This site is owned and operated by Fehr Graham. Your privacy on the internet is of the utmost importance to us. At Fehr Graham, we want to make your experience online satisfying and safe.
Because we gather certain types of information about our users, we feel you should fully understand the terms and conditions surrounding the capture and use of that information. This privacy statement discloses what information we gather and how we use it.
Gathered Information
- Fehr Graham may gather information that users provide through optional, voluntary submissions. These are voluntary submissions to receive our electronic newsletters, to participate in our message boards or forums, to email a friend, and from participation in polls and surveys. Some of this information may be considered personally identifiable
- Fehr Graham may gather information through aggregated tracking information derived mainly by tallying page views throughout our sites. This information allows us to better tailor our content to readers’ needs and troubleshoot the website. This information may include the referring URL, your IP address, your ISP, your browser type and date/time stamp of website access. Note that your IP address gives an indication of the physical location of your ISP and by extension and indication of your physical location.
- Consistent with the Federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, we will never knowingly request personally identifiable information from anyone younger than 13 without requesting parental consent.
Services Offered
Fehr Graham may offer the following services, which require some type of voluntary submission of personally identifiable information by users:
- Electronic newsletters: We may offer an electronic newsletter to users. Fehr Graham gathers the email addresses of users who voluntarily subscribe. Users may remove themselves from this mailing list by following the link provided in every newsletter that points users to the subscription management page. Users can also subscribe to the newsletters at registration.
- Forums: If Fehr Graham offers forums, users must register separately for these services in order to post messages, although they needn’t register to visit the site. During registration the user is required to supply a username, password and email address.
- Email this to a Friend Service: Our site users may be able to choose to electronically forward a link, page or documents by clicking “email this to a friend.” The user must provide their email address and that of the recipient. This information is used only in the case of transmission errors and, of course, to let the recipient know who sent the email. The information is not used for any other purpose.
- Polling: We may offer interactive polls to users so they can easily share their opinions with other users and see what our audience thinks about important issues. Opinions or other responses to polls are aggregated and are not identifiable to any particular user. Fehr Graham may use a system to “tag” users after they have voted, so they can vote only once on a particular question. This tag is not correlated with information about individual users.
- Surveys: Fehr Graham may conduct user surveys to better target our content to our audience. We sometimes share the aggregated demographic information in these surveys with our sponsors, advertisers and partners. We never share any of this information about specific individuals with any third party.
Usage Tracking
- Fehr Graham may track user traffic patterns throughout all of our sites. However, we do not correlate this information with data about individual users. Fehr Graham does break down overall usage statistics according to a user’s domain name, browser type and MIME type by reading this information from the browser string (information contained in every user’s browser).
- Fehr Graham may track and catalog the search terms that users enter in our search function, but this tracking is never associated with individual users. We use tracking information to determine which areas of our sites users like and don’t like based on traffic to those areas. We do not track what individual users read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to build a better service for you.
Cookies
- We may place a text file called a cookie in the browser files of your computer. The cookie itself does not contain personally identifiable information although it will enable us to relate your use of this site to information that you have specifically and knowingly provided. But the only personally identifiable information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie can’t read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. Fehr Graham uses cookies to track user traffic patterns (as described above).
- You can refuse cookies by turning them off in your browser. If you’ve set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies, you will receive the warning message with each cookie. You do not need to have cookies turned on to use this site. However, you do need cookies to participate actively in message boards, forums, polling and surveys.
Information Use by Fehr Graham
- Fehr Graham uses any information voluntarily given by our users to communicate with our users, provide customer service and to enhance user experience on our site, whether to provide interactive or personalized elements on the site or to better prepare future content based on our users’ interests.
- We use information that users voluntarily provide to send out electronic newsletters and to enable participation in forums and polls. We send newsletters to subscribers on a regular schedule (depending on the newsletter) and occasionally send special editions when we think subscribers might be particularly interested in something we are doing. Fehr Graham never shares newsletter mailing lists with any third parties, including advertisers, sponsors or partners.
- We may use tracking information to determine which areas of our site users like and don’t like based on traffic to those areas. We do not track what individual users read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to build a better service for you. We may track search terms entered in the search function as one of many measures of what interests our users. But we don’t track which terms a particular user enters.
Sharing Information with Third Parties
We will not share personally identifiable information with third parties as part of our regular course of business. However, it’s possible that we may share personally identifiable information to comply with applicable laws or valid legal process or to protect the personal safety of our users or the public. Also, we might acquire or merge with or be acquired by another company in which we might dispose of some or all of our assets. If that happens, your personally identifiable information may be disclosed to another company, but that disclosure will be subject to the privacy policy.
We partner with Microsoft Clarity and Microsoft Advertising to capture how you use and interact with our website through behavioral metrics, heatmaps and session replay to improve and market our services. Website usage data is captured using first- and third-party cookies and other tracking technologies to determine online activity. We also use this information for site optimization, fraud and security purposes, and advertising. For more information about how Microsoft collects and uses your data, visit the Microsoft Privacy Statement.
Security
Fehr Graham operates secure data networks protected by industry-standard firewall and password protection systems. Our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary and only authorized individuals have access to the information provided by our customers.
Opt-Out Policy
We give users options wherever necessary and practical. Such choices include:
- Opting not to register to receive our electronic newsletters.
- Opting not to participate in certain interactive areas, which completely alleviates the need to gather any personally identifiable information from our users.
Your Consent
By using this site, you consent to the collection and use of this information by Fehr Graham. If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page so that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances we disclose it.