Privacy Policy

Information You Give Us

You do not have to provide the Georgia Department of Agriculture with any personal information in order to access our site. However, for some services, such as contacting our agency or reporting required data, we may need information from you such as your name, address, telephone number, email address, and other contact or identifying information about yourself.

Visits to Our Site

When you visit our site, the following basic information is automatically received and stored by the web servers hosting our site:

  • The originating Internet Protocol (IP) address;

  • The internet domain name;

  • Information about your computer or mobile set-up (e.g., type and version of web browser, operating system, screen resolution, and connection speed);

  • The pages on our site that you visit;

  • The internet address, or URL, of the website that connected you to our site, if you accessed our site via a link on another page (i.e., “referral traffic”); and

  • The amount of data transmitted from our site to your computer.

Our site also uses web measurement and customization technologies (such as “cookies”). You can choose not to accept cookies from any website, including our site, by changing your browser settings. 

Email Subscriptions

In order to manage our email subscription lists, we retain the names and email addresses of our email subscribers, as well as other information they may have shared with us (e.g., addresses and phone numbers), logs of emails we send, and automatically generated email data used to improve our email communications. This automatically generated email data (generated through simple tools such as “pixel tags” and link redirects) includes:

  • The recipient’s email client;

  • Whether the email was opened;

  • If a link in the message was clicked;

  • Whether an email was delivered;

  • If the email was forwarded; and

  • If the email was printed.

If, at any time, you wish to stop receiving our messages, simply click on the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of each email message.

How Information is Used

If you choose to provide us with information, we may use that information to contact you, respond to your message, or provide you the information or services you requested.

We may use data you provide and automatically generated data for statistical analysis to assess, for example, what information is of interest to users, technical design specifications, and system performance. This allows us to make general improvements to our site. We may also use your information in order to detect, prevent, and respond to security issues and other harmful or unlawful activities on the site.

Sharing of this Information

Information you choose to share with the Georgia Department of Agriculture (directly and via third party sites) may be treated as information subject to open records requests. However, we exercise discretion to limit such information provided to protect your privacy.

Within our agency, we restrict access to personally identifiable information to staff who require access to this information in order to perform their official duties, and we exercise controls to limit what data they can view based on the specific needs of their position.

We do not use or share your information for commercial purposes.

Links to External Sites

Our site may link to websites created and maintained by other public and/or private organizations and individuals. When you follow a link to an external site, you are leaving our site and are subject to the external site’s privacy and security policies. We do not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of information contained on an external site. We also do not endorse the site’s sponsor, any views they express, or any products or services they offer.

Your activity on third-party website sites is governed by the third-party website’s security and privacy policies.