Privacy and security notice

This Service (including, but not limited to text, content, photographs, video and audio) is protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation. You must abide by all additional copyright notices or restrictions contained in this Service.

You may create Web links to any URL on Estripes.com, including articles.

YOU MAY NOT COPY, REPRODUCE, DISTRIBUTE, PUBLISH, DISPLAY, PERFORM, MODIFY, CREATE DERIVATIVE WORKS, TRANSMIT, OR IN ANY WAY EXPLOIT ANY PART OF THIS SERVICE, EXCEPT THAT YOU MAY DOWNLOAD MATERIAL FROM THIS SERVICE FOR YOUR OWN PERSONAL, NONCOMMERCIAL USE AS FOLLOWS: YOU MAY MAKE ONE MACHINE READABLE COPY AND/OR ONE PRINT COPY THAT IS LIMITED TO OCCASIONAL ARTICLES OF PERSONAL INTEREST ONLY.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE GENERALITY OF THE FOREGOING, YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE ANY PART OF THIS SERVICE OVER ANY NETWORK, INCLUDING A LOCAL AREA NETWORK, NOR SELL NOR OFFER IT FOR SALE. IN ADDITION, THESE FILES MAY NOT BE USED TO CONSTRUCT ANY KIND OF DATABASE.

*See Rights and Permissions for commercial use.

Rights and Permissions

The material on this service may not be reproduced for any commercial purpose with out the express written consent of European and Pacific Stars and Stripes. For permission to reprint S&S material or to obtain a copy please write or e-mail to:

Charlene Neuwiller, Librarian
529 14^th St., NW, Suite 350
Washington, DC 20045-1301
Phone: (202) 761-0867
Fax: (202) 761-0890
E-mail: neuwillerc@stripes.osd.mil

* Please describe the material (story, photo, etc.) to be used, the purpose of the republication and the manner of use. Please include mailing & e-mail addresses, and a phone number.

Estripes.com User Agreement and Privacy Policy

Thank you for visiting estripes.com and reviewing our privacy policy. This is the website of the European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.

The Stars and Stripes privacy policy is clear: We will collect no personal information about you when you visit our website unless you choose to provide that information to us.

PLEASE READ USER AGREEMENT (amended as of September 1, 2001) BEFORE USING THIS SERVICE. BY CONTINUING TO USE estripes.com, YOU AGREE TO ABIDE BY THE CONDITIONS OF THIS AGREEMENT.

Estripes.com ™ SERVICE USER AGREEMENT

© 2001 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes. All rights Reserved.

1. Welcome to estripes.com. By using this Service, you agree to be bound by all of the terms of this Agreement. Estripes.com, part of European and Pacific Stars and Stripes (EPSS), reserves the right to charge for Services in the future. In such event, we will notify you, and give you an opportunity to subscribe to this Service. We reserve the right to change the terms of this Agreement or to modify any features of this Service at any time. By using this Service and/or continuing to use this Service after the posting of Notices regarding such changes, you agree to be bound by such changes.
2. This Service (including, but not limited to text, photographs, graphics, video and audio content) is protected by copyright as a collective work or compilation. All individual articles, content and other elements comprising this Service are also copyrighted works. You must abide by all additional copyright notices or restrictions contained in this Service.
3. (a) You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, enter into a database, display, perform, modify, create derivative works, transmit, or in any way exploit any part of this Service, except that you may download material from this Service for your own personal use as follows: you may make one machine readable copy and/or one print copy that is limited to occasional articles of personal interest only. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, you may not distribute any part of this Service over any network, including a local area network, nor sell or offer it for sale. In addition, these files may not be used to construct any kind of database. See rights and permissions.

(b) Estripes.com has been specially designed for presentation of content in a unique format and appearance to our users. We are concerned about the integrity of our Service when it is viewed in a setting created by a third party that includes advertising or other materials that we have not authorized to be displayed with our Service. Neither you nor any third party shall make use of the contents of the Service in any manner that constitutes an infringement of our rights, including copyright.

(c) Just as estripes.com requires users to respect our copyrights, and those of our affiliates and partners, we respect the copyrights of others. If you believe in good faith that your copyrighted work has been reproduced on our site without authorization in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, you may notify our designated copyright agent either by mail to Max Lederer, Legal Counsel, European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, Central Office, 529 14^th St., NW, Suite 350, Washington, DC 20045 or by e-mail, ledererm@stripes.osd.mil. This contact information is only for suspected copyright infringement. Contact information for other matters is provided elsewhere on this site. Any personal information you provide in your note will be used only for purposes related to your note.

European and Pacific Stars and Stripes and estripes.com are committed to bringing you information tailored to your individual needs but also, recognizes the importance of protecting the privacy of your personally identifiable information. In adopting this privacy policy, our intent is to balance our legitimate business interests in collecting and using personally identifiable information and your reasonable expectations of privacy.

What personally identifiable information do I provide to estripes.com?

Estripes.com asks you to provide various types of personally identifiable information to enhance your experience on our site. During registration, estripes.com may ask for information such as your name, e-mail address, birth year, gender, and optional information regarding household income. The more information you provide, the better we are able to customize your experience. We may also ask you for other information at other times - such as when you enter a contest or participate in a promotion, when you post an online ad, or when you order products from us. See below about "cookies" and what other information is collected.

If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we will gather and store certain information about your visit automatically. This information does not identify you personally. We automatically collect and store only the following information about your visit:

1. The 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) and 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.
2. The type of browser and operating system used to access our site;
3. The date and time you access our site;
4. The pages you visit; and
5. If you linked to the Stars and Stripes website from another website, the address of that website.

We use this information to help us make our site more useful to visitors-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.

How does estripes.com use my personally identifiable information?

Our primary goal in collecting personally identifiable information is to provide you, the user, with a customized experience on our site. This includes personalization services, interactive communications, online shopping and many other types of services, most of which are completely free to you.

Estripes.com uses the personally identifiable information you provide to us in several ways. Some examples follow.

A user's personally identifiable information may be used by estripes.com for editorial purposes such as to contact you as part of an online survey. We may also use the information provided by you to contact you with legal notices, or to advise you of any material changes in our terms and conditions.

In order to provide services free of charge, we display advertisements. Estripes.com delivers targeted advertisements on behalf of advertisers. Advertisers give us an advertisement and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (for example, females over 25 years old). We take the advertisement and display it to users meeting that criteria. In this process, the advertiser never has access to individual account information. You will only receive special offers via e-mail from estripes.com consistent with your stated preferences. You can change your preferences at any time.

Estripes.com also does research on our users' demographics, interests and behavior based on the information you provide to us upon registration, on order forms, during a promotion, as well as from our server log files or from surveys. We do this to better understand and serve our users. This research is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis and estripes.com may share this aggregated data with advertisers or other businesses. In addition, under confidentiality agreements, estripes.com may match user information with third party data.

Do other companies or people have access to personally identifiable information I provide to estripes.com?

When you are on an area of estripes.com and are asked for personally identifiable information, you are providing that information to European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, or vendors providing contractual services for estripes.com (such as hosting vendors). If personally identifiable information is being provided to and/or maintained by any company other than these, our policy is that we will not transfer that personally identifiable information unless notice is given prior to transfer. If you do not want your information to be shared, you can choose not to allow the transfer by not using that particular service or by expressing this preference, if requested. Additional information about personally identifiable information follows.

Promotions: Promotions that run on estripes.com may be sponsored by companies other than estripes.com or may be co-sponsored by estripes.com and another company. Some or all personally identifiable information provided by you during a promotion may be shared with the sponsor. If information will be shared, we will disclose such sharing prior to the transfer. You can decide not to participate in the promotion if you don't want your personally identifiable information to be shared. In certain circumstances, you may not be able to participate in a particular promotion if you chose not to share personally identifiable information.

Advertisers and Links: estripes.com advertisers, or Web sites that have links on our site, may also collect personally identifiable information directly from you. The information practices of companies collecting data on or Web sites linked to estripes.com are not covered by this privacy statement.

Marketplace: If you make a purchase or request a service from a business in Shopping, the information you provide for that transaction (as well as tracking information and cookies as described below) is provided directly to the Shopping business. Businesses listed in estripes.com Shopping have separate privacy and data collection practices. Estripes.com has no responsibility or liability for these independent policies. For more information regarding the business and its privacy policy, go to that business' home page and click on the appropriate link.

Other: If we run competitions or contests on the site, you may be required to provide information such as your telephone number and address in order to participate. The exact rules may vary in each case but the specific rules for any contest will state how that information may be used. If you told us in your account preferences that you would be interested in receiving e-mail from us, we may send you e-mails about estripes.com products, promotions, or services as well as on behalf of other companies. You can change your account preferences at any time.

We do not control the privacy policies of our advertisers, sponsors or other sites or businesses to which we provide hyperlinks or access. Please visit the sites of these businesses to review their privacy policies. Estripes.com users should also be aware that, when you voluntarily disclose personal information in chat areas or bulletin boards, that information may be collected by others and may result in unsolicited messages from others.

Except as stated in this privacy policy or at the time of collection, a user's personally identifiable information will not be transferred to a party outside Stars and Stripes, or its service vendors unless notice is given at the time of collection or prior to transfer. If you do not wish to receive any e-mail or to have us share such information with any another party, you may change your preferences for the future at any time by (i) clicking the box on the registration form requesting us not to e-mail you or to share such information, (ii) contacting us by mail at (529 14^th Street, NW, Suite 350 Washington, DC 20045). Estripes.com may also disclose account information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against someone who may be violating our User Agreement or may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) estripes.com's rights or property, other estripes.com users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities.

Data Security: We have in place physical, electronic and managerial procedures to protect the information we collect online. However, as effective as these measures are, no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that the information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the internet.

What information do web servers collect?

Web servers serving estripes.com automatically collect certain non-personally identifiable information, such as which pages each user visits and the domain name (e.g., earthlink.net) of visitors. This information is used for various purposes including internal review, to tailor information to individual visitors, and for traffic audits. We also provide this information (as well as information from third-party market researchers) about our users on an aggregated, anonymous basis to our advertisers.

What are cookies and how does estripes.com use them?

Estripes.com places a "cookie" on the browser of an estripes.com user's computer to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie can be used to tell when your computer has contacted a Web site; we may also use the information for editorial purposes and for other purposes such as measuring certain traffic patterns. For example, cookies are used to ensure that you don't see the same ad too many times in a single session and that you do not have to reenter your login name or password during your visit. We may also use cookies to track your progress and number of entries in some of our promotions and contests. Advertising service vendors that serve ads into our site may also use their own cookies. You may opt-out of the cookies delivered by estripes.com by changing the setting on your browser. Please be aware that this will disable all cookies delivered to your browser, not just the ones delivered by estripes.com.

Kids pages: We at Stars and Stripes are especially concerned about protecting children’s privacy. We hope parents and teachers are involved in children’s Internet explorations. It is particularly important for parents to guide their children when children are asked to provide personal information on line. Stars and Stripes will request no personal information from children. Do not send any information about yourself to us - including information like your name, address or e-mail address. In general, we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under 13. In the event that we learn that we have collected any personal information from a child under the age of 13 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information from our database as quickly as possible.

Technology on the Internet is developing at a rapid pace, and we need to maintain our flexibility in the online arena. If we need to change our policy in the future, we will post these changes as soon as they go into effect.

© Copyright 2001 The European and Pacific Stars and Stripes