Our postal address is
501 Second St.
San Francisco CA 94107
We can be reached via e-mail at webmaster@wpi.com
Or you can reach us by telephone at 415-243-4188.
We publish the following Web-only magazines: JavaWorld; SunWorld; LinuxWorld; and Windows TechEdge.
We collect only the domain name, but not the e-mail address of visitors to our Web page, the e-mail addresses of those who communicate with us via e-mail, aggregate information on what pages consumers access or visit, user-specific information on what pages consumers access or visit, and information volunteered by the consumer, such as survey information and/or site registrations.
The information we collect is used to improve the content of our Web magazines, help us understand how our readers use our magazines, is used to notify consumers about updates to our Web magazines, is shared with other reputable organizations to help them contact consumers for marketing purposes, and is used by us to contact consumers for marketing purposes.
From time to time, we make the e-mail addresses of subscribers (only) available to other reputable organizations whose products or services we think you might find interesting. We carefully control which organizations can e-mail to this list and limit its use to those whom we judge most relevant to readers of our specialty magazines. We consider the subscriber e-mail addresses a valuable asset of the magazines and therefore control the actual use of the e-mail list, even by third parties, through our own e-mailing service (The Email Channel/FDDS); we do not turn over e-mail addresses to others. Demographic data received from subscribers is used only in aggregated form.
Subscribers (those who fill out our e-mail alert subscription form) have the option upon signup of refusing marketing e-mail from third parties. In addition, subscribers can at any time add themselves to or remove themselves from the third-party use list while remaining subscribers; they can also unsubscribe altogether at any time from our e-mail alert service. Detailed instructions are sent with every e-mail alert or third-party e-mailing we send you.
If you supply us with your postal address online you may receive mailings from other reputable companies. You can, however, have your name put on our do-not-share list by sending e-mail to us at the above address.
Persons who supply us with their telephone numbers online may receive telephone contact from us with information regarding orders they have placed online, or from editors asking their opinion about issues affecting the magazines or markets, or from our own marketing staff. We do not make telephone numbers of subscribers available for rental.
Examples of reputable companies that send our subscribers topic-relevant e-mail and postal mail include Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Borland, Symantec, trade show companies, and technical training class companies. Under no circumstances do we make our lists available to known spammers, get-rich-quick sites, pornographic sites, or vendors of products not in some way relevant to the likely interest areas of readers of each of our magazines.
Use of Cookies on our Sites
"Cookies" are an identification tag or code provided by a server to your browser, which your browser stores and, when the same server requests, gives it back. It is a method of distinguishing among visitors to a Web site.
There are two uses of cookies by our magazines. First, our advertising management and delivery service uses cookies to keep track of which visitors in a time period have seen which ads, so advertising banners can be delivered in various mixes. The most common example is to prevent a visitor from seeing the same ad two times in a row during a single visit. The ad server software may provide numerous cookies during a given visit to keep track of various ad campaigns delivered.
Second, our Web server provides your browser with a single longlasting cookie, then reads that cookie on any subsequent page you visit on our magazines. We use this cookie exclusively to understand how visitors use our site. In theory we should be able to see how often people visit in given time periods, how many articles they read in each visit, how many people visit and never return, what percentage of our visitors are regular subscribers, and looking for patterns in our demographics for which stories are read by what kinds of readers. We have not yet (as of March 1998) set up our data analysis system to digest this data, but we plan to do so eventually.
We also plan at some future time to offer special services and benefits to readers who are subscribers; we will be able to use the cookies to distinguish our subscribers from nonsubscribers for these purposes.
Some fear that the use of cookies gives us the ability to ferret information from you without your knowledge. As far as we know, it is not physically possible for us to do anything like this. In any event, we do not use the cookie feature to access additional information from your computer, or to store anything other than a randomly generated identifying tag on your computer, or otherwise violate your privacy or acquire personal information you have not already provided us.
If you have further questions about cookies, CIAC, the Computer Incident Advisory Capacity unit that monitors computer problems for the U.S. Department of Energy, issued a study on March 12, 1998 of the risks to users of cookies, titled "Information Bulletin I-034: Internet Cookies."
You can refuse the cookies or delete the cookies file on your computer using various widely available methods. In such cases, the ad serving system will serve up default ad campaigns, and our cookie analysis plans will lack the needed data. In addition, when we implement special subscriber benefits, cookied subscribers will have automatic access to them, but noncookied subscribers will have to enter a password. There are no other implications for accepting or refusing cookies from our magazine sites.