The information gathered by us falls into two categories: (1) information voluntarily supplied by visitors to our website when they register, and (2) tracking information gathered as visitors navigate through our site. Third party providers featured on or linked to from our site may be gathering the same kinds of information.
To help make our site more responsive to the needs of our visitors, help you navigate, tailor content to your needs and to measure traffic within our site, we automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address, when you visit our site.
If you choose to have the site remember your username and password, we also invoke a standard feature of browser software, called a "cookie," to assign each visitor a unique, random number, a sort of user ID, which resides on your computer.
Unless you voluntarily identify yourself through registration, we won't know who you are, even if we assign a cookie to your computer. The only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply. Our cookies can't read unrelated data from your computer.
To make use of certain features on our website, such as posting pictures, stories, messages, news, live chat, and other interactive forums, visitors need to register and to provide certain information as part of the registration process. We ask, for example, for your name, email address, street address, city or town, zip, and we request information on other topics.
Of course, even if you want to remain completely anonymous, you're still free to take advantage of the wealth of content available on our site without registration. The vast majority of our site does not require visitors to complete a registration form or give us contact information (such as a name and email address) to visit.
The more we know about our visitors the more enjoyable your contact will be with other return missionaries and those who register on our site. But if you don't supply the information we require, we may be unable to provide you with services we make available to other visitors to our site. For example, while we allow anyone to read postings in our Messages Board without registration, posting to it requires registration, which enables visitors to also modify their own posts. Our live chat feature also requires registration.
We also use contact information from the registration form to send the user information what's new on the alumni site. Users may opt-out of receiving email notifications; see the choice/opt-out section below.
As this privacy policy reaffirms, we strive to protect confidentiality for our visitors. We do reserve the right to use contact and other information when we deem it necessary or appropriate to comply with applicable laws, rules, or lawful orders of courts and governmental agencies, to enforce compliance with the terms and conditions for use of our site, or to protect third parties from what we regard as threats of serious harm.
