Privacy Statement
Texas A&M Information Technology respects your privacy and is committed to ensuring that any personal or confidential information that is collected is kept accurate and secure from unauthorized access. The purpose of this privacy statement is to inform you of what information we collect, how we use it, how we protect it, when we can release it, and how you are entitled to access it. Please note that our website contains links to various external websites, and Texas A&M IT is not responsible for the privacy and security practices of those websites.
Information Collection, Use and Release
When you visit our website, we do not collect personal information about you. In particular, we do not use "cookies" to collect or store personal information. Any personal information that you provide via email or through other online means will be used only for purposes necessary to serve your needs, such as responding to an inquiry or other request for information. This may involve redirecting your inquiry or comment to another person or department better suited to meeting your needs.
Our site uses server logs to collect information concerning your internet connection and general information about your visit to our website. This information may be used to analyze trends; to create summary statistics for the purpose of determining technical design specifications; and to identify system performance or problem areas.
This means we sometimes acquire, record, and analyze portions of the data that is entered into, stored on, and/or transmitted through this site by you. This information is only released – when legally required – to help law enforcement investigations, legal proceedings or internal investigations of Texas A&M rule and regulation violations. These groups would use the information to track the electronic interactions back to the source computer(s) or account(s).
Cookies
A cookie file contains unique information that a website can use to track such things as passwords, pages you have visited, the date you last looked at a specific page, and to identify your session at a particular website. We do not use cookies to track or collect any information that could personally identify individual visitors.
Server Log Information
The following information in our server logs:
- User/client hostname - The hostname (or IP address if DNS is disabled) of the user/client requesting access
- HTTP header, "user agent" - The user-agent information includes the type of browser, its version, and the operating system on which it is running
- HTTP header, "referrer" - The referrer specifies the page from which the client accessed the current page
- System date - The date and time of the user/client request
- Full request - The exact request the user/client made
- Status - The status code the server returned to the user/client
- Content length - The content length, in bytes, of the document sent to the user/client
- Method - The request method used
- Universal Resource Identifier (URI) - The location of a resource on the server
- Query string of the URI - Anything after the question mark in a URI
- Protocol - The transport protocol and version used
Security
We employ extensive security measures consistent with the Texas Administrative Code (TAC) "Information Security Standards" and Texas A&M University Rules and Standard Administrative Procedures to protect against unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction of information under our control, as well as the loss, misuse, or alteration of our web sites and/or associated electronic information resources. The information resources that support our web sites undergo an annual information security risk assessment via the Information Security Awareness Assessment and Compliance (ISAAC) system. The ISAAC system assesses the security posture of information systems and measures compliance with information security standards.
Information Access
Except for education records governed by FERPA, all information collected from this website, including the summary server log information, emails sent to the website, and information collected from web-based forms, may be subject to the Texas Public Information Act. This means that while TAMU does not actively share information, in some cases may be compelled by law to release information gathered from its web servers.
The Texas Public Information Act, with a few exceptions, gives you the right to be informed about the information that this website collects about you. It also gives you the right to request a copy of that information, and to have the university correct any of that information that is wrong. You may request to receive and review any of that information, or request corrections to it, by contacting the TAMU Public Information Officer or the TAMU Office of Open Records, 1181 TAMU, College Station, Texas, 77843-1181, at 979-862-7777.
Questions
If you have any questions about the practices of this site or your use of this website, please contact Texas A&M IT.
Did you know?
- In the United States, about 55 million people have a disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- About 1 in 5 Americans have some kind of disability (src: 2010 U.S. Census).
- The percentage of people affected by disabilities is growing as our population ages.
- Two popular, free screen readers are VoiceOver (Mac OS and iOS) and NVDA (Win).
- Good accessibility practices can improve the search ranking of your website.
- Form fields without labels can cause problems for some assistive technology users.
- Low color contrast makes content difficult to see, especially for users with low vision.
- Documents linked on a website need to be accessible too (e.g., PDF and Word files).
- Audio content, like podcasts, need transcripts for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Online videos should be captioned for deaf or hard of hearing users.
- Using HTML tags correctly is very important for accessibility.
- Descriptive link text helps make a website more accessible. Avoid using "Click here" or "Read more."
- A "screen reader" is an application that reads content aloud to a user.
- There is no "alt tag" in HTML. "Alt" is an attribute used with the img tag.
- HTML uses the alt attribute to provide a text description of an image.
- Alt text should describe an image, if the purpose of the image is to convey information.
- If an image is a link, the alt text for the image should explain where the link goes.
- If an image is only being used for decoration, the alt text should be null (i.e., alt="").
- If a table has headers, using header tags (<th>) will make the table more accessible.
- An accessible website is one that can be navigated and understood by everyone.