ADS's Privacy Policy
The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) respects the privacy
of its users. This document describes our policy.
Server Logs
As you travel through the ADS web site, our server logs the following
information about your session on the site:
- Your computer's IP address (an IP address is a
number that is assigned to you by your internet service provider).
- The type of browser and operating system used to access our site.
- The date and time you access our site.
- The pages that you visit.
- If you came to our website using a link from a different web site,
the address of that website.
- The cookie that ADS may have set up for you (see below).
We use this information from our server logs to learn about our
visitors as a group, not about you as an individual. We also use the
information to generate important statistics required by our funding
sources. These records are kept only for the purpose of
maintaining and improving services on our site, and are never shared
with any other entity.
Cookies
A "cookie" is a unique identifier that a Web site places in your
computer's hard drive for future reference. ADS uses cookies to
allow customization of our site's features on a user-by-user bases.
For instance, the implementation of the
ADS preference
settings makes use of cookies.
Additionally, cookies offer a mechanism allowing us to track the sequence of
documents that a particular user retrieves from our site,
without having any knowledge of the user's identity, and without
requiring any form of user ID or password assignment.
Again, this information is being collected only for the purpose of providing
better service to our users. This permits, for instance, the
creation of the "Also-read" article links, allowing users to
see articles which were also read by people who read a given article.
Please note that our site does not require visitors to have
cookies enabled in their web browsers.
However, be reminded that some features of our
system won't be available to you if you choose to configure your
browser not to use cookies.
Future Changes
ADS reserves the right to change this policy at any time.
If we make material changes to our privacy policy, these changes
will be posted on this page.
ads@cfa.harvard.edu