Privacy Statement and Advertising Info

Privacy Statement

We here at GPF always have and always will respect the privacy of our visitors. In fact, we're probably just as nuts (or more so) about online privacy as you are. GPF has never collected and sold private information to anyone for any purpose, and you have our solemn oath that we never will. All forms on this site do exactly what they say they do, and we try our best to spell out all the details before you even get to them.

As a general rule, we here at GPF do not collect any information from you other than what is normally supplied by your browser through the course of normal Web browsing activities. This may include (but is not limited to) your IP address, your operating system, your browser name and version, what pages you accessed and how much data you retrieved from our site. This information is aggregated from our server logs and is used only for site maintenance and occasionally for internal marketing research. On rare occasions, aggregate information may be shared with third parties for marketing purposes, but no personally identifiable information will be used. We will hand over our server logs to the proper authorities if required to do so by law, or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with legal process, respond to claims, or to protect the rights, property or safety of our users or the public.

From time to time, we conduct polls of our readers which are totally anonymous. The questions may contain some demographic information, such as gender, age, general world location, how often you read the strip, etc. All information collected by these surveys is purely voluntary, stored securely on our server, and used solely for making this site as good as it can be. We will never sell or otherwise distribute this information outside our control unless it is aggregated and otherwise cannot be attributed to a single individual.

In the event we may run future contests, we may require you to enter small amounts of personal information, such as your name and e-mail address. We may also attempt to brand your browser with a unique "cookie" ID and/or store your IP address to help prevent duplicate entries. When we do this, we promise to tell you up front exactly what's going on, and we will never do this without giving you such knowledge first. Any such personal information collected by such a contest will be stored securely on our server, impossible to access from outside sources, and will be promptly destroyed once the contest has been completed. Again, it will never be sold or distributed out of our hands.

Our GPF Premium subscription service has a unique user-initiated account and requires us to collect a small amount of information about each user. This information currently includes:

• A user-generated, unique user name which is our primary means of identifying each user;
• The user's e-mail address, which is our primary means of contacting the user outside of the site, including notifications of account changes, password resets, etc.;
• The user's password, which is salted and cryptographically hashed in a non-reversible fashion;
• A user-specified security question and answer to aid in authenticating the user during password reset situations (security answers are salted and hashed in the same manner as passwords).

This information is used solely for the functionality of the Premium service and will not be given to outside parties for any reason. We perform no tracking aside from what is required for this service to function properly. As stated above, we will never release any information about this service unless all personal information is removed and the data is aggregated. If the user wishes to have their Premium subscription information removed, they may contact us to put in a removal request and we will happily comply once they affirm that all branding cookies in all applicable browsers have been removed.

Our Policy on and Use of "Cookies"

For the uninitiated, "cookies" are small snippets of text information stored on your hard drive, saved by your browser. Cookies have a multitude of uses, usually helping maintain state information between pages (such as an online shopping cart system, or perhaps a game). Cookies can and have been used by others for malicious purposes; please rest assured that we here at GPF will never use cookies in such a manner.

As a general rule, this site does not use cookies for your basic GPF experience (the comic, archives, most fun extras). Some of our Geeky Games may use cookies to maintain state information, and we may use cookies to help identify your browser in the case of a contest, as mentioned above. Our GPF Premium subscription service uses cookies to determine whether or not you are authorized to access exclusive content. These cookies will never be set without your knowledge; we will always tell you up front what's going on before it happens, so you can elect not to participate in or use these features if you feel uncomfortable. In most cases, we will also provide some method of destroying the cookie and thus "unbranding" your browser if the feature is no longer needed or desired. Note, however, that the Premium cookie is required to access all exclusive content and while it can be removed, removing it will disable Premium access in your browser.

We cannot be held responsible for any use of cookies, legitimate or otherwise, made by our advertisers.

Advertiser Information

To help keep our site free and open to everyone, we have elected to display banner advertising on most of our pages. In return for displaying their ads, we receive monetary compensation. Not much, but it's more than nothing. We have little control over the content of these banner ads, where they may lead, and the contents of the sites they may lead to. As such, we cannot be held responsible for any offensive or malicious content that may appear on these ads or their feature sites. If you do find any offensive, malicious, or illegal material in such a banner ad, please check this question in our FAQ to see how to report this ad so it can be banned.

There is always the possibility that banner ads may include JavaScript, Java, Flash, may attempt to set a "cookie," or even attempt to install "spyware" or other software without your permission. All such code is completely out of our control, and we cannot be held responsible for any such code that may affect your browser in any fashion. (Some banner ads have been known to crash browsers, much to our dismay.) We also cannot be held responsible if one of these advertisers attempts to collect your personal information through a banner ad; we personally find such an act to be unscrupulous and devious, but there's little we can do about it, if it occurs. If you believe your personal information is being spirited away by such an ad, please check this question in our FAQ to see how to report this ad so it can be banned.

There have been, in some cases, advertisers who have displayed ads on our site that represent or promote ideas, products, or services that are neither endorsed nor supported by the GPF team. In fact, we have even noticed an ad or two that directly contradicts our personal views and beliefs. In no way, shape, or form should it be mistaken that display of any banner ad on the GPF site implies our support or endorsement of the products, services, or ideas represented by any ad. We cannot vouch for any advertiser, aside from the fact that they pay us to display their ads. If you choose to use an advertiser's product or service based upon seeing their ad here on GPF, you do so at your own risk.

Each advertiser usually maintains their own privacy policies and procedures. For your convenience, we've included links to their privacy pages here:

• sovrn Networks Privacy Policy
• Google Privacy Policy
• Amazon Privacy Policy

We are now required to include the following statement from one of our ad suppliers:

We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Web site. These companies may use aggregated information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.

Currently, we have only a very limited capacity to directly sell ads on our site. Our tests have been largely experimental and we are exploring many options in this realm, such as purchasing ad-server software or simply rolling our own. For more information, please see our Advertising hub.

In addition, we've also launched GPF Premium, a subscription-based service that allows you to surf our site ad-free for a small fee. In addition, subscriptions allow you to gain access to exclusive content. We here at GPF heartily endorse Premium as a cool, nifty way to enjoy our comic without pop-up banners and other annoying distractions. Please visit the link above for more details.