The only information we collect and maintain about our users is the contact and payment information provided by customers when they place orders, plus contact information from those persons who opt-in, for example sending a request to receive our newsletters. Customer credit-card numbers are not retained on our website, and are of couse used only to place the orders received.
We do use various statistical checks, which do not identify the users, for example in order to check the number of web-hits our site has received. No effort is made to identifier particular users through these statistical checks, and, to the best of our knowledge, it would not be possible to do so.
We do not sell, swap, trade, or give our customer list to anyone. We will not provide any customer contact information to any third party without the express consent of the individual customer. If the Joe Zilch Fan Club, (or even Joe Zilch himself) asked us to provide a list of customers who had purchased Joe Zilch books, we would not provide such information. We would refuse the request outright. If warranted, we might pass along whatever information the third party requested, for example via our newsletters or catalog, or via the website. So far, however, no circumstances have ever arisen where we have ever even been asked to provide such infomation.
We make use of the customer and prospective customer information we collect in order to contact our customers in order to complete orders, to resolve problems with orders, to confirm contact information, and to promote FoxAcre Press, via occasional printed and online newsletters, mailings, and similar means.
Any customer may at any time instruct us to remove all identifiable information from all our active records, and/or instruct us not to send any or all of our sales and promotion material. Contact us at info@foxacre.com or via our physical mail address, FoxAcre Press, PMB 281, 1977 North Olden Avenue Ext., Trenton NJ 08618-2193, or via fax at (609) 882-1043 with your instructions.
We will follow all such instructions as fully as possible, but we cannot be responsible for such circumstances as promotional material already in transit, or brief delays or initial errors in expunging database records
We will treat our customers honestly at all times, and strive to handle all issues and queries with courtesy and respect. We will do all we can to resolve all customer complaints as quickly, and as fairly, as we can.
If a customer starts to place an order with FoxAcre, then breaks off for some reason, and then returns, our order-taking system will try to use cookies to "remember" the most recent state of the order. This won't always happen. The cookies might expire, the customer might be logging in from a diffeent computer, etc. The cookies in such cases retain order information, and about the internet address and browser used in the earlier session. They do NOT contain any personal identifiers. Once an order is completed, or the uncompleted order expires, this order-in-progress tracking information is deleted.
What follows this explantion is the bureaucratic, machine-generated flapdoodle version, necessitated by the way Microsoft, that champion (ha!) of privacy protection has programmed Internet Explorer. Microsoft has set up Explorer so that it will, under certain complicated circumstances, without providing any explantion to the user, refuse to let "cookies" be used by a secure server, such as that used by FoxAcre's order-taking system. A cookie is a small text file stored on a user's computer. A website uses it to remember information provided by the user from one session to the next. This behavior on the part of Microsoft Explorer can make it impossible for a customer to complete an order.
In order to get around this Microsoft-imposed control, FoxAcre Press has to have a "compact policy" installed on its server. In theory, this series of letter codes encapsulates our policy for dealing with privacy issues. We have used a software tool to generate a privacy policy that ought to keep Explorer from deliberately malfunctioning as described above. We also have to post a privacy policy, which you are now reading. The same software tool generates boilerplate text, which we present below. As best we can tell, the privacy policy written above goes further, but posting the following text (which we will of course honor) ought to keep the paper-pushers happier.
Just by the way, Microsoft, as part of its heroic effort for privacy, supports legislation that would allow it to send commands direct to your computer, disabling any software Microsoft had decided you shouldn't be allowed to run.