Privacy Policy

The following is Brookes Publishing’s privacy policy and appears on www.brookespublishing.com and all Brookes web sites:

This privacy statement discloses the privacy practices for www.brookespublishing.com. Brookes Publishing Co. respects the privacy of our customers, our website visitors, and our newsletter subscribers. Anyone can visit our website without revealing his or her name or personal information, and we do not use any devices that detect personally identifying information about the visitors to our site.

This website agrees to notify you of

1. What personally identifiable information of yours or third party personal identification is collected from you through the website
2. The organization collecting the information
3. How the information is used
4. With whom the information may be shared
5. What choices are available to you regarding collection, use, and distribution of the information
6. The kind of security procedures that are in place to protect the loss, misuse, or alteration of information under Brookes Publishing Co.’s control, and
7. How you can correct any inaccuracies in the information.

If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact us by email (webmaster@brookespublishing.com) or postal mail (Brookes Publishing, P.O. Box 10624, Baltimore, MD 21285).

Collecting and Using Information

All of the personal information that we collect on this site is volunteered by our visitors, such as through our site forms or our online order form. Brookes Publishing Co. is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We will not sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement.

Brookes Publishing Co. collects information from our website’s visitors at several different points on our site.

Email Lists

Subscriptions to Brookes’s emailing lists are voluntary, and anyone may subscribe at at any time. If you purchase a product from us, you may be emailed regarding new products or special offers. If you supply us with your email address under other circumstances (such as one of our site question or request forms), then you will not be added to any of our email lists unless you explicitly request to be added. Furthermore, we do not share or sell email addresses under any circumstances. If your email address should change you may update it through your online account or by contacting customer service at 1-800-638-3775. If you should receive unwanted email communication from us, then please follow the directions for unsubscribing included in the email you received, or email webmaster@brookespublishing.com. We will promptly update our records and, if requested, remove your email address from our lists.

Postal Mailing Lists

Once you place an order with Brookes, online or otherwise, you likely will receive catalogs by postal mail from us throughout the year. On rare occasions, we share small segments of our list of customers with related publishers and nonprofit organizations.

If you wish to be removed from our postal mailing list, then please email us; call toll-free 1-800-638-3775; fax to 410-337-8539; or write to Brookes Publishing Co., P.O. Box 10624, Baltimore, MD 21285-0624, Attention: Customer Service. We will be happy to remove you from any list that we generate from our customer records, but please be aware that we may not be able to remove your name from lists that we purchase from outside vendors—although we will make every effort to make your name inactive if you so request.

Feedback

Visitors to our site can send us feedback by emailing webmaster@brookespublishing.com. Email submitted to webmaster@brookespublishing.com or Customer Service contains the email address of the sender. If a user requests a response, then the email address (or other means of communication) is used only for purposes directly related to the response, and no personally identifiable information about the sender is stored or retained in our database.

Orders and Exam/Desk or Review Copy Requests

If you would like to place an order or request an exam/adoption copy from Brookes, then we require information necessary to process the order or request, including contact information (name, organization, shipping address, telephone/fax number) and, if making a purchase, financial information (credit card number, expiration date). This information is used for billing purposes and to fill customers’ orders or requests. Some additional information required on exam/adoption request forms is used to qualify requesters or to collect aggregate information about how our products are used.

Once you place an order with Brookes, you may receive email related to your order (e.g., confirmation), or we may contact you if we have trouble processing your request. Customers who supply their email addresses during the ordering process will be added to our email lists only if they opt to do so at that time.

In addition, once you place an order with Brookes, online or otherwise, you likely will receive catalog mailings (by postal mail) from us throughout the year. On rare occasions, we share small segments of our list of customers with related publishers and nonprofit organizations. If you wish to be removed from any of our mailing lists (postal or email), then please email Customer Service; call toll-free 1-800-638-3775; fax to 410-337-8539; or write to Brookes Publishing Co., P.O. Box 10624, Baltimore, MD 21285-0624, Attention: Customer Service.

We will be happy to remove you from any emailing or postal mailing list that we generate from our customer records, but please be aware that we may not be able to remove your name from lists that we purchase from outside vendors—although we will make every effort to make your name inactive if you so request.

Permission to Reuse or Reprint Our Material

Website visitors who wish to request permission to reuse or reprint Brookes material may do so through our online permission request form. On this form, a user must provide contact information (name, organization, shipping address, telephone/fax number) and detailed information about how the material will be reused. Requests for permission to reuse or reprint our materials go through a detailed review process, and contact information may be retained for the life of the product, or longer.

Cookies

A cookie is a small piece of information deposited by a website and stored by your web browser on your computer’s hard drive. Our shopping cart uses a cookie to assign shoppers a simple shopping cart ID, which allows them to pick up items and add them to their carts. The cookie is temporary and is automatically deleted from your hard drive when you close your browser. If you choose not to accept cookies, you won’t be able to use our shopping cart, but you will be able to access all of other the features available on our website. (To learn more about cookies, visit http://www.pcwebopedia.com/TERM/c/cookie.html.)

Log Files and IP Addresses

In our website’s log files, we collect anonymous data such as IP addresses, browser types, referring pages, pages visited, and time spent on our site. IP addresses are used to generate temporary shopping cart IDs to facilitate the shopping process and are subsequently discarded. IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information. All other anonymous data is used only in aggregate for internal review to improve the content of our website.

Third-party Vendors

Brookes enlists the services of an order fulfillment center to ship orders, and a bank processes orders made by credit card. These companies do not retain, share, store, or use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes. We also use a third-party mailing house to send catalogs and other postal mail to current and potential customers. The mailing house is bonded, which means that it cannot and does not share, store, sell, or use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes.

Linking to Other Sites

This website contains links to other sites. Please be aware that Brookes Publishing Co. is not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of every website that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by Brookes Publishing Co.

Surveys and Contests

From time to time, our website and our email newsletters request information from users via surveys. Participation in these surveys is completely voluntary, and the user therefore has a choice whether to disclose any information. Information requests may include contact information (e.g., name, address) and/or demographic information (e.g., ZIP code, affiliation, job title). Survey information will be used to monitor or improve the use and user satisfaction of this site or to gather aggregate data about our customers.

From time to time, we offer opportunities to participate in contests. Participation in these contests is completely voluntary, and the entrant therefore has a choice whether to disclose any information. Information requests may include contact information (e.g., name, address) and/or demographic information (e.g., ZIP code, affiliation, job title). Contest rules will disclose how the information will be used. If your personal information will be used in a way different from that stated in the privacy statement at the time, then you will have the choice to opt out. And, as stated in each contest’s rules, winners’ names will be posted to the website or in other promotional materials.
Referral Service

If you elect to use our referral service (e.g., “email a colleague about this book”) to inform a friend about our site, we ask you for your name and email address and your friend’s email address. Brookes will automatically send the friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site, and, if you request one, you will receive a single email confirming your request. Brookes does not store either your information or your friend’s information once these emails have been sent.

Security

This website takes every precaution to protect our users’ information. When users submit sensitive information via the website, their information is protected both online and offline.

When you place an order online, all of the information that you submit—including your credit card number, name, address, contact information, and even the list of books you’ve chosen to purchase—is encrypted by a secure server using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which is the industry standard security protocol. During the encryption process, the information is scrambled into small bits of code that cannot be read as they are transmitted to us over the Internet. Once we receive the encrypted information, Brookes uses a private, one-of-a-kind key to decode your order.

Once we receive your order, all of your information—not just the sensitive information mentioned above—is restricted in our offices. Only employees who need the information to perform a specific job (e.g., our customer service representatives) are granted access to personally identifiable information. Our databases and customer service systems are protected by employee-specific passwords, and the servers on which we store customer information are kept in a secure environment. Furthermore, all employees are kept up-to-date on our security and privacy practices. Each year, as well as any time policies are added or modified, our employees are notified and/or reminded about the importance we place on privacy and what they can do to ensure that our customers’ information is protected.

If you have any questions about the security at our website, you can send an email to webmaster@brookespublishing.com.

Correcting/Updating Personal Information

If your personally identifiable information changes (e.g., ZIP code), or if you no longer desire our services, then we provide a way to correct, update, or remove the personal data provided to us. To make changes to your personal data, you may use the account feature on the website or contact Customer Service; call toll-free 1-800-638-3775; fax to 410-337-8539; or write to Brookes Publishing Co., P.O. Box 10624, Baltimore, MD 21285-0624, Attention: Customer Service.

Opt-out

Our users and customers are given the opportunity to opt-out of having their information used for purposes not directly related to our site.

Users who no longer wish to receive our newsletters or other promotional materials may opt-out of receiving these communications. If your email address should change, or if you should receive unwanted email communication or other promotional materials from us, then please email webmaster@brookespublishing.com, or follow the directions for unsubscribing included in the email you received. We will promptly update our records and, if requested, remove your address from our emailing lists.

As discussed in the section pertaining to orders, we will be happy to remove you from any online or offline mailing list that we generate from our customer records, but please be aware that we may not be able to remove your name from mailing lists that we purchase from outside vendors—although we will make every effort to make your name inactive if you so request.

Notifying Users of Changes

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on our homepage so that our users and customers are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If at any point we decide to use personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time it was collected, then we will prominently notify customers on our emailing lists of the change as well post the change on our website to give all customers the opportunity to opt-out of having their information used in this different manner.

Legal Disclaimer

Though we make every effort to preserve user privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law wherein we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with an appropriate law enforcement investigation, current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on our website.

Questions?

Thank you for taking the time to read our privacy policy. We take your privacy seriously, so please let us know if you have any questions or comments regarding our website or this policy. Please direct questions to our webmaster at webmaster@brookespublishing.com.