PRIVACY AND SECURITY POLICY

The Department of Information Technology in the Division of Student Affairs respects your privacy. We are providing this privacy and security policy to ensure that we make every effort to respect your privacy and to inform you of what information we collect, how we use it, how we protect it, when we can release it, and how you are entitled to access it.

INFORMATION COLLECTION, USE, AND RELEASE

When you visit our website to read or download information, we do not collect personal information about you. In particular, we do not use “cookies” to collect or store personal information. However, we do collect and store technical information about your visit in server logs.

We use information from server logs to evaluate accessibility or gauge the popularity of various features on our websites. We also use that information for general reporting and management functions. Specifically, we use log analysis tools to generate statistics, determine technical design specifications, and identify system performance issues.

Occasionally, we acquire, record, and analyze portions of the data that you enter, store, or transmit through our websites or email you send us. We release this information – only when legally required – to help law enforcement investigations, legal proceedings, or internal investigations of Texas A&M University rule and regulation violations. These groups would use the information to track the electronic interactions back to the source computer(s) or account(s).

Except for education records governed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), all information collected from our website, including server logs, and information collected from web forms, or email you send to us, may be subject to the Texas Public Information Act. This means that while we do not actively share information, in some cases we may be compelled by law to release this information.

COOKIES

A cookie file contains unique information that a website can use to store such things as passwords, or pages you have visited, or the date you last looked at a specific page. Cookies can also identify your server session at a particular website. We do not use cookies to collect or store personal information.

SERVER LOGS

We store the following information in our server logs:

• User/client hostname – The hostname or IP address of the user/client requesting access
• HTTP header, “user-agent” – The user-agent information includes the type of browser, its version, and the operating system on which it is running
• HTTP header, “referrer” – The referrer specifies the page from which the client accessed the current page
• System date – The date and time of the user/client request
• Full request – The exact request the user/client made
• Status – The status code the server returned to the user/client
• Content length – The content length, in bytes, of the document sent to the user/client
• Method – The request method used
• Universal Resource Identifier (URI) – The location of a resource on the server including web pages, images, and other files
• Query string of the URI – Anything after the question mark in a URI Protocol – The transport protocol and version used

INFORMATION SECURITY

We employ extensive security measures consistent with the Texas Administrative Code (TAC) “Information Security Standards” and Texas A&M University Rules and Standard Administrative Procedures to protect against unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction of the information under our control, as well as the loss, misuse, or alteration of our websites and/or associated electronic information resources. The information resources that support our websites undergo an annual information security risk assessment that assesses the security posture of information systems and measures compliance with information security standards.

INFORMATION ACCESS

The Texas Public Information Act, with a few exceptions, gives you the right to be informed about the information our website collects about you. It also gives you the right to request a copy of that information, and to have the university correct any of that information. You may request to receive and review any of this information, or request corrections to it, by contacting the TAMU Public Information Officer or the TAMU Office of Open Records, 1181 TAMU, College Station, Texas, 77843-1181, at 979-862-7777.

QUESTIONS

If you have any questions about this privacy and security policy, the practices of our website, or your use of our website, please send an email to the webmaster or by postal mail to: