Privacy Policy

Privacy is important. You know that, and so do we. Here's some of the things that we do to protect your privacy and to uphold our good name.

When you contact us, “it's only between you and us.” We keep a list of our customers, of course, and we're pleased to say that by now it's become quite a long list, but we don't sell or provide any of that information to anyone for any reason. (Except, of course, to any law-enforcement or other government agencies who have a legitimate need to know, or in answer to a subpoena, and so-forth.)
We keep a copy of the non-financial information that you provide to us when you contact us, or when you place an order with us, but we don't disclose that information to anyone else (unless legally compelled to do so). We use this information only to contact you. We never retain, nor will we ever ask for, any information of any highly-confidential or financial nature!
- As a matter of fact, we never even possess any “financial” information about you ... at all! We have no idea what your bank-account or credit-card number is, and we don't want to know!
- When we sell something to you, we use a secure financial service (PayPal®) that only tells us “approved” or “declined,” along with a completely-random transaction reference number. They don't tell us anything “personal,” and we like it that way!
- Therefore... if anyone at all, claiming to be “us” or to be somehow affiliated with us, asks you for any sort of financial information, for “verification purposes” or what-have-you ... well, you know that it isn't legitimate! (After all, how could we possibly need to ask you for any information ... that we do not even possess?)
Go ahead! It pays to be skeptical! Ask questions! Be certain! We don't mind. Although we happen to be a legitimate web-based business that's been around since 1996, we know that the Internet is full of a lot of unscrupulous ... criminals! We know that “phishing” now constitutes more than 50% of the crimes now perpetrated on the Internet, and we don't want to be associated with any of them! (Nor, of course, do you!) If you have any reason whatsoever to doubt anything that proclaims itself to be “from us,” please assume that it is fraudulent and do not respond in any way until (and unless) you are absolutely sure.
When we make announcements, we think it's something you really would like to know about. We use our customer list for legitimate business purposes, like keeping in contact with you from time to let you know about changes to our products and services. Sometimes we include information written by and about other companies who've done something or who have something that we think you'd be interested to learn about. If you don't want to receive things like that, just let us know and we won't send them to you anymore.
When we contact you personally, for example to assist in filling your order or to follow-up with you about a problem or other issue that you have raised, what we ask or say to you will always be directly relevant to the matter at hand:
- We will never ask you to disclose confidential information, especially not financial information of any sort such as account-number. No legitimate representative of our company will ever send you any e-mail that insists that you “must” do something “right away.”
- Through our on-line store affiliate, e-junkie, and directly ourselves, we use PayPal® as our financial clearinghouse for all on-line transactions. PayPal is the only entity which actually accepts your money, or approves or declines your credit.
- The only thing PayPal tells us is: “approved” or “declined,” along with a (completely random) transaction reference-number which contains no personal information of any kind. That's all we need to know, and therefore, it's all we want to know.
- The Internet Crime Complaint Center (http://www.ic3.gov), is a very interesting and useful resource. It is “a partnership between the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C) [...] to serve as a vehicle to receive, develop, and refer criminal complaints regarding [...] cyber crime.” We think this is a great service to the e-commerce community, and a very informative web-site.
- We use industry-standard (“https://”) encryption techniques to enable you to contact us securely. This protects your information from eavesdroppers, and if you click upon the “closed padlock” icon that appears on the margin of your web-browser screen, it will prove that the website you're connected-to really does belong to us. We'll always use this same mechanism both to contact you and to reply to you about any personal matter. (We might also send you an e-mail notifying you that a message or a reply has been sent, if you want us to, but you'll have to log-in to the secure area of our web site to read the actual message.)
- Even this secure messaging facility is not a place to discuss anything of a financial nature. Remember, no legitimate representative of our company will ever ask for this, and we do not want to know.
Please don't send us your confidential information of any kind. Not unless we've expressly agreed in advance to take it! For instance, don't send us a completely-unsolicited message that says, “Here's a database containing 50,000 customer records and it's broken and can you please fix it?” (Such things have happened!) We don't want to be exposed to your company's confidential information.

In summary: We appreciate your business, and we respect your privacy. We carefully take steps to keep confidential all of the confidential information that you may send us, and we don't ask for (and don't accept) what we do not need to know. We understand also that your time is valuable, so we're judicious as to how and when we contact you, and do so only with your permission.

We hope that you've found this description of our policies informative and useful. We do, of course, reserve the right to change it from time to time as we may see fit.