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Fifth National Climate Assessment - Read the Report

Privacy Policy

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is committed to protecting individual privacy and securing the personal information made available to us when you visit GlobalChange.gov or visit our pages hosted by other sites (such as our official profiles on social networking sites). This Privacy Policy describes what information is made available to USGCRP and how that information is used and retained.

Information You Give Us

If you choose to contact us with personal information through our website, we use that information to respond to your message and to help provide the information requested. We treat emails the same way we treat letters sent to the U.S. Global Change Research Program. We do not collect personal information for any purpose other than to respond to you. We only share information with another government agency if your inquiry relates to that agency, or as otherwise required by law. Moreover, we do not create individual profiles with your personal information or provide it to any private or commercial organizations.

USGCRP sponsors a number of open public comment activities, the results of which are often released on GlobalChange.gov. In these cases, commenters will be explicitly notified of future release of their input.

Information Automatically Collected

When you visit GlobalChange.gov, the following basic information is automatically received and stored by the web servers hosting GlobalChange.gov:

  • The originating Internet Protocol (IP) address and internet domain name;
  • Information about your computer or mobile device (e.g., type and version of web browser, operating system, screen resolution, and connection speed);
  • The pages on GlobalChange.gov that you visit;
  • The internet address, or URL, of the website that connected you to our site, if you accessed GlobalChange.gov via a link on another page (i.e., “referral traffic”); and
  • The amount of data transmitted from GlobalChange.gov to your computer.

We use this information to help us make our site more useful to visitors -- to learn about the number of visitors to our site and the types of technology our visitors use. We do not track or record information about individuals and their visits.

How Information is Used

If you choose to provide us with information, we may use that information to contact you, respond to your message, or provide you the information or services you requested. In order to serve you better, we may analyze multiple sources of data you have provided (for example, to look up whether you previously contacted USGCRP about the same topic so that we do not send you a duplicative response). We may also use messages or comments collected through GlobalChange.gov or official social media pages for our own purposes, such as to guide future public engagements and improve our websites.

Retention

Electronically submitted information is maintained and destroyed according to the principles of the Federal Records Act and Freedom of Information Act and the regulations and records schedules approved by the National Archives and Records Administration.

Cookies

To better serve our visitors, we use technology commonly referred to as "cookies" to track new and returning visitor actions on GlobalChange.gov. They are used to track the way visitors use our site so we may continually improve the experience. These cookies do not capture personally identifiable information, such as your name or email, or track interactions outside of GlobalChange.gov.

GlobalChange.gov uses a third-party analytics provider (currently Google Analytics) to analyze data from cookies. The third-party analytics provider does not receive personally identifiable information through these cookies and is prohibited from combining, matching or cross-referencing GlobalChange.gov information with any other information. We have also limited the provider’s ability to see your full IP address (a process known as “IP masking”). Please review Google Analytics’ privacy policy for additional information.

Email Subscriptions

In order to manage email subscription lists, we retain the names and email address of our email subscribers, as well as other information they may have shared with us (job title, organization), logs of emails we send, and automatically generated email data used to improve our email communications. This automatically generated email data (generated through simple tools such as “pixel tags” and link redirects) includes:

  • The recipient’s email client;
  • Whether the email was opened;
  • If a link in the message was clicked;
  • Whether an email was delivered;
  • If the email was forwarded; and
  • If the email was printed.

If, at any time, you wish to stop receiving our messages, simply click on the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of each email message.

Third-Party Websites

USGCRP maintains official pages or accounts on some third-party websites such as Facebook and Twitter in order to better engage with the American public. Your activity on those sites is governed by the third-party website’s security and privacy policies. Users of third-party sites often share information with the general public, user community, and/or the third-party operating the site and should review the privacy policies of those sites before using them. You should also adjust privacy settings on your account on any third-party site to match your preferences.

To improve the quality of our services, we may integrate measurement tools for basic analysis of activity on third party sites (such as likes and retweets) and do not collect personally identifiable information.

Links to External Sites

GlobalChange.gov may link to websites created and maintained by other public and/or private organizations and individuals. When you follow a link to an external site, you are leaving GlobalChange.gov and are subject to the external site‘s privacy and security policies. We also do not endorse the site’s sponsors, any views they express, or any products or services they offer.

Interaction with Children

This website may offer educational content to children under 13 years old. No personally identifiable information is collected from them unless it is voluntarily submitted as a request for information or services. The information collected is used to respond to user inquiries or to provide services requested by our users.