Your privacy on the Internet is very important to us. Because we gather certain types of information when you visit our site, we feel you should fully understand our collection and use of that information. This privacy statement discloses what information we gather, how we use it, and how to correct or change it.

	What information do we gather about you?
	What do we do with the information we gather?
	With whom will we share the information we gather?
	Our opt-out policy
	Correcting and updating your personal information
	Removing your name from our database

Questions regarding this statement should be directed to webmaster@hatfactory.com.

What information do we gather about you?

We gather five kinds of information from you as you use our site:

• your email address when you voluntarily subscribe to our periodic mailings,
• information you supply when you make a purchase from our site,
• responses to occasional survey questions we may ask of you,
• aggregated tracking information derived by tallying page views throughout our site, and
• other email addresses you supply when you voluntarily send a referral note to a friend using our referral page.

Mailing list subscription
Our site offers free, periodic electronic mail bulletins to our customers. We gather the email addresses of customers who voluntarily subscribe. Customers may remove themselves from this mailing list by following the link provided in every mailing that points customers to an unsubscribe page. Customers can also subscribe to the mailing list as they peruse our site, or at the time they make a purchase from the site.

Product purchases
When a customer makes a purchase from our site, they are required to provide their postal mailing address, their telephone number or their email address, and a credit card number and expiration date. A customer may also provide answers to optional questions about their age and gender.

We strongly encourage our customers to use our secure web server when making any purchase from this site. The secure web server encrypts all communications between a customer's web browser and our web site, to even further reduce the remote chance that someone can gain access to personal customer information by "eavesdropping" on a customer's web "conversations" with our site.

A customer's credit card information is collected only for a single, specific purchase, and is not "saved" for future purchases on our site. A credit card number must be provided anew each time a customer makes a purchase from our site. Any customer credit card information stored by our computer systems for a specific purchase is securely encrypted before storage, to prevent accidental disclosure to employees of our Internet service provider, or to any malicious third parties who may gain access to our computer systems. No credit card numbers are ever stored on disk in an unencrypted form.

Surveys
Occasionally, we will conduct surveys of our customers, to better create products that meet customer needs. Information about individuals gathered via these surveys will never be shared with any third party. We may share aggregated statistical information from surveys with vendors and other partners with whom we do business.

Usage tracking
We track customer traffic patterns throughout our site. However, we do not correlate this information with data about individual customers. We do summarize overall usage statistics by domain name, browser type, computer operating system, and by the referring URLs from which our customers visit our site.

Email referrals
We offer our customers an email referral service, whereby they can direct us to send a brief mail message to a friend, introducing our products and our web site. We send only one email message to the supplied email address, we send a copy of the email message to the person who requested the referral mail be sent, and we do not store the friend's email address for any future use.

Cookies
A cookie is a small data file that certain Web sites write to your computer's hard drive when you visit them. A cookie file can contain information such as a customer ID that the site uses to track the pages you've visited. However, the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie can't read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. We use cookies to monitor customer traffic patterns (as described above), and to keep track of your order and address book as you go through our site.

The information we put in a cookie is only a unique, random session number. We do not store any personal information about you in a cookie. We use the session number to identify you anonymously in our database, and, when you place an order, to track the component information of your order: the products you select, the packages you want delivered, and the credit card transaction of the final sale.

If you've set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies, you will receive the warning message with each cookie.

You can refuse cookies by turning them off in your browser. You do not need to have cookies turned on to use this site.

What do we do with the information we gather?

We use any information voluntarily given by our customers to enhance their experience while visiting our web site, and to better prepare future products based on the interests of our customers. We also use the information to deliver our products to customers.

As stated above, we use information that customers provide voluntarily in order to send out electronic mail and to deliver our products. We never share mailing lists with any third parties.

We use tracking information to infer which of our products customers like and don't like based on traffic to those areas. We do not track what individual customers read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to create better products for you.

We create aggregate reports on customer demographics and traffic patterns.

When you place an order for our hats, we will send you one email message to confirm your order has been placed. When we ship your order, we'll send a second email message to notify you that your hats are on the way to their destination.

We will never send email or any other communication to the people you list in your address book. (Unless it's to send them the hats you buy for them!) Your address book entries are solely for your use, and will never be divulged to any third party, or used by us for any purpose other than to deliver hats.

With whom will we share the information we gather?

We do not share information about individual customers with any third party. We may share aggregated demographic information with partners or vendors, if such sharing can help us improve our products.

Our opt-out policy

Wherever practical, we give you the option not to provide requested information. While we must collect certain information to sell and ship our hats to you, we will clearly state which information is optional and which is required.

You may choose not to receive periodic email from us.

Correcting and updating your personal information

We offer you the ability to correct or change the information we collect as you are making a purchase. You may change your information by visiting the page for your entry in your address book. You may change this information at any time and as often as necessary. If you are experiencing problems or have any questions about how our site works, you may can contact us at webmaster@hatfactory.com.

Removing your name from our database

We do not provide a self-service means for you to completely remove all your personal information from our web site database. If you wish us to remove your personal information from our database, please send email to webmaster@hatfactory.com and we will purge all your personal information from our web site files. (We are legally obligated to keep purchase transaction records, but we will remove all web site references.)