This section of the page explains how the U.S. Agency for International Development will handle information we learn about you from your visit to our web site. The information we receive depends upon what you do when visiting our site.

If you visit our site to read or download information, such as country information or information about one of our projects:

We collect and store only the following information about you: the name of the domain from which you access the Internet (for example, aol.com, if you are connecting from an America Online account, or iowa.edu if you are connecting from the University of Iowa's domain); the date and time you access our site, the Internet address of the web site from which you linked directly to our site; and what information you view while you visit our web site.

We use the information we collect to measure the number of visitors to the different sections of our site, find out what information is the most viewed, and to help us make our web site more useful to visitors. This gathering and storing of information is separate from the activity described as monitoring in our Security Notice.

The information gathered is used for two purposes: site management and, in the case of suspected unauthorized activity, for law enforcement and possible criminal prosecution.

If you identify yourself by sending us a comment using our contact page or an E-mail:

You also may decide to send us personally-identifying information, for example, in an electronic mail message asking a question or providing us with a comment or suggestion. We use personally-identifying information to respond to your comment or suggestion, and to count the number of people sending us comments. In certain instances, your comment or suggestion may be forwarded to other U.S. government agencies or departments if they are in the best position to respond to your message.

We want to be very clear: We will not obtain personally-identifying information about you when you visit our site, unless you choose to provide such information to us.

Cookies and other information stored on your computer

In general, this site does NOT use the "cookies" that some Web sites use to gather and store information about your visits to their sites.

Cookies are essentially tokens of information, such as preferences and passwords, which some Web servers collect from you when you access them. That data is stored on your hard drive-not on the Web site's server. Whenever you visit a "cookie" site, the server looks for its cookie on your hard drive and, if found, then reads the information it stored there. Cookies generally are stored in your browser's directory or folder in a file named cookie.txt (MagicCookie on a Macintosh).

Some of the links on the USAID web site point to non-USAID sites which may place cookies on your computer.

If you want to avoid such cookies, we encourage you to set your browser to notify you when cookies are being set and allow you to reject them. Your system's help files will explain how to do this.