All statements below are believed to be in full compliance with NASA and GSFC policy, and they are intended only for the purpose of clarifying certain local issues. If anything below seems to be in conflict with the officially-worded policies, then those official policies take precedence.
In a nutshell: we respect your privacy.
This web server logs all accesses and access attempts for two reasons:
- We want to be able to show our management that people are using this server, so that we can justify its continued existence, and
- We must watch for attempts to breach security and break in to our server.
We compile general cumulative usage statistics and may record them permanently, but generally we do not care about individual accesses. If you access our web site, we will never come looking for you later trying to sell you anything, or survey your opinions on anything, or convince you to write your Congressperson for any increased NASA funding. We consider those kinds of marketing activites to be an inappropriate use of our log files.
We delete all detailed logs of individual accesses from this web server within 60 days (and usually within one month). It is not going to be worth any telemarketer/spammer's trouble to grab our log files and scan them to compile mailing lists, even if we let them. Which we don't.
We don't use "cookies", either. We never have, and we never will.
The one exception to all this concerns attempts to break into our systems through this web server. (You know who you are.) We frequently scan our log files for attempted breaches, and when we find them we keep those log entries forever. They get written up into reports and forwarded to NASA's computer security authorities.
The pages on this website are intended to be accessible to individuals with disabilities in accordance with provisions of Section 508 of the Workforce Investment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The webmaster of this site has urged and lectured the individual pages' authors on the desirability and importance of accessibility.
Nevertheless, if you have any difficulty viewing any page with adaptive technology, please contact the person responsible for the page in question. (This person is listed as the "web curator" somewhere near the bottom of each page.) If that does not work, then contact the webmaster. Alternatively, or if an issue is not resolved to your satisfaction, you can try contacting Goddard's Equal Opportunities Program Office (EOPO), and they will work with you to ensure accessibility.
If you encounter any hypertext links that point to servers other than this one (code916.gsfc.nasa.gov, also known as hyperion.gsfc.nasa.gov), then you should understand that the maintainers of this web site are not responsible for the other sites' content. This is especially true for links to non-NASA sites. The presence of such links here should not be interpreted as an endorsement of any or all materials that you might find on those other sites. And just as we have no control over other sites' content, we have no control either over their privacy practices either. If you follow those links, then you are on your own.
The Code 916 web site is a collaborative effort of many people in GSFC's Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Branch. Certain sections on this site are authored and maintained by the site's webmaster; others are authored and maintained by various Branch staff members.
Although the site webmaster works with page authors to encourage compliance with various requirements and regulations, there is no centralized monitoring or enforcement authority within the Branch. Each staff member is solely responsible for the pages which he or she maintains, and for adherence to all relevant policies and requirements.
Questions or complaints about technical issues associated with this web site should be addressed to the webmaster listed below as "web curator". But questions or complaints concerning a page's content should be addressed to that page's maintainer, who is required to be listed as the "web curator" for that page.