Privacy and Terms of Use

We do not collect or store any personally identifiable information when you visit our site. The information provided only aids in identifying and presenting available benefit(s) for which a visitor may be eligible; however, all information provided and generated will be lost after either closing your browser or 30 minutes of inactivity.
If you visit our site to read or download information, we collect and store the following information:

• The name of the domain from which you access the Internet (for example, google.com if you connect from a personal computer).
• The date and time you access our site.
• The Internet address of the website that directly linked you to our site.
• Commonly searched benefits and keywords.
• Anonymous demographic information about our visitors such as gender, age range, and areas of interest for adults over the age of 18. Browsers may be associated with a demographic category, such as gender or age range, based on the sites that were visited. This demographic information is used to help us better understand our visitors' interests and needs to provide content that serves you.

If you identify yourself by sending an e-mail containing personal information:
To protect your privacy, we ask that you do not send us personal information, as we are not able to respond to case specific inquiries. We may forward your e-mail to other government employees who are better able to respond to you. If you wish to file a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), instructions are provided on the . 

If you link to other sites outside GovLoans.gov
Our website has many links to other sites. When you link to any of these sites, you are no longer on our site and are subject to the privacy policy of the new site.

Cookie Use Notice:
Cookies are small files that Web servers place on a user’s hard drive. We do not use cookies to collect any PII or to track user activities beyond our website.  Cookies can serve several functions, depending on how they are designed:

• They allow the website to identify you as a previous visitor each time you access a site.
• They track what information you view at a site (important to commercial sites trying to determine your buying preferences).
• In more advanced cases they track your movements through many websites, but not the whole Web.
• Businesses use them for customer convenience to allow them to produce a list of items to buy and pay for all at one time, and to garner information about what individuals are buying on their sites.
• Advertisers use them to determine the effectiveness of their marketing and offer insights into consumer preference and tastes by collecting data from many websites.
• They can be used to help a website tailor screens for each customer’s preference.

We limit our use of cookies to "session cookies," types of cookies that are temporarily stored in your computer's memory. Session cookies disappear when the Web user terminates a Web session and closes the browser. GovLoans.gov does not issue "persistent cookies," which are cookies that could be stored permanently on your workstation and reused each time you visit the GovLoans.gov website. If you are concerned about the potential use of information gathered from your computer by cookies, you can set your browser to prompt you before it accepts a cookie. Most Internet browsers have settings that let you identify and/or reject cookies.

For security purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, our website also employs software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage. Unauthorized attempts to upload information or change information on this service are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act of 1996.