Sociology Department Privacy Policy

The Texas A&M Sociology Department maintains this web site (sociweb.tamu.edu). The following applies to all pages maintained on this site (sociweb.tamu.edu) but not to all links from this site.

Cookies: A file that contains unique information a web site can use to track such things as passwords, lists of pages visited and the date you last looked at a specific page or to identify your session at a particular web site. We have a number of pages that place a cookie on which information is stored. These pages use them to identify the password used to log into our system, automatically fill in some areas of a form, and record whether polls or surveys have been completed before.

E-Mail: Electronic Mail sent when clicking on an e-mail link or submitting information via forms that contains personal or identifiable information will only be used to process that submission. In the event another agency or person is better suited to respond, your email will be sent to them to better serve you.

Site Management Functions: Information collected for analysis and statistical purposes. This information is not reported or used in any manner that would reveal personally identifiable information, and will not be released to outside parties, unless legally required to do so in connection with law enforcement investigations or other legal proceedings.

Server Log Analysis: This is information that is used for the purpose of assessing what information is of most interest, determining technical design and identifying system performance or problem areas. The following information is collected from this web site:

• User Client Hostname - The hostname (or IP address if DNS is disabled) 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 it's running on.
• HTTP Header, "referer" - The referer 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.
• Query string of the URI - Anything after the question mark in a URI.
• Protocol - The transport protocol and version used.

Information Access: The Texas Public Information Act, with a few exceptions, gives you the right to be informed about the information our web sites collect 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.

Information Security
We employ information security measures consistent with the Texas Administrative Code information security standards and with Texas A&M University rules and standard administrative procedures to protect against unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction of information under our control. The information resources that support our web sites undergo an annual information security risk assessment to assess the security posture of information systems and measures compliance with information security standards.