on a stack of yummy king-size Hershey bars

that FriendsInBusiness.com will NEVER sell, rent, lease, or give your name, e-mail address, or any other personal information you entrust us with to another living soul.

Now here's the technical stuff regarding the types of information we do receive and collect when you visit FriendsInBusiness.com, what we do with it, and how we safeguard it...

Log Files:  We collect and use the data contained in log files (as does almost every other website on the planet).  The information in the log files includes your IP (internet protocol) address; your ISP (internet service provider such as AOL, Earthlink, etc.); the browser you used to visit our site (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.); the time you visited our site; and which pages you visited throughout our site.

Cookies and Web Beacons:  We do use cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit our site.  It's thanks to cookies that our forum "remembers" when you visited last, tells you how many new messages have been posted, flags them so you don't have to sift through everything, and allows you to choose how you want the messages organized.  As another example, if we used popups (which we don't), cookies might limit their appearance to once per visit (definitely a good thing).

Third-Party Advertisements:  We do place third-party advertisements (such as Google Adsense) on FriendsInBusiness.com to support our site.  Google and other advertisers typically use technology such as cookies and web beacons when placing ads on our site, which means they may also receive certain information regarding your visit (your IP address, your ISP, which browser you're using, whether you have Flash installed, etc.).   This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (for example, showing California real estate ads to someone in California -- not because they "know where you live" but because they reason that if you're using an Internet Service Provider in California, you probably live in California).

Disabling Cookies:  You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies and/or third-party cookies in your browser settings (or, depending on your system, by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security).  However, this can affect how you are able to interact with our site and others.  On some sites, you might not be able to log in or access certain features.  We don't require any login at FriendsInBusiness.com, but if you disable our cookies, the forum won't know which messages you've already read and it will have no way to store your preferences, making your visits less enjoyable.