Information Automatically Gathered About All Visitors

We collect aggregate and user-specific information on which pages consumers access or visit. This information is used to generate reports that help us assess the value of and interest in the various web sites we provide. We use the information we collect to improve the content of our web pages. We can build a better site if we know which pages our users are visiting, how often they visit and how long they stay on a page.

Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our web pages to you upon request, to tailor our sites to the interests of our users, and to measure traffic within our sites.

To help make our sites more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we may utilize a standard feature of browser software called a "cookie." A cookie is a small piece of computer code that is deposited on your hard drive by our site. Browsers typically recognize when a cookie has been sent to your computer and give you the option to refuse or allow it. A cookie does not actually identify you, just the computer that you are using to access our site. A cookie cannot read data off your hard drive. Our advertisers, content partners and sites that are reached from links on our site may also assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we cannot control.

We use cookies to help us tailor our site to your needs so we can deliver a better and more personalized service. It is a cookie, for example, that allows us to deliver to you any personalized information each time you visit a site.

In addition, we can access cookies later in your current session or in a later session on our site in order to improve your visit to our web site, as in the following examples:

Account Registration

If your use of a component of the site requires you to register, a cookie will be used to automatically identify you as a registered user when you are using our site. These cookies are known as persistent cookies and continue on your computer after the initial session in which they are created.