Privacy and Security Statement
Purpose
The Institute for Scientific Computation (ISC) at Texas A&M respects your privacy and commits to ensure that any personal or confidential information collected is kept accurate and secure from unauthorized access. The ISC homepage does not collect personal information about visitors. However, the ISC may utilize third party analytics services that may use browser cookies to anonymously collect and track site usage information. These services analyze this information as an aggregate, and thus avoid collecting personally identifiable information.
Scope
This privacy and security statement applies to the ISC website and any email that you send to the ISC. The ISC is not responsible for the privacy and security practices of the content of websites external to the ISC, including other Texas A&M websites and external websites linked within the ISC website.
Information Gathered by the ISC
The ISC does not collect personal information when you visit the ISC website. However, the ISC does use personal information that you provide via email or through other online means only for purposes necessary to serve your needs, such as responding to an inquiry or other information request. This may require the ISC to redirect your inquiry or comment, including associated personal information, to another person or department better suited to meeting your needs.
The ISC does collect technical information concerning your internet connection and general information about your visit to the ISC website and stores this information in server logs. The ISC may use this information to analyze trends, create summary statistics for determining technical design specifications, and to identify system performance or problem areas.
In other words, the ISC sometimes acquires, records, and analyzes portions of data entered into, stored on, and/or transmitted through the ISC website by you. The ISC will only release this information, when legally required, to help law enforcement investigations, legal proceedings, or internal investigations of Texas A&M rule and regulation violations. In such circumstances, these groups may use this information to track the electronic transactions back to the source computer(s) and/or account(s).
Cookies
A cookie is a file containing unique information that a website can use to store and track such things as passwords, pages you visited, the date you last visited a specific page, and to identify your server session at a particular website. The ISC does not use cookies to track or collect any information that could personally identify individual visitors.
Server Sessions
A server session is similar to a cookie, except stored on a web-server rather than on your local machine. It can store and track such things as pages you visited, the date you last visited a specific page, personal information you supply, or information the web page retrieves for you. The ISC may occasionally use server sessions to store information about your visit. For example, the ISC may require you to log into the ISC website. In this example, a server session will store your username, distinguishing you from other people using the ISC website.
Server Log Information
The ISC may store the following information in server logs for analysis:
- User/client hostname
- The hostname or, if lacking DNS, IP address of the user/client requesting access
- HTTP header, "user agent"
- The user-agent information includes the type of browser, its version, and the operating system running it
- HTTP header, "referrer"
- The referrer specifies the page from which the client accessed the current page
- System date
- The date and time of the user/client request
- Full request
- The exact request the user/client made
- Status
- The status code the server returned to the user/client
- Content length
- The content length, in bytes, of the document sent to the user/client
- Method
- The request method used
- Universal Resource Identifier (URI)
- The location of a resource on the server
- Query string of the URI
- Anything after the question mark in a URI
- Protocol
- The transport protocol and version used
Access to Information
Except for education records governed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), all information collected from the ISC website, including the summary server log information, emails sent to the website, and information collected from web-based forms, may be subject to the Texas Public Information Act. This means that while the ISC does not actively share information, in some cases Texas law may compel the ISC to release information gathered from its web servers.
The Texas Public Information Act, with a few exceptions, gives you the right to be informed about the information that the ISC website collects about you. It also gives you the right to request a copy of that information, and to have the university correct any of that information that is wrong. You may request to receive and review any of that information, or request corrections to it, by contacting the Texas A&M Public Information Officer or the Texas A&M Office of Open Records, 1181 Texas A&M, College Station, Texas, 77843-1181, at 979-862-7777.
Information Security
Texas A&M and the ISC employ extensive security measures consistent with the Texas Administrative Code (TAC) "Information Security Standards" and Texas A&M Rules and Standard Administrative Procedures to protect against unauthorized access, disclosure, modification, or destruction of information under ISC control, as well as the loss, misuse, or alteration of te ISC website and/or associated electronic information resources. The information resources that support the ISC website undergo an annual information security risk assessment via the Information Security Awareness, Assessment, and Compliance (ISAAC) system. The ISAAC system serves to assess the security posture of information systems and measure compliance with information security standards.
Questions
Texas A&M and the ISC comply with the State Website Linking and Privacy Policy. If you have any questions about the practices of the ISC website or your use of the ISC website, please contact the webmaster via email or the postal address given at the bottom of this page.