Privacy Policy

Thank you for visiting the website of the National Council of Higher Education Loan Programs (NCHELP). Our privacy policy is simple: We collect only limited personal information about you and then only if you choose to provide that information. We disclose this information only in limited cases.

Personal information we collect
Some of our web pages let you voluntarily submit contact information such as name, title, organization, address, phone number and e-mail. We collect this information so we can more easily and efficiently provide services to you. If you provide this information while registering for a NCHELP conference or event, the contact information may be shared with other conference registrants and conference sponsors and exhibitors. In addition, contact information for key employees of NCHELP members is provided to other NCHELP members. Otherwise, we do not share personal information.

We do not intend to collect any personal information from children under 13 years of age.  If we learn that we have collected this information from a child under the age of 13, we will promptly delete this information from our system.
   
Non-personal information we collect
If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website, read pages, or download information, our website's operating system will automatically record some general information about your visit. Specifically, we record:

• The Internet domain for your Internet service, such as "xcompany.com" or "xcompany.net" if you use a private Internet access account; or "yourschool.edu" if you connect from a college or university domain.
• The date and time you visit our site, and the web pages that you visit on our site.
• The address of the previous website you were visiting, if you linked to us from another website.

We use this information so we can analyze usage patterns and diagnose system problems and to help us make our site more useful to visitors. This tracking system does not record information about individual visitors.

In addition, we collect the following information while you are visiting our website so that you can better use the site:

• The type of browser (such as "Netscape version X" or "Internet Explorer version X") that you are using.
• The type of operating system that you use (such as Macintosh, Unix, or Windows).

This information is deleted once you leave our website.

Links to Other Sites
This privacy policy discloses the privacy practices for NCHELP. But this site provides links to other web sites. When you leave the NCHELP website to visit an external site, you are subject to the privacy and security policies of the new site. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of any site you link to from ours, especially if you share any personal information. Be informed. You are the person best qualified to protect your own privacy.
 
Security and Intrusion Detection
For security purposes and to make sure this service remains available to all users, our web host uses special software programs for monitoring network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise to cause damage to this site or the hosting computer system. These programs collect no personally identifiable information, but they do collect information that could help us identify someone attempting to tamper with this website.

Contacting us
If you have any questions or comments about this policy, please write us or call us at:

General Counsel
NCHELP
1100 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20036
202-822-2106

Effective date
This privacy policy is effective beginning July 1, 2004. Changes to this policy will be posted on this website.