McGowan Consultants

We collect and store the following information from our web site users.
1. Information submitted via any form on our site.
2. Shipping information needed to ship an online order to you.
3. Logging information for security purposes.

YOUR CREDIT CARD INFORMATION IS NEVER AVAILABLE TO US OR STORED IN OUR DATABASE AT ANY TIME. All credit card transactions are routed to Verisign for secure processing. We receive back shipping information from Verisign after it has been submitted to them, but never any credit card information.

How we use the info we collect/track.

When you submit personal information to us via web site forms, the information is kept in our database and is used only for purposes of contacting you again at a later time.

Forms in which an email address is submitted will sometimes contain checkboxes allowing you to choose if you would like to receive offers, newsletters, etc from us or other affiliated outside organizations. Only with such permission from you will we ever send you email offers or solicitations. If you have marked the check box indicating you would like to receive offers from outside vendors, we will allow outside organizations that meet our criteria, to send you emails via us. We DO NOT give your address to such organizations in any sort of address list. Rather, they will submit us an email to send to our own internal mailing list. Only after the content of such an email has been reviewed by us and validated as being appropriate and meeting the criteria represented to you at the time you opted into our mailing list, will the email be sent to you by us.

You may opt out of our email list at any time by visiting our email options page.

With whom we share information with.

If, at the time you submit your email address to us in any of our online forms, you specify that it is okay for us to send you offers from other outside vendors, we will keep your email address in our database and allow these vendors to send emails to our list of such users. These emails must first be approved by us as having appropriate subject matter and content. After they have been so validated, we will send the email to the list of permitting users in our database. This is as far as our sharing of information goes.

Any user who has opted into one or more of our mailing lists may opt out of any or all of them at any time by visiting our email options page.

WE WILL NEVER DISCLOSE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION TO ANY OUTSIDE SOURCE.

Our site contains links to other sites as a convenience to our users, and, as a means of getting other sites to link to us. We also link to our secure payment gateway, Verisign, to do credit card processing for our online orders.

Our privacy policy applies to this site only and not to any other site we may link to. When linking to another site, the privacy policiy for that site (if any) would then apply.

As an example, when you total an online order on our site and then click the "Checkout" button, you will be forwarded to Verisign's secure server to submit shipping information and complete the credit card processing. While engaged in this transaction on their server, Verisign's privacy policy would apply.

Our site's use of cookies.

A cookie is a small packet of information which can be placed on a web site user's computer by a web server, via that user's web browser, when the user accesses the portion of the site that contains the cookie. The information inside a cookie may then be retrieved by the web site (again, via the user's browser) when the user visits the site again at a later time.
Some common uses of cookies are:
1. To authenticate a user upon subsequent visits to a site and thus spare the user the inconvenience of having to log in with a user name and password each and every time.
2. To maintain a "shopping cart" of items that a user selected while last on the site. Leaving a cookie, identifying the items placed in the cart, on the users computer can allow the server to "remember" what items are in that users shopping cart on subsequent visits by reading the information in the cookie.
3. Site personalization settings for a particular user can be stored in cookies so that the setings may be restored automatically when the user revisits the site.
4. To track the visits and browsing habits of a particular user to a particular site.

Our use of cookies is extremely limited at this stage of the site's development and may increase as more features are added to the site. Rest assured, however, that cookies will NEVER be used to obtain personal information from any user without his/her authorization beyond what is mentioned in points one through four above.

Changes in our privacy policy.

Should we make any changes to our privacy policy in the future, we will prominently post a link on our site that tells what changes have been made.

In the event that we should decide to use any of our users' personal information in a way that is different than was stated in our privacy policy during the time in which the information was collected, we will email any such user in our database to notify them of the change(s). The user then has a choice as to whether or not their personal information will be used in this new manner by replying to the email or otherwise contacting us.

Security of your personal information.

All online orders are totaled using our shopping cart software before any personal information is obtained from the user. The total amount of the order is then forwarded to Verisign's secure server to collect credit card and shipping information, at which time, Verisign's privacy policy would apply, as per point number 4 above. The shipping information and order details are returned to us and, if the transaction is approved, the money obtained from the transaction is deposited into our merchant account via our secure payment gateway (Verisign) and our payment processor (Nova Information Systems). We do not keep or have access to any of your credit card information at any time.

All other personal information (name, address, phone, email, etc) is kept in our database and is accessed by only those who need access to it for order processing, etc.

Email Choice/Opt-out policy.

Any emails sent to our users as a result of having opted into our mailing list at an earlier time will contain a link to our email options form, whereby they may opt out of (or back into for that matter) any or all of our mailing lists.

Methods of contacting us.

Please see our contact page for information on contacting us.