When you access The Brunching Shuttlecocks Web Site, you leave electronic traces of your passing: on our computer, on your computer, and quite possibly on a computer or computers between yours and ours. This is true of the entire Web, and most of the non-Web Internet. This document addresses what we do and don't do with the information we get.

The major evidence of your visit is in the form of an access log, a text file that records certain facts about your visit, such as what page you looked at, what kind of browser you were using, and in some cases what page you came from to get here. This is standard information provided by your browser and it is collected by nearly every Web site out there, even the Pope's. This information doesn't contain your address, your credit card number, the number of children you have or any similar personal information. In other words, we can't use this information to say "Hey, Mildred Buttonwillow of Topeka, Illinois visited us last Tuesday."

We sometimes share our access logs with other people, because they're a standard way of proving how much traffic a site gets. We don't make them publicly available, though, and we won't share them with anyone who we believe might try to use them to track down individual people, even though that would be nearly impossible to do without a series of subpoenas and a lot of luck.

We sometimes ask for a name and e-mail address for contests and interactive toys. We do not share your e-mail address with anyone. We don't use it ourselves, except to alert winners or tell people about problems with the contest. We want to make that very clear. We will not share your e-mail address or add you to any mailing list. We generally announce winners by name, though, and we may display all entries with names, so if that makes you uncomfortable, use a pseudonym.

At times, we may run a voluntary demographic survey. This will not be done on brunching.com itself, but rather it will have a banner that will take you off-site for the survey. We and our ad networks use this information in aggregate form and share it, in aggregate form only, with potential advertisers. Identifying information will not be asked for, and no attempt will be made to contact you personally.

We do have a single mailing list which we use to send out Self-Made Critic reviews. We never add people to this unless they explicitly tell us to. At this point the list does not contain advertising. If we do add advertising to the mailing at some point, we will send out an announcement first so that people can choose to leave the list.

If you send mail to comments@brunching.com, we assume you are permitting your letter to be published with your name, but without your e-mail address. If you do not wish your letter to be published, send it to editor@brunching.com instead, or specify in the letter that it is not for publication. We reserve the right to edit letters for brevity, clarity, or grammar and spelling. We also reserve the right to leave all your spelling mistakes as-is to make you look dumb.

Our Web site uses cookies, but they are not used to store personal information about users, they will not be shared with anyone else, and they will not be used to contact you.

Our advertisements are served by an outside agency. Even though you are looking at our pages, you are looking at their images, and they collect their own logs and may serve their own cookies. They have their own privacy policies which you may want to review.

The Brunching Shuttlecocks works with a third party that serves ads to this site. To find out more about how Flycast manages the privacy of information in conjunction with serving ads on this site, please go to http://www.flycast.com/about_us/about-privacy.html.

We may choose to run ads from other networks with no notice. Keep in mind that any site you go to as a result of clicking on an ad banner will have its own separate privacy policy or lack of same.

Our merchandise sales are handled by CCNow. To order a shirt you must leave our site and go to theirs. They have their own separate security and privacy policies.

Our site does not use the security features of your browser, so we can't guarantee the security of any information transferred between your computer and ours. The Internet is not inherently a very secure place, and we strongly recommend that you do not send any sensitive information, such as your credit card or social security number, over the Internet unless you are sending it to a secure site.