any changes to these terms shall mean that you have accepted those changes.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.