Privacy Policy

Our Commitment to your Privacy

This site is owned and operated by Michael Duke and Associates, henceforth known as “MDA.” Your privacy on the Internet is of the utmost importance to us. At MDA, we want to make your experience online satisfying and safe.

Because we gather certain types of information about our users, we feel you should fully understand our policy and the terms and conditions surrounding the capture and use of that information. This privacy statement discloses what information we gather and how we use it.

General Statement of Principles

As described in detail below, any information we gather at this web site is strictly for our use and is not shared with any other entity, public or private, for any reason. We will not sell or give away any lists or other data that we may retain and we do not purchase such information from other sources.

Tracking and Gathering Information

MDA gathers two types of information about users:

  • 1. Information that users provide through optional, voluntary submissions. These are voluntary submissions to receive our electronic newsletters and to purchase our products.
  • 2. Information MDA gathers through aggregated tracking information derived mainly by tallying page views throughout our sites. This information allows us to better tailor our content to readers’ needs and to help our advertisers and sponsors better understand the demographics of our audience. Under no circumstances does MDA divulge any information about an individual user to a third party.

Optional Voluntary Information

We offer the following free services, which require some type of voluntary submission of personal information by users:

  • 1. Electronic newsletters policy (Dispatches)
    • We will offer a free electronic newsletters to users. MDA gathers the email addresses of users who voluntarily subscribe. Users may remove themselves from this mailing list by following the link provided in every newsletter that points users to the subscription management page. Users can also subscribe to the newsletters at the time of registration.
  • 2. E-Commerce (Purchasing or inquiring about products from our web site)
    • Statistical Data
      Our servers (as most) track IP addresses and referring pages to help with site maintenance and improvements. This data is viewed only as anonymous statistics to show the busiest times of the day or week, pages with errors and how effective our advertising has been. This information is not used for any other purpose.
    • Personal Information Collected (Order Forms)
      With the exception of credit card info, we store the information from your order form to allow us to track consulting issues or refer to a previous order to help provide some customer service. You may elect to have your information completely removed from this system by emailing us at info@michaelduke.com with your request.
    • Information Correction or Removal
      If you wish to correct, update or remove any information about you that may be in our records, please send us an email at info@michaelduke.com with the details of your request. If you wish to contact us further, please find complete contact information on our contact page.

Children

Consistent with the Federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), we will never knowingly request personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13 without requesting parental consent.

Usage tracking

MDA tracks user traffic patterns throughout all of our sites. However, we do not correlate this information with data about individual users. MDA does break down overall usage statistics according to a user’s domain name, browser type, and MIME type by reading this information from the browser string (information contained in every user’s browser).

MDA sometimes tracks and catalogs the search terms that users enter in our Search function, but this tracking is never associated with individual users. We use tracking information to determine which areas of our sites users like and don’t like based on traffic to those areas. We do not track what individual users read, but rather how well each page performs overall. This helps us continue to build a better service for you.

Cookies

We may place a text file called a “cookie” in the browser files of your computer. The cookie itself does not contain Personal Information although it will enable us to relate your use of this site to information that you have specifically and knowingly provided. But the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie can’t read data off your hard disk or read cookie files created by other sites. MDA uses cookies to track user traffic patterns (as described above). Our advertising system delivers a one-time cookie to better track ad impressions and click rates.

You can refuse cookies by turning them off in your browser. If you’ve set your browser to warn you before accepting cookies, you will receive the warning message with each cookie. You do not need to have cookies turned on to use this site.

Security

MDA operates secure data networks protected by industry standard firewall and password protection systems. Our security and privacy policies are periodically reviewed and enhanced as necessary and only authorized individuals have access to the information provided by our customers.

Opt-out Policy

We give users options wherever necessary and practical. Such choices include:

  • Opting not to register to receive our electronic newsletters.
  • Opting not to participate in certain interactive areas, which completely alleviates the need to gather any personally identifiable information from our users

Your Consent

By using this site, you consent to the collection and use of this information by MDA. If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page so that you are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances we disclose it.