The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) operates this Website and is committed to protecting the privacy of individual visitors. We will never post or comment on personal medical information. We maintain safeguards to store and secure information we have about site visitors. The safeguards may be physical, electronic or procedural. We reserve the right to make changes to our site, policies, and conditions of use at any time. By visiting familyhealthadvocate.org, you accept these conditions.

What information do we collect?
It is the AAFP's general policy to collect only personal information that the visitor knowingly chooses to provide. The following information is collected from all visitors and is recorded in a log file:

• Time and date of the visit
• The Internet address of the computer
• The browser and operating system used
• The page that is viewed
• The previous page that was visited

We do not collect any personally identifying information from visitors who are browsing the public areas of the site other than the data mentioned above. We do not review the use of the site by individual users unless this information will help us troubleshoot an individual user's problems. We also reserve the right to review personally identifying information if a user's account is suspected of being associated with any of the following:

• Attempts to violate site security
• Activity that degrades the performance of the site
• Activity that might be related to copyright violations

In addition, familyhealthadvocate.org offers visitors the opportunity to sign up for email newsletters and periodic updates. To receive these emails, you will be asked to provide basic contact information. (If at any time you want to stop receiving these emails, you can easily unsubscribe).

How is the data used?
Any personally identifiable information you provide, including your email address, will be kept confidential and will not be sold.

Email messages sent to familyhealthadvocate.org are read by the familyhealthadvocate.org staff. After these emails are reviewed, they are routinely deleted. They are not archived or otherwise stored.

The AAFP may on occasion be required by law or emergency circumstances to disclose data collected from familyhealthadvocate.org. In such situations, the AAFP may release personal information to third parties to comply with valid legal requirements such as a law, regulation, search warrant, subpoena or court order. In the event that we are legally required to disclose your personal information to a third party, you will be notified unless doing so would violate the law or court order.

How are cookies used?
Cookies are a technology used to identify a user as the user moves through a site. The user's browser allows the site to place some information on the user's hard drive that identifies the computer utilized. Two types of cookies are commonly used. A session cookie is a temporary file stored in memory on the user's computer drive whenever a site is accessed and is terminated by closing the browser. A persistent cookie is a file stored on the user's hard drive that may be deleted manually by the user or expired by the web server.

Session cookies and persistent cookies are used on some areas of familyhealthadvocate.org to provide greater functionality. The information generated from these cookies is also used to help determine which services are most important and guide editorial decisions.

Users who choose to forego the functionality offered by cookies have the option to disable cookies either by indicating when asked that they do not wish to have a cookie created or by disabling the cookie function in their browser's preferences.