Thank you for visiting the VARA Website. Our privacy policy is simple: We will collect no personal information about you when you visit our website. What is collected? Read on.

Information Collected and Stored Automatically

If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we will not gather nor will we store anything that identifies you personally. We do collect and store the following:

• Internet domain (for example, "xcompany.com" if you use a private Internet access account, or "yourschool.edu" if you connect from a university's domain)
• IP address (an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web) from which you access our website.
• Type of browser and operating system used to access our site;
• The date and time you access our site;
• The pages you visit; and
• If you linked to our website from another website, the address of that website.

Cookies

If you log into the website in order to post classifieds or messages, or to edit event data, the server uses cookie technology to remember who you are from page to page. You will need to have cookies enabled for the login system to work.

If You Send Us Personal Information

If you choose to provide us with personal information by sending an e-mail to us, or by filling out a form with your personal information and submitting it through our website, we will use that information to respond to your message and to help us provide you with information that you request. We do not collect personal information for any other purposes. The information you provide is not used for marketing, nor is it given to any other organizations or persons. We hate spam as much or more than anyone.

Links to Other Sites

Our website has links to other websites. Please review their privacy policies when you visit. At the time of the creation of the web-link on our page, the material on the target website was appropriate for any of our members or their children; we wouldn't have it any other way. If you follow a link from our website to an offensive or otherwise inappropriate site, PLEASE let us know and we will expeditiously correct the problem.

We thank you, whoever you are.

How the Internet Works

Our server knows this routing information anyway because of the fundamental nature of the Internet. Realize that you don't actually connect to our web server as if you were making a phone call. Your browser sends a message to our server telling it what type of browser/OS you are using and a note to "Send privacypolicy.html to this IP address." Our server identifies the file you want and gets all of its images and parts. Each piece of the page has your IP address on it, as well as instructions on how each piece fits into the whole page. Our server then sends all of that into the web where each piece is forwarded from node to node until you get it. Your browser puts it all together using the instructions included, and viola! (So you see, if that routing information weren't known to our server, you wouldn't get anything.) Meanwhile, our server makes a quick note recording which page was requested, the IP address it was sent to, the date and time, browser/OS, and referring page.

Why bother?

Why do we bother? We use this information to help us make our site more useful -- to learn about the number of visitors to our site and the types of technology our visitors use. We do not track or record information about individuals and their visits, but we might see that certain requests came back as FileNotFound errors. That tells us to fix our links or to go to the search engine that you used and tell them to fix theirs. We might see that no one has looked at the J45 membership page and realize that we never made a link to it! We might see that the event database has overloaded the server 10 times in the last few days and so we would then have to fix that problem. Knowing which browser and OS helps us in making the pages look right. Different browsers display things differently; IE has codes that Netscape won't show. If we knew that everyone showed up with Internet Explorer, we could ignore all of the Netscape-specific code. Computers affect the webpage, too; an Apple has certain fonts that the PC doesn't, for example.

If you have any questions, or if you feel that we need to re-evaluate our policy, please do not hesitate to write.

Thank you.