Privacy Policy
January 1, 2022
The Federal Land Manager Environmental Database (FED) team is committed to protecting the privacy and security of visitors to this website. Outlined below is the
full FED online privacy policy. If you have questions or comments about this policy, please let us know.
When you visit the FED website, we may store some or all of the following pieces of information: the Internet address (IP address, e.g. 129.82.109.68) from which you access the website, the date and time of your visits (referenced to your incoming IP address), the Internet address of the website from which you linked to the website (if any), the keywords you searched before clicking a link to the website, and your browser and operating system. This information is used to measure the number of visitors to the various sections of our site and identify system performance or problem areas. We also use this information to help us develop the site, analyze patterns of usage, and to make the site more useful. This information is not used for associating search terms or patterns of site navigation with individual users. The website uses Google Analytics for tracking many of these statistics.
When you visit many websites, the web server generates small collections of information known as HTTP "cookies". Cookies are commonly used to recognize your computer (at a certain basic level) on future visits to the website.
The FED website uses per-session cookies to serve various technical purposes, like providing seamless navigation through some of the input-intensive or multi-step pages of the website in order to preserve your input from a previous step until all the steps have been completed. These cookies do not permanently record data and they are not stored on your computer’s hard drive. These session cookies are available only during an active browser session - when you close your browser, the session cookie disappears.
The FED website uses persistent cookies to implement the "Remember Me" functionality from the Login form. Persistent cookies (also called stored cookies) are stored on a user's hard drive until it expires (persistent cookies are set with expiration dates) or until the user deletes the cookie through his/her browser settings. This common use of cookies is done in order to allow you to visit the site within a certain time period without having to log in again. The only pieces of information stored in this cookie are the user's unique, arbitrary ID (a machine-generated integer value) and an expiration date. You can delete this persistent cookie at any time through your browser's settings, or you can prevent it from being stored in the first place by simply leaving the "Remember Me" box un-checked (the default) on the Login form.
You can choose to disable cookies altogether through your web browser's settings. Doing so will generally not affect your ability to search for, review, and retrieve data on the website, but may have some ramifications for some of the more complex input forms and multi-step "wizards".
Many of the resources on the website do not require registration or sign-in and thus do not require any personal information to be submitted. Many other resources (primarily data-intensive ones) do require sign-in, and thus certain basic information (such as your email address and organizational affiliation) must be entered during the registration process. For more information on why registration and sign-in is required for certain website resources, please see our "Why Do I Have to Sign In?" page. In short, the small amount of information we collect during the registration process is never resold or retransmitted to any other parties. The information you provide is encrypted in our database and the only portions that are ever used for internal project statistics are your organizational affiliation and the domain portion of your email address.
When registering for a website account, your username and email address can be as pseudonymous (i.e. "incognito") as you desire, but we do require that you provide a valid email address for the purposes of account validation and resetting your password when necessary. Your email address will not be published or shared anywhere and is generally only accessed by the website's account authentication system. Your password is automatically encrypted upon entry by a strong encryption algorithm and is stored in an encrypted field in a specialized, secure database that is used solely for the purposes of website sign-in and authentication.
Some of the information requested during the registration process is completely optional. However, we do encourage you to provide as much of this information as you are comfortable with, since it helps the FED team assess the general composition of website usage and provide useful traffic statistics to our sponsors and cooperators.
Regardless, none of your information is ever published, transmitted, or otherwise shared with any third party for any reason.
Any comments you provide through the website forums or other comment-enabled tools are by necessity considered public information, and may be shared internally between FED developers and collaborators as necessary to accurately communicate technical information for the purposes of managing the project and website. And, of course, in public forum threads your comments are visible to all other users of the website.
The FED enables you to post your opinion on discussion topics in our Forums. We encourage you to share your thoughts as they relate to the topic being discussed. Your posts will be publicly visible; therefore, the site utilizes a moderation policy to ensure that your posts are appropriate and not harmful to others. We review and moderate posts according to the policy below. The views expressed in posts should be understood to reflect the views of the author and not necessarily the views of the FED team.
We expect posts to be generally courteous and germane to the subject matter of this site. To that end, we have established the following policy.
We reserve the discretion not to display posts that:
- contain obscene, indecent, or profane language;
- contain threats, or defamatory statements;
- contain hate speech directed at race, color, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, ethnicity, age, religion, or disability;
- reveal your own or others’ sensitive/personal information
- contain information posted in violation of law, including libel, condoning or encouraging illegal activity, and revealing classified information, or posts that might affect the outcome of ongoing legal proceedings or
- promote or endorse services or products, including links to external commercial sites. (Note that non-commercial links that are relevant to the topic or another post are acceptable.)
- contain content that is off-topic, spam, or intended primarily to promote a link.
Do not submit copyrighted, trademarked or other proprietary material in any form unless you clearly indicate that you have permission to do so. By submitting your posts or other work, you grant the government and anyone viewing the discussion forum web site irrevocable permission to copy, distribute, make derivatives, display or perform the poster’s work publicly and free-of-charge.
To protect your privacy, please do not include information (e.g., an e-mail address or phone number) in the text of your comment that identifies you.
We recognize that the Internet is a 24/7 medium and your posts are welcome at any time. However, given the need to manage federal resources, we intend to review and moderate posts from 9 am – 5 pm Monday through Friday, except federal holidays. We intend to review and moderate posts submitted at other times as soon as possible on the next business day.
The FED website may contain links to websites created and maintained by other public and/or private organizations. These links are provided as a service to our users. When users follow a link to an outside website, it should be understood that they are leaving the FED website and are subsequently subject to the privacy and security policies of the owners/sponsors of the outside website(s). Where appropriate, external links may be indicated by the following icon:
The FED privacy policy may be revised or updated if practices change or if better ways to keep you informed are developed. You should refer to this page often for the latest information and a description of any changes. If changes are made to this policy, a new policy will be posted and announced on the website and the date at the top of this page will be updated. In addition, registered users may be notified by email of any changes to this policy.