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YOUR
PRIVACY
ValueMasters
will not, under any circumstances, license, sell, or give away any
information you submit to us. It is used exclusively by us and is
not shared with any third party. We appreciate your trust in us,
and we value your opinions and loyalty. If you have any questions
or comments on our privacy policy or general comments about the
site, please let us know using the 'contact us' link provided at
the bottom of our site pages.
When you register
with ValueMasters by entering any of our prize drawings or by making
a purchase, you can elect to have e-mail notifications sent to you
regarding special offers, new products and other valuable ValueMasters
news. If you elect to receive these e-mails and then wish to be
removed from the list, simply send us an e-mail with 'REMOVE' in
the subject line and you will promptly be removed from our mailing
list.
Use of Information
When you register, ValueMasters requires certain information. (Registration
does not require any credit card information. Credit card information
is only needed if you make a purchase). We use the information to
create a personal profile so we can tailor special offers based
on your previous purchasing patterns. This information allows us
to better understand our customers. It also allows us to improve
your online experience, tailor the site to your specific interests,
and speed up your transactions.
ValueMasters
may share non-personal aggregate or summary information regarding
its customers with partners or third parties, but ValueMasters will
not share any information at the individual customer level including
name, address and credit card information.
Cookies
ValueMasters uses a feature of your Internet Browser called a 'cookie'
to help us personalize the shopping experience for you. If you are
unsure of what a cookie is or how they work, see our cookie information.
Secure Shopping
When you place orders or access your account information, you access
the use of a secure server. The secure server software (SSL) encrypts
all the information you input, including your name, address, and
credit card information, before it is sent over the Internet to
ValueMasters.
Every credit
card transaction placed with ValueMasters is secure. We have never
had a transaction which resulted in any type of credit card fraud
or financial penalty to a customer. ValueMasters maintains a record
of your transaction in the Order History section or our the website,
which is only accessible by ValueMasters. No record of your credit
card number is maintained in your Order History or anywhere else
on ValueMasters's commerce system or servers.
Under the Fair
Credit Billing Act, your bank can not hold you liable for more than
$50.00 of unauthorized charges made to your account. If your bank
does hold you liable for any of this $50.00, ValueMasters will cover
the entire liability for you, up to the full $50.00. ValueMasters
will only cover this liability if the unauthorized charges resulted
through no fault of your own from purchases made at ValueMasters.com
while using the secure server.
In the event
of unauthorized use of your credit card, you must notify your credit
card provider in accordance with its reporting rules and procedures.
ValueMasters
is a member of the Better Business Bureau OnLine and has met all
its standards.
What is a Cookie?
This explanation of cookies was provided by: Netscape.
What are
cookies?
Cookies help Web sites maintain user states. This means that Web
sites can "remember" information about users to facilitate
their preferences for a particular site, transparent user passwords,
and so forth. More specifically, cookies allow Web sites (servers)
to deliver simple data to a client (user); request that the client
store the
information; and, in certain circumstances, return the information
to the Web site.
How do cookies
work?
Cookies are small data structures delivered by a Web site to a Web
client. The Web site may deliver one or more cookies to the client.
The client stores cookie data in one or more flat files on its local
hard drive. In certain cases (determined by the data in the cookie
itself), the client returns the cookie to the server that originally
delivered it.
Why are
cookies useful?
Cookies allow Web sites to maintain information on a particular
user across HTTP connections. The current HTTP protocol is stateless,
meaning that the server does not store any information about a particular
HTTP transaction; each connection is "fresh" and has no
knowledge of any other HTTP transaction. "State" information
is information about a communication between a user and a server,
similar in many ways to frequent flyer profiles or option settings
in desktop software. (For example, a preference for aisle or window
seats is cookie-like information that a frequent-flyer program might
store about one of its customers.) In some cases it is useful to
maintain state information about the user across HTTP transactions.
What kind
of client-side information can Web servers store?
User information may be stored in the cookie or in a database on
the Web site. This information may be provided by either the user
or the Web site provider. Some scenarios include the following:
Alice is shopping
at a particular Web site that uses a shopping cart metaphor. She
puts items into a shopping cart by clicking a link or an "Add
to Shopping Cart" button. Cookies can be used to store or reference
information on the contents of Alice's shopping cart so that she
can conveniently purchase a cart full of items rather than one item
at
a time.
Bob clicks
around a Web site that allows users to view articles for a small
charge. Cookies can be used to store or reference information about
which articles he has viewed (that is, a list of URLs) so that he
can pay for them all at once rather than each time he downloads
an article.
Carl fills
out a Web form with his name, address, and other information. Cookies
can be used to store or reference this information so that the next
time Carl visits the site, the information is automatically uploaded
and he doesn't have to provide it again. If the form contains sensitive
information such as a credit card number or a mailing address, the
cookies can be delivered over Secure Sockets Layer, which encrypts
the information as it travels between the client and server.
Don logs in
to a Web site that requires a user name and password. When Don's
user name and password pair is successfully verified, the server
passes down a cookie that functions as a "guest, pass"
allowing him access to certain areas of the Web site. After a set
time period, perhaps half an hour or a day, the guest pass expires
and Don must log in again.
Each of these
examples illustrates one of two things: Either the server provides
information (as in the last example) or the user provides information
by taking some action, such as clicking a link or button or filling
out a form.
Can cookies
read information from a user's hard drive?
No. Cookies can only store data that is provided by the server or
generated by an explicit user action.
Can cookies
be used to gather sensitive information, such as a user's email
address?
Cookies can be used to store any information that the user volunteers.
They cannot be used to gather sensitive information such as the
fields in a Netscape preference file. In this case, however, the
same information can just as easily (and with potentially more objectionable
privacy concerns) be stored on the server by using a simple server-side
application that stores user information in a database. Cookies
are passive files that are delivered to the client, stored on the
client's hard drive, and returned in certain situations to the same
server that provided the information in the first place.
Where are
cookies stored?
Cookie data is stored unencrypted on the user's hard drive (although
during actual communication it is stored in memory). The filename
is different for each platform. For example, on Windows machines,
cookie data is stored in a file called COOKIE.TXT.
Can programmers
save client state information without cookies?
Yes. Client state information can be stored in several ways. For
example, server administrators and programmers can create a database
application that tracks and stores data they would otherwise have
managed with cookies. Cookies are simply a programming convenience.
How long
do cookies last?
A Web site may set an expiration date for a cookie it delivers.
If no expiration date is specified, the cookie is deleted when the
user quits Netscape Navigator.
Can malicious
sites read cookie information used by another site?
Cookies are designed to be read only by the site that provides them,
not by other sites.
Can cookies
be encrypted?
While the cookie file itself is unencrypted on the user's computer,
it can be encrypted between the user's computer and a Web site.
Programmers can require that cookies be delivered and received only
in the context of a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) session. The SSL
session handles the actual encryption of cookie data.
Does every
browser implement cookies in the same way?
Not necessarily. Because the use of cookies is just becoming an
official standard, there may be some subtle differences that do
not affect how they work. For instance, Netscape uses a single file
for all cookies, while another company uses a folder with a separate
file for each cookie.
Are cookies
being presented for standardization to a standards body?
Yes. The State Management subworking group of the Internet Engineering
Task Force's HTTP Working Group is currently working on creating
a formal Internet draft for a cookie specification. In Communicator
4.0, Netscape has added the portion of the IETF specification that
provides users with the ability to reject cookies that are not sent
to the originating server. This enables users concerned with privacy
to reject the placement of cookies by advertisers that track users
on a variety of sites and send the information back to their corporate
server.
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