What Information Does USDA Collect?
When you browse through the USDA website, read pages, or download information, we may gather and store certain information about your visit automatically. We may use technologies to gauge your browsing habits or web surfing history to improve the information presented to you. For example, if you search for both USDA loans and rural communities during a website visit, on a subsequent visit you may also be provided with information about USDA rural loan programs.
The information we store does not identify you personally. We automatically collect and store only the following information about your visit:
- The Internet domain and IP address from which you access our website. For example, if you access our website from school, we see "schoolname.edu" and the school's IP address;
- The type of browser and operating system used to access our site;
- The date and time you access our site;
- The pages you visit; and
- If you linked to the USDA website from another website, the address of that website.
We use this information to help us make our site more useful, to learn about the number of visitors to our site, the types of technology our visitors are using to visit our website, and to present relevant information to you based on your website browsing requests.
We do not track your web activities beyond your browsing the USDA website. We do not cross reference your browsing habits with other entities, and we do not sell or give away your information to other entities.