This website is owned and operated by Pro Practica, Inc. Your privacy on the Internet is of the utmost importance to us: we want to make your experience online satisfying and safe.

Because we gather certain types of information about our users, we believe 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.

Pro Practica, Inc. gathers two types of information about our website’s users:

• Information that users provide through optional, voluntary submissions. These include voluntary submissions to receive our electronic newsletters, to register online, to participate in our message boards or forums, and to participate in polls and surveys.
• Information Pro Practica, Inc. gathers through aggregated tracking information derived mainly by tallying page views throughout our sites. This information helps us to tailor our content to readers' needs and to understand the demographics of our audience.

We offer, or may offer, the following free services, each of which requires some type of voluntary submission of personal information by users:

• Electronic Newsletters (Dispatches). We may offer from time to time a free electronic newsletter to users. Pro Practica, Inc. 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 the time of registration.
• Message Boards/Forums. Users of the site's Message Boards and Forums must register separately for these services (both are free of charge) in order to post messages, although they need not register in order to visit. During registration, the user is required to supply a user name, password, and email address.
• Polling. We may from time to time 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. Pro Practica, Inc. 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. Pro Practica, Inc. may occasionally conduct user surveys to help us target our content to our audience. We sometimes share the aggregated demographic information in these surveys with our suppliers, sponsors, advertisers and partners. We never share any such demographic information about specific individuals with any third party.

Consistent with the Federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), we will never knowingly request personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13 without requesting parental consent.

Pro Practica, Inc. may track user traffic patterns throughout our site. However, we do not correlate this information with data about individual users. Pro Practica, Inc. 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).

We use tracking information to determine which areas of our site users do and do not 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 place a text file called a "cookie" in the browser files of your computer. The cookie itself does not contain personal 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 personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie cannot read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. Pro Practica, Inc. uses cookies to track user traffic patterns (as described above). Our advertising system may deliver a one-time cookie to help us track ad impressions and click rates.

You can refuse cookies by turning them off in your browser. If you have 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.

Pro Practica, Inc. uses any information voluntarily given by our users to enhance their experience in our network of sites, whether to provide interactive or personalized elements on the sites or to help us prepare future content based on the interests of our users.

As stated above, we use or may use information that users voluntarily provide in order to send out electronic newsletters and/or to enable users to participate in polls, surveys, message boards, registration and forums. We may send out newsletters to subscribers on a regular schedule (depending on the newsletter), and occasionally send out special editions when we think subscribers might be particularly interested in something we are doing.

We use tracking information to determine which areas of our sites users do and do not 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 track search terms entered in the “Search” function as one of many measures of what interests our users. But we do not track which terms a particular user enters.

Pro Practica, Inc. uses the above-described information to tailor our content to suit your needs and to help our advertisers better understand our audience's demographics. We will not share information about individual users with any third party, except to comply with applicable law or valid legal process or to protect the personal safety of our users or the public.

Pro Practica, Inc. 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.

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.

By using this site, you consent to the collection and use of this information by Pro Practica, Inc. 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.