The information gathered by Patham Impact falls into two categories: (1) information voluntarily supplied by visitors to our website through optional registration and (2) tracking information gathered as visitors navigate through our site.

To make use of certain features on our website, visitors must provide certain information as part of the registration process. (We may ask, for example, for your name, email address, sex, age, and PIN code, and we might request information on your occupation, interests, and the like.) The information you supply will help us to make Pratham Impact a better website by allowing us to tailor our site to your interests and make it more useful to you. Supplying such information is entirely voluntary. In some instances, which involve, for example, subscriptions, you may need to provide all the information before the subscription can reach you. We can't deliver your magazines or notify you that you've been lucky enough to win a prize in a promotional contest if we don't know how to contact you. Of course, even if you want to remain completely anonymous, you are still free to take advantage of the wealth of content available on our site without providing any personal information.

To help make our site more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we invoke a standard feature of browser software, called a "cookie", to assign each visitor a unique, random number (a sort of user ID) that resides on your computer. The cookie does not personally identify the visitor as an individual; rather, cookies merely identify the computer that a visitor uses to access our site. Unless you voluntarily identify yourself (through registration, for example), we will have no way of knowing who you are, even if we assign a cookie to your computer. The only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply (an example of this is when you ask for our Personalised Horoscope). A cookie cannot read data off your hard drive. Our advertisers may also assign their own cookies to your browser (if you click on their ads), a process that we do not control.

We use cookies to help us tailor our site to meet your needs, and to deliver a better service that is keyed to the interests of our visitors. We use cookies to determine what features our visitors prefer and which are less popular. We can build a better site if we know which pages our users are visiting and how often. And we use cookies to avoid showing you the same ad, repeatedly, during a single visit.

If you do not want the benefit of cookies, there is a simple process to manually delete your cookies. Please consult your web browser's Help documentation for more information on this process.

Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address, when you visit our site. (Your IP address is a number that lets computers attached to the Internet know where to send you data -- such as the web pages you view.) Your IP address does not identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our web pages to you upon request, to tailor our site to the interests of our users, to measure traffic within our site and let advertisers know the geographic locations from where our visitors come.

Pratham Impact includes links to other websites whose privacy policies we do not control. Once you leave our servers (you can tell where you are by checking the URL in the location bar on your browser), use of any information you provide is governed by the privacy policy of the operator of the site you are visiting. That policy may differ from ours. If you can't find the privacy policy of any of these sites via a link from the site's homepage, you should contact the site directly for more information.

When we present information to our advertisers -- to help them understand our audience and confirm the value of advertising on our website -- it is usually in the form of aggregated statistics on traffic to various pages within our site. If you do register with Pratham Impact, we may, from time to time, contact you about content and features that we believe may be of interest to you.

All information gathered on Pratham Impact is securely stored within the Pratham Impact-controlled database. The database is stored on servers secured behind a firewall; access to the servers is password-protected and is strictly limited. However, as effective as our security measures are, no security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet. And, of course, any information you include in a posting to the discussion areas is available to anyone with Internet access.

A note to end on: The Web is an evolving medium. If we need to change our privacy policy at some point in the future, we'll post the changes before they take effect. Of course, our use of any information we gather will always be consistent with the policy under which the information was collected, regardless of what the new policy may be.