Arkansas.Net makes a distinction between Security and Privacy, these definitions and guidelines will help you understand our privacy and security policies.

Privacy
refers to information we gather about you, and the use we make of it in the operation of our business.

Security
involves making sure that any sensitive information you may provide to Arkansas.Net is done in a safe and secure manner. Our sites have security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. If you don't find your concern addressed here, or just want to talk to us, feel free to contact us by e-mail.

Privacy Policies

Arkansas.Net is sensitive to protecting the private information that our customers and visitors provide to us. The trust and loyalty of our customers is very important to us and we hope this policy will demonstrate our commitment to making sure your Internet experience with Arkansas.Net is positive. Our Privacy Policy describes how Arkansas.Net treats information received about you when you become a customer and when you use Arkansas.Net to explore the World Wide Web. This policy is organized into the following individual sections:

Customer Information
Customer Surveys
Web Site Use and Navigation Information
Cookies
Changes to Arkansas.Net's Privacy Policy
Questions, Comments or Concerns
Children's' Guidelines

Please read each Privacy Policy section carefully.

Also, please remember that no computer system should be considered safe from intrusion. E-mail may pass through many computer systems, and should not be considered a secure means of communication unless encrypted. Even then, information is only as secure as the encryption method. Therefore, although we take many precautions to protect our system and our servers, however, we cannot guarantee the security of any data on any server, including "secure servers."

Customer Information

Arkansas.Net Customer information is information such as your name, address, telephone number, and billing information, that identifies a particular individual or business. Arkansas.Net collects and stores customer information in the following ways:

As part of a customer's registration for Arkansas.Net's services, customers must select a user name, provide us with contact information including name, address, telephone number(s), company name (if applicable), and credit card, banking or other billing information. Upon account creation we assign you a password and account ID that you will need in order to actually utilize Arkansas.Net's service. We retain this information in our customer databases.

How We Use Customer Information

The customer information that we collect during the registration process is or may be used: (1) Name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address (if you have one) Credit card number (only if you wish to activate service), for billing purposes; (2) To examine system accounting logs, user mailboxes and other company records to resolve e-mail and other system errors or problems; (3) To make sure that only Arkansas.Net customers are able to access certain member-only services.

This information is kept on limited access computers and is only available to those employees who have a need to know.

We provide some information to companies that we use to perform certain functions for us -- for example, a credit card processing company for billing that communicates with the Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express credit card companies. This information is transmitted via a private and dedicated point to point link between our billing computers and our credit card processing company and no information is transmitted across the Internet. Address information is given to our fulfillment company that sends out our commercial paper billings and various Arkansas.Net direct mail programs. These companies are authorized to use this information only for the express purpose of completing our postal and mailing request. They are not authorized to release this information to other third parties. Occasionally, we use our customer database to distribute Arkansas.Net newsletters or important notices to our customers. Arkansas.Net may also use customer information to enforce our Appropriate Use Policy, but only to the extent necessary. Arkansas.Net will share customer information with governmental authorities when legally required to do so, and may cooperate with these authorities investigating claims of illegal activity such as (but not limited to) hacking, the illegal transfer or use of copyrighted material, or postings or e-mail containing threats of violence.

Except under the limited circumstances described above, we do not disclose individual customer information to any third parties.

Changes to Your Customer Information

Arkansas.Net has enabled you as the end user the ability to review and to update or correct as needed and necessary your account information. From this link you will be able to update all information relating to your account as needed. This link will transfer you to the account management section of the Arkansas.Net web site. Our sites give users options for changing and modifying information previously provided.

http://www.arkansas.net

Customer Surveys

Something new to Arkansas.Net is our customer surveys. These surveys allow Arkansas.Net to make broad determinations about our customers. They allow us to seek additional services that would be of benefit to our entire customer base. They help us understand what is important to you as we are reviewing new Internet products that may be of use to you. Your personal information and responses will remain strictly confidential, even if a third party conducts the survey.

Our sites may also record the USER IDs IP address, which helps us diagnose problems with our server and administer our Web site. Your IP address also is used to gather broad demographic information.

All information collected by Arkansas.Net for use outside of Arkansas.Net is viewed in aggregate, i.e., we combine all the information into statistical data that breaks down general categories of information by percentage: gender, age, education, etc. This information assists us in better understanding our customers as a group. The aggregated information may be shared with third parties, but it contains no individual specific customer information.

Web Site Use and Navigation Information

Each time a user visits our Web Site, our servers collect certain anonymous use and navigation information. This information is aggregated and anonymous. It tell us how our Web Site is used and navigated, including the number, frequency and duration of visits to each Web page.

Web Site use and navigation information that we collect may include the domain names of visitors who are not already Arkansas.Net customers (such as "www.user'sISP.com"), and of Arkansas.Net customers, but it does not otherwise contain individually identifiable information about any visitor to our Web Site.

For each visitor to our Web page, our Web server automatically recognizes the consumer's IP address/ Domain name combination.

We collect IP Address/ Domain Name combination of visitors to our Web page, the e-mail addresses of those who post messages to our bulletin board, the e-mail addresses of those who communicate with us via e-mail, the e-mail addresses of those who make postings to our chat areas, aggregate information on what pages consumers access or visit, user-specific information on what pages consumers access or visit and information volunteered by the consumer, such as survey information and/or personal information requested for site registrations, promotions, order fulfillment, etc.

The information we collect is used for internal review and may be used to improve the content of our overall Internet Site, to customize the content and/or layout of our page for each individual consumer, to notify consumers about updates to our Web site, and may be shared with other organizations to help them contact consumers for marketing purposes and/or used by us to contact consumers for marketing purposes.

By submitting your information to us, you are consenting to our use of it as described above. If you do not want to be contacted by us in the future, or if you do not want us to share the information we collect from you with other companies or organizations, please do not submit your data to us.

How We Use Web Site Use and Navigation Information

Like customer survey information, we use the anonymous, aggregated information to improve the content and navigation features of our Web Site. We also may use the anonymous, aggregated information to enable Arkansas.Net Partners or advertisers to evaluate whether to post advertising banners or other material on the Arkansas.Net Web Site.

Cookies

Like most web sites, Arkansas.Net makes use of browser "cookies". Cookies are files written to a user's hard disk and read by server programs to inform a Web site if the user has previously visited that site. We use cookies to continually enhance your Arkansas.Net experience, and may use them in the future to store customer preferences and choices.

Our Account Management Web pages use cookies to store and retrieve session identifiers that correspond to a secure database containing each customer's user name and password information. This is designed to facilitate access by customers to Arkansas.Net member services. Customers cannot access the Account Management Web pages unless they have a browser that supports these cookies. These cookies do not enable third parties to access any of your customer information.

Companies who advertise on our Web Site may also use cookie technology. We do not control the use of cookies by our advertisers.

Changes to Arkansas.Net's Privacy Policy

We may make changes to this policy from time to time. We will post changes to our Privacy Policy here, so be sure to check back periodically. We may also decide to notify our customers by e-mail of significant changes.

Questions, Comments or Concerns

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about our Privacy Policy you may contact us at legal@arkansas.net

Children's Guidelines

• We do not collect online contact information without prior parental consent or parental notification, which will include an opportunity for the parent to prevent use of the information and participation in the activity. Without prior parental consent, online information will only be used to respond directly to the child's request and will not be used for other purposes without prior parental consent.
  
• We do not collect personally identifiable offline contact information without prior parental consent.
• We do not distribute to third parties any personally identifiable information with out prior parental consent.
  
• We do not give the ability to publicly post or otherwise distribute personally identifiable contact information without prior parental consent.
• We do not entice by the prospect of a special game, prize or other activity, to divulge more information than is needed to participate in the activity.

Is my credit card safe?

We honestly think so. We wouldn't be accepting customers' information over the Web if we didn't. People do business with Arkansas.Net because of our superior network reliability and service. Our website is one aspect of that service, but we'd be doing ourselves and our customers a disservice by offering a means of interacting with us if we didn't live up to our standards.

Why do I hear so much about security on the Internet?

Several things conspire to make Internet security a newsworthy item. First, it's new, so people wonder, talk and write about it. Secondly, the Internet is "technology", so people find it interesting to discuss. And tend to be a little suspicious of it.

The Internet has always thrived on openness. It has been the "Internet way" for someone to release something, a piece of software, a networking specification, a security protocol, and then have lots of smart people try to find flaws in it, lending their ideas for making it better. It has proven to be a remarkably effective development process. But for people unfamiliar with it, to see each new release of a browser, for example, get pounded on and picked apart, can be rather disconcerting.

What's the worst thing that could happen?

In most U.S. states, you are liable for up to $50 of losses from credit card theft. Granted, the time and hassle involved in replacing the card is often far worse. But it's reassuring that if someone gets your credit card information (regardless of how) the down side is, shall we say, limited.

How do I know if a website is secure?

In order to be accurate, we're going to get a bit detailed here. When buying something on the Internet, there are three things to be sure of:

1. Data you send is strongly encrypted.
2. The site you're doing business with is the site you think it is.
3. The site you're doing business with processes your credit card and address information in a safe and responsible manner.

Points 1 and 2 are taken care of by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), the industry standard security protocol that the Arkansas.Net site uses to communicate with secure browsers like Netscape and Internet Explorer. When communicating with a secure server like ours, these browsers encrypt the information you send in a way that is extremely difficult for anyone else to decode. (You don't have to know whether your browser supports secure transactions. if it doesn't, you won't be able to login to the secure portions of our site.) We've included a visual representation below of what to look for in your browser window to see if you're viewing a site securely.

Many security experts say the most important thing is what happens once the merchant receives your order. At Arkansas.Net, we take several steps to keep things on our end as safe as possible. We do our billing operations on machines that are protected behind a dedicated Firewall, so there's no danger of people gaining access to them.

Which parts of the Arkansas.Net site are secure?

Most of the activity on our site involves the viewing of materials we've prepared and made accessible to everyone, so there's no need for these pages to be "secure". With a service information page or a page from "Our Home Page", for example, no security risk exists because there is no "information" being exchanged. Anyone can access the same pages by pointing their browser at http://www.arkansas.net.

The portion of the Arkansas.Net site we've made secure is, not surprisingly, the new account creation and account management areas.. This is where you make changes to account information and update billing information. The entire account creation and management process, from introduction to final confirmation, takes place in a secure environment.

There are several ways to confirm that you're in a secure area. All SSL capable browsers have a symbol to indicate secure mode. Specifically:

Browser	Symbol Location	Normal (Insecure) mode Symbol	Secure Mode Symbol
Netscape 1.2, 2.0 and 3.0	Lower left	Broken Key	Complete Key
Netscape Communicator (4.0-4.7)	Lower left	Open Lock	Closed Lock
Microsoft Internet Explorer	Lower Right	NONE	Closed Lock

You can also tell when you're in a secure area because the URL to the left of the colon changes from 'http' to 'https' to signify that a SSL protocol is being used to communicate with the server. (http = HyperText Transport Protocol; https = HTTP with SSL.) In most browsers you'll also see a solid blue line in the upper portion of the browser's window, another visual aid that lets you know you're browsing a secure area.

One additional note: some browsers give you a warning when you go from a secure area to a regular area. The aim is worthy enough to ensure that people know when they've left a secure server. But in practice, the message is often a bit startling, and makes it look like you've done something wrong even though you really haven't.

If you have any additional questions don't hesitate to contact us via e-mail.