CDS: Privacy Statement

Covenant Data Systems Online Privacy Statement

Last updated: December 2006

Covenant Data Systems is committed to protecting your privacy. Please read the Covenant Data Systems Online Privacy Statement below and also any supplemental information listed to the right for additional details about particular Covenant Data Systems sites and services that you may use.

This Covenant Data Systems Online Privacy Statement applies to data collected by Covenant Data Systems through the majority of its Web sites and services, as well as its offline product support services. It does not apply to those Covenant Data Systems sites, services and products that do not display or link to this statement or that have their own privacy statements.

Collection of Your Personal Information

At some Covenant Data Systems sites, we ask you to provide personal information, such as your e-mail address, name, home or work address or telephone number. We may also collect demographic information, such as your ZIP code, age, gender, preferences, interests and favorites. If you choose to make a purchase or sign up for a paid subscription service, we will ask for additional information, such as your credit card number and billing address, that is used to create a Covenant Data Systems billing account.

We may collect information about your visit, including the pages you view, the links you click and other actions taken in connection with Covenant Data Systems sites and services. We also collect certain standard information that your browser sends to every website you visit, such as your IP address, browser type and language, access times and referring Web site addresses.

When you receive newsletters or promotional e-mail from Covenant Data Systems, we may use web beacons, customized links or similar technologies to determine whether the e-mail has been opened and which links you click in order to provide you more focused e-mail communications or other information.

In order to offer you a more consistent and personalized experience in your interactions with Covenant Data Systems, information collected through one Covenant Data Systems service may be combined with information obtained through other Covenant Data Systems services. We may also supplement the information we collect with information obtained from other companies. For example, we may use services from other companies that enable us to derive a general geographic area based on your IP address in order to customize certain services to your geographic area.

Use of Your Personal Information

Covenant Data Systems collects and uses your personal information to operate and improve its sites and deliver the services or carry out the transactions you have requested. These uses may include providing you with more effective customer service; making the sites or services easier to use by eliminating the need for you to repeatedly enter the same information; performing research and analysis aimed at improving our products, services and technologies; and displaying content and advertising that are customized to your interests and preferences.

We also use your personal information to communicate with you. We may send certain mandatory service communications such as welcome letters, billing reminders, information on technical service issues, and security announcements. Some Covenant Data Systems services may send periodic member letters that are considered part of the service. We may also occasionally send you product surveys or promotional mailings to inform you of other products or services available from Covenant Data Systems and its affiliates.

Sharing of Your Personal Information

Except as described in this statement, we will not disclose your personal information outside of Covenant Data Systems and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates without your consent. Some Covenant Data Systems sites allow you to choose to share your personal information with select Covenant Data Systems partners so that they can contact you about their products, services or offers. Other sites do not share your contact information with third parties for marketing purposes, but instead may give you a choice as to whether you wish to receive communications from Covenant Data Systems on behalf of external business partners about a partner's particular offering (without transferring your personal information to the third party). See the Communication Preferences section below for more information.

Some Covenant Data Systems services may be co-branded and offered in conjunction with another company. If you register for or use such services, both Covenant Data Systems and the other company may receive information collected in conjunction with the co-branded services.

We may hire other companies to provide limited services on our behalf, such as handling the processing and delivery of mailings, providing customer support, hosting websites, processing transactions, or performing statistical analysis of our services. Those companies will be permitted to obtain only the personal information they need to deliver the service. They are required to maintain the confidentiality of the information and are prohibited from using it for any other purpose.

We may access and/or disclose your personal information if we believe such action is necessary to: (a) comply with the law or legal process served on Covenant Data Systems; (b) protect and defend the rights or property of Covenant Data Systems (including the enforcement of our agreements); or (c) act in urgent circumstances to protect the personal safety of users of Covenant Data Systems services or members of the public.

Communication Preferences

You can stop the delivery of future promotional e-mail from Covenant Data Systems sites and services by following the specific instructions in the e-mail you receive.

These communication choices do not apply to mandatory service communications that are considered part of certain Covenant Data Systems services, which you may receive periodically unless you cancel the service.

Security of Your Personal Information

Covenant Data Systems is committed to protecting the security of your personal information. We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. For example, we store the personal information you provide on computer systems with limited access, which are located in controlled facilities. When we transmit highly confidential information (such as a credit card number or password) over the Internet, we protect it through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol.

If a password is used to help protect your accounts and personal information, it is your responsibility to keep your password confidential. Do not share this information with anyone. If you are sharing a computer with anyone you should always choose to log out before leaving a site or service to protect access to your information from subsequent users.

Collection and Use of Children's Personal Information

Many Covenant Data Systems sites and services are intended for general audiences and do not knowingly collect any personal information from children. When a Covenant Data Systems site does collect age information, and users identify themselves as under 13, the site will either block such users from providing personal information, or will seek to obtain consent from parents for the collection, use and sharing of their children's personal information. We will not knowingly ask children under the age of 13 to provide more information than is reasonably necessary to provide our services.

Please note that if you grant consent for your child to use Covenant Data Systems services, this will include such general audience communication services as e-mail, instant messaging, and online groups, and your child will be able to communicate with, and disclose personal information to, other users of all ages. Parents can change or revoke the consent choices previously made, and review, edit or request the deletion of their children's personal information. If we change this privacy statement in a way that expands the collection, use or disclosure of children's personal information to which a parent has previously consented, the parent will be notified and we will be required to obtain the parent's additional consent.

We encourage you to talk with your children about communicating with strangers and disclosing personal information online. You and your child can visit our online safety resources for additional information about using the Internet safely. Covenant Data Systems has a terrific site with information to assist parents and children with privacy at http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/family/default.mspx.

Use of Cookies

Covenant Data Systems Web sites use "cookies" to enable you to sign in to our services and to help personalize your online experience. A cookie is a small text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Web page server. Cookies contain information that can later be read by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer.

Covenant Data Systems Web sites use cookies to store your preferences and other information on your computer in order to save you time by eliminating the need to repeatedly enter the same information and to display your personalized content and appropriate advertising on your later visits to these sites.

You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Most Web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. If you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to sign in or use other interactive features of Covenant Data Systems sites and services that depend on cookies.

Use of Web Beacons

Covenant Data Systems Web pages may contain electronic images known as Web beacons - sometimes called single-pixel gifs - that may be used to assist in delivering cookies on our sites and allow us to count users who have visited those pages and to deliver co-branded services. We may include Web beacons in promotional e-mail messages or our newsletters in order to determine whether messages have been opened and acted upon.

Covenant Data Systems may also employ Web beacons from third parties in order to help us compile aggregated statistics and determine the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns. We prohibit Web beacons on our sites from being used by third parties to collect or access your personal information.

Finally, we may work with other companies that advertise on Covenant Data Systems sites to place Web beacons on their sites in order to allow us to develop statistics on how often clicking on an advertisement on a Covenant Data Systems site results in a purchase or other action on the advertiser's site.

Use of Third Party Ad Networks

The majority of the online banner advertisements you see on Covenant Data Systems Web pages are displayed by Covenant Data Systems. However, we allow other companies, called third-party ad servers or ad networks, to display advertisements on Covenant Data Systems Web pages. Some of these ad networks may place a persistent cookie on your computer in order to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement. In this way, ad networks may compile information about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw their advertisements and determine which ads are clicked on. This information allows an ad network to deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. Covenant Data Systems does not have access to the cookies that may be placed by the third-party ad servers or ad networks.

Controlling "Spam" or Unsolicited E-mail

Covenant Data Systems is concerned about controlling unsolicited commercial e-mail, or "spam." Covenant Data Systems has a strict Anti-Spam Policy prohibiting the use of Mail Enable (the software on our e-mail server which serves e-mail) e-mail account to send spam. Covenant Data Systems will not sell, lease or rent its e-mail subscriber lists to third parties. While Covenant Data Systems continues to actively review and implement new technology, such as expanded filtering features, there is no currently available technology that will totally prevent the sending and receiving of unsolicited e-mail. Using tools such as the Inbox Protector and being cautious about the sharing of your e-mail address while online will help reduce the amount of unsolicited e-mail you receive.

Enforcement of This Privacy Statement

If you have questions regarding this statement, you should first contact us.

Changes to This Privacy Statement

We will occasionally update this privacy statement to reflect changes in our services and customer feedback. When we post changes to this Statement, we will revise the "last updated" date at the top of this statement. If there are material changes to this statement or in how Covenant Data Systems will use your personal information, we will notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes prior to implementing the change or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to periodically review this statement to be informed of how Covenant Data Systems is protecting your information.