BARRACUDA'S SECURITY AND PRIVACY POLICIES

The privacy and security of our readers and customers is of great importance to us.

SECURITY

Why shopping with us safe

To ensure your information is safely guarded, we use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology. When giving your credit card number to us, SSL encrypts the information. With this encryption, only Barracuda Magazine is able to decode your credit card information.

How can you be sure any connection is secure? Simply look at the lower right-hand or left-hand corner of your browser window after accessing a server. If you see an unbroken key or a closed lock (depending upon your browser), the SSL is active and your information secure. You can also double-check by looking at the URL line of your browser. When accessing secure server, the first characters of the site address will change from 'http' to 'https.' When you enter your credit card info through our online shopping cart, the link will say "https:" indicating that it is a secure link. The company "he.net" that you see under our secure server connection is merely the host of our website. All orders are collected and filled by Barracuda Magazine, not a third party.

People are sometimes uneasy about placing orders over the internet because it feels like they are just handing out their credit card number to some faceless machine in the ether that's going to just automatically charge them money. At Barracuda, credit card charges are not automatically placed by our shopping cart system. All orders placed with here are checked by a real human being and are manually processed before your card is charged. This takes a little extra time for us to process orders this way, but it protects us AND you from credit card fraud.

Orders are normally retrieved several times daily. Once they are downloaded, your sensitive information is decoded on a machine here at our offices, not online. Our customer database is also stored offline on a local machine here in our offices, not online.

PRIVACY

We do not like getting junk mail and spam. We don't want to waste your time or annoy you by turning your information over to some direct marketing company.

We are an independently run company. We are not the arm of some big corporation. As such, we don't have any interest in selling your name or information to marketing companies or spammers. Any information that you provide to us when you place an order on our website is used solely for the purpose of filling your order.

We do not send out spam to our customers. We do not send out weekly news releases or anything like that. We only send out email notices about the release of new issues of Barracuda, which only amount to about three emails a year at this point. These promotional emails are individually composed emails, not sloppy emailings with hundreds of other email addresses in the "to:" field. If a customer ever wishes to stop receiving even these few emails, all they ever need to do is ask to be removed from the mailing list. We are happy to comply.

We require that you provide us with an email address when placing an order not so that we can swipe your email address from you. Rather, we do this so that your receipt/order confirmation can be emailed to you and so that we have an easy way to get in touch with you in case there is a problem with your order.

(If you are still concerned about spam, we suggest that you simply set up a free email account with yahoo or hotmail and use that email address for online transactions or anything that you feel might result in you getting on a spam mailing list. This will keep your personal, daily-use email more private.)