Our Privacy Policy

This website is provided as a public service by NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration (NOAA OR&R); we welcome you as a site visitor. Here is an explanation of how we handle information we learn about you during your visit.

Most important, we do not collect personal information that would allow us to identify you by name or contact you directly (such as your email address), unless you choose to send that information to us. How we handle information about you depends on how you use our website:

1. If you visit our site, we collect and store just the following information about you:

• Your host name or IP address.
• The date and time when you visited pages on our site.
• The pages you viewed.

We use this information for site management purposes: for example, to learn how people visit the pages on our site, to find out which pages are of most interest to visitors, and to identify problems people are encountering on our site.

For the same reason, we also collect information about search criteria, search results, and chemicals saved in MyChemicals collections. However, we pool this information and do not link it to specific IP addresses.

2. If you identify yourself by sending us an email containing personal information (such as your postal address when you request us to send something to you):

• We use your information to respond to your request.
• We save your message in an email archive, which we use for site management purposes (for example, it's useful to us to see how many people have requested a particular item, or have asked a particular question).

By sending us personal information, you are giving your consent for us to use the information for the stated purpose.

We do not use information about you in any other ways, and we do not share information about you with other parties. We do not use persistent tracking technologies. We use session "cookies" for site navigation, but they are not saved between site visits. (A cookie is a file placed on your hard drive by a website.)

This privacy policy applies only to this website. Some organizations within NOAA may have other information collection practices. You are encouraged to check the privacy policy when going to another web site. NOAA also has a general privacy policy.

You can obtain more information about your rights under the Privacy Act of 1974 (as amended) from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission website.

For the protection of users of our website, we have safeguards in place to identify and prevent unauthorized attempts to access or cause harm to information and systems. Unauthorized attempts to add or modify information on this website are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act.