The Handbook of the Navigator - Privacy Policy

1. Higher Balance does not share any personalized information with anyone. Any information given to Higher Balance in the form of purchases or inquiries stays with us. We do not give, share or sell your information to any affiliates or 3rd party vendors.

2. For site management, we use software programs to collect and create summary statistics on the following information for statistical purposes.

- the date and time
- the originating Internet Protocol (IP) address
- the object requested
- the address of the web site from which you linked to our site
- the type of browser you use to access our web site, and
- the completion status of the request.

3. This computer system uses these gathered statistics for such purposes as:

assessing what information is of most and least interest,
determining technical design specifications, and
identifying system performance or problem areas.

4. For site security purposes and to ensure personal details remain private, this site employs software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage.

5. This web site makes no attempts to identify individual users or their usage habits. We use raw data logs for no other purposes and scheduled these logs for regular destruction.

6. Unauthorized attempts to upload information or change information on this service are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

7. The information we receive depends upon what you do when visiting our site -

a. If you visit our site to read or download information:

We collect and store only the following information about you: the name of the domain from which you access the Internet (for example, aol.com, if you are connecting from an America Online account, or psu.edu if you are connecting from Pennsylvania State University’s domain); the date and time you access our site; and the Internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site.

We use the information we collect to measure the number of visitors to the different sections of our site, and to help us make our site more useful to visitors.

b. If you identify yourself by sending an E-mail:

You also may decide to send us personally identifying information, for example, in an electronic mail message containing a complaint or compliment.

We use personally identifying information from viewers in various ways to further the usefulness and accuracy of the information contained on our Web site or to add new sections and services. If you include personally-identifying information in your e-mail because you want us to address issues specific to your situation, we may use that information in responding to your request.

Be aware that despite anything we do to protect electronic information, e-mail is not necessarily secure against interception. If your communication is very sensitive, or includes personal information, you might prefer to send it by regular mail instead.

8. Cookies:

Cookies are small files that web servers place on a user’s hard drive. They can serve several functions:

they allow the web site to identify you as a previous visitor each time you access a site;

they track what information you view at a site (important to commercial sites trying to determine your buying preferences);

in the more advanced cases they track your movements through our Web site but not the whole Web;

businesses use them for customer convenience to allow them to produce a list of items to buy and pay for them all at one time and to garner information about what individuals are buying at their sites;

advertisers use them to determine the effectiveness of their marketing and offer insights into consumer preferences and tastes by collecting data from many Web sites; and

they can be used to help a web site tailor screens for each customer’s preference.

To protect your privacy, be sure to close your browser completely after you have finished conducting business with a web site that does use cookies. If you are concerned about the potential use of the information gathered from your computer by cookies, you can set your browser to prompt you before it accepts a cookie. Most Internet browser have settings that let you identify and/or reject cookies.

Higher Balance uses cookies only for to keep items in your cart and for raw access logs to monitor traffic to our site.

9. Session Variables:

Session variables are small files that a Web site transfers temporarily to your computer’s memory, not to your computer’s hard drive.

On some of our web pages, we use “session variables” to help you use our web sites interactively. Netscape’s browser labels our session variables as cookies — these are not cookies.

The session variables on Higher Balance’s Web pages do not collect information about you, but only about your browser “session.” The session variable makes it easier for you to use the dynamic features of our Web services, without having to provide the same information again as you move from one page to another.

Session variables on Higher Balance’s Web pages expire as you exit the service delivering the session variable. That is, they are automatically removed from your computer’s memory when you close your browser, reboot, or flush your cache.

NOTE: We will not obtain personally identifying information about you when you visit our site, unless you choose to provide such information to us.