Question: What is a "cookie"?

Answer: A "cookie" is a small piece of information passed between a Web site (such as ours) and the Web browser on your computer. Written as a simple text file, a cookie is useful because it helps your browser remember specific information that the Web server can later retrieve. All the latest browsers accept cookies as normal procedure.

For enhanced security, we use cookies to temporarily store your authentication data. This means that, with cookies enabled, you don't need to log in every time you click to a new page anywhere within our site. Therefore your browser must be set to accept cookies before you can take advantage of our services. If you received this message, it's because your browser is currently set to not accept cookies. To proceed within our site, you must set your browser to accept cookies.

Note: We do not store any of your personal information in the cookie or on your computer.

Question: Tell me more: Why are cookies needed?

Answer: Cookies are important to our site, and to most other commercial sites on the Web, for several reasons. Cookies help us make sure that you get the information relevant to choices you make while visiting a Web site. For example, online stores use cookies to keep track of items you add to your "shopping cart" while you browse. The cookie in your browser becomes a list of items selected, so when you're finished shopping you can then pay for all the items at once instead of one at a time. Because the list is kept on your browser instead of on the store's Web server, there's no chance of your "shopping cart" getting lost or erased at the server -- even if thousands of people are using the store's server at the same time you are.

You can think of our cookie as a "pass key" or "ID badge" that allows you to browse our site without having to manually identify yourself at every "door."

Question: Does accepting a cookie put me at risk?

Answer: Contrary to what you might have heard from less reliable sources, no. The only information that can be stored in a cookie is information that you provide or the choices you make while visiting a Web site. A Web site cannot find your email name or other information unless you deliberately give that information by typing it directly into the Web site. Allowing a Web site to create a cookie does not give that site access to the rest of your computer, and in almost all cases only the site that created the cookie can read it.

The only possible risk -- and it's very small -- involves privacy issues that could arise if one site provides a cookie that can be read by another site. We have already eliminated that possibility. Our cookies are readable ONLY by our site. The information you provide to us does not go anywhere else. So it is always safe for you to accept our cookies.

Question: What information is in our cookies?

Answer: The only information stored in our cookies is the identification of our Web site. As you click from page to page within our site, this identification data tells our server that you have already logged in to our site and don't need to log in again during this session visit. No other information is stored in our cookie.

Question: How long do cookies last?

Answer: Our cookies "expire" after either one of two things happen:

• You leave ("log off" or "exit") our site.
• 20 minutes pass with no activity from you. After 20 minutes, the site and the cookie assume that you are no longer present, so you are automatically logged off of the site. You will have to log in again to continue.

In each case, the cookie remains in your computer's memory. Next time you visit our site, the cookie contains just enough information to tell us that you have visited here before. This helps to authenticate your identity, enhancing both your security and ours.

Question: What cookies CANNOT do

Answer: 

• A cookie cannot give a Web server or programmer any private information about you or the contents of your computer. The only way that any private information could be in your cookie file is if you personally gave that information to a Web server in the first place and it decided to put that information into your cookie for some reason.
• Almost all cookies (including ours) cannot be passed from one server to another. For example, if you leave our site and then move to a completely different site, there is no possible way for our cookie to communicate with any server or person associated with the other site. Each cookie is marked with information about the specific Web server it is for.
• A cookie cannot spread a computer virus to your or any other computer.