privacy policy
	usage agreement | data use

DEFINITION OF TERMS "Web Site" refers to all pages hosted under the "AstronomyDaily.com" domain. "Company" refers to "AstronomyDaily.com", a business registered with the state of New Hampshire, USA. "User" refers to all persons or programs (including but not limited to spiders, agents, avatars and similar systems) who connect to the Web Site via browser, ftp, or other client software, or who receive text, images, plans, software, or other material from a link to the Web Site, whether or not such a link is known to or condoned by the Company. PRIVACY The Company maintains information collected in the user registration process in order to display custom configured pages within this Web Site. This is the sole use of this information. Except in response to legal process, the information collected is never intentionally disclosed, sold, given away, rented, or otherwise made available to any other person, party, firm, organization, or other entity for any purpose. Please refer to the data use section for a list of exactly what information is collected and how it is used. From time to time, the Web Site may conduct surveys to obtain user profile information. This information is used to evaluate our audience for the purpose of setting advertising rates. User profile information is used in the aggregate to establish an "average user" and is never associated with the specific User who answered the survey. Participation in such surveys is always voluntary. COOKIES A cookie is a small file that is copied to the local hard drive of each User. The Web Site makes use of "cookies" in four different ways: The main cookie is a subset of your user registration information. This file is created during the user registration process and updated each time the Web Site is visited. When you return to the Web Site, the cookie file is sent back to us. This allows us to custom configure our pages for you without the need for a user log-in procedure. A temporary cookie is created to save certain information as you go through the screens of the registration process. This temporary cookie contains your user name, time zone, and date of birth. It is automatically deleted when you exit your browser. Each advertisement that is shown is accompanied by a cookie file.  This cookie is used to ensure that ads rotate in the proper order.  These cookies come from the AstronomyDaily.com domain and not from a third party or advertising agency.  They are not used to track your surfing or to deliver "targeted" ads. The AstronomyDaily.com discussion forums, hosted on the forums.astronomydaily.com server, use phpBB forum software. This software uses a cookie for user login information and other housekeeping functions. We use this software "as-is" and do not modify the sections related to cookies. More information may be found at phpBB.com. A cookie file is not a secret way for a web server to find out private information about you and what you have on your hard drive. The only way that any private information could be in your cookie file would be if you intentionally gave that information to a web server in the first place and the server decided to put that information into your cookie file for some reason. Viruses can not be spread through the use of cookies.  Browser security features prevent a cookie file from being read by any web site other than the site that initially created it.  An excellent article discussing the use of cookies in detail is available here.  There is also a highly recommended article about cookies on the How Stuff Works web site. You may be asked to enter your user name and date of birth or to repeat the user registration process if your cookie file is ever lost or deleted, for instance, if you change computers or log in from someone else’s computer. This policy is a wholly incorporated part of the usage agreement. Please refer to it for more information.