Privacy Statement

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) provides this website as a public service.
We allow website users to electronically submit forms and materials that may contain personal information. With a few exceptions, Texas privacy laws and the Public Information Act give you the right to ask DFPS about the personal information we collect about you, review that information, and ask us to correct any errors.

You will find the procedures for requesting corrections in Title 1 of the Texas Administrative Code, sections 351.17 through 351.23.

Privacy and Linking Policies for All DFPS Websites

You are free to copy and distribute the information on this website.  DFPS does not collect personal information about you when you visit our website, unless you choose to provide it. Our website contains links to other sites and DFPS is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of those websites.

How do we handle information about your visit to our website?

We use cookies to collect information. A cookie is a file sent from a website to a visitor's web browser that gathers information which is used to track such things as passwords, the web pages you visit, the date you last looked at a specific web page and other information about your visit.

No personal information is stored in a cookie. The only information about a visitor that is stored is the visitor's IP address and the site address. Other information we collected is:

  • Service name - the Internet service that is running on the client computer.
  • Server port - the software port number used to connect the client.
  • Cookie - the content of the cookie sent or received.

We use cookies to understand how visitors use our website. We don't report this information or use it in any manner that would reveal personal information. We will not release this information to any outside parties unless legally required to do so.

We log and summarize this data, which we use to determine what information on the website is being used the most and track the system's performance. This helps us make our site more useful to visitors by telling us how many people visit our site, what they are interested in, how long they stay on our website, and the technologies they use. For example, if you connect to our website using Gmail, we will know that someone using Gmail connected to the site. We won't know any personal information about you, including your name or email address.

DFPS collects the following information for this analysis:

  • User Client hostname - the hostname (or IP address if DNS is disabled) of the user/client requesting access.
  • HTTP header, "user-agent" - the user-agent information includes the type of browser, its version, and the operating system it's running on.
  • HTTP header, "referer" - the referer specifies the page from which the client accessed the current page.
  • System date - the date and time of the user/client request.
  • Full request - the exact request the user/client made.
  • Status - the status code the server returned to the user/client.
  • Content length - the content length, in bytes, of the document sent to the user/client.
  • Method - the request method used.
  • Universal Resource Identifier (URI) - the location of a resource on the server.
  • Query string of the URI - anything after the question mark in a URI.
  • Protocol - the transport protocol and version used.

We also use cookies to allow our contractors or subcontractors to analyze the effectiveness of advertising for public education campaigns. These cookies tell us which online or mobile advertisement brought a visitor to the website and if the visitor clicked through to the specific information we want to share. This data is aggregated and used to optimize the media campaign by eliminating ineffective ads and increasing those that perform well.  

If you send us an email with a question or comment that contains personal information, or fill out a form that emails us personal information, we use that information only to respond to your request and analyze trends. We may send your message to another government agency or person who is in a better position to answer your question.

We make no attempts to identify individual users or how they use this site except for legal investigations.  We use information for no other purposes and we destroy this information according to the retention schedules of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

We use software to monitor network traffic to identify illegal attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage to this website. Unauthorized attempts to upload or change information on this site are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Texas Penal Code Chapters 33 (Computer Crimes) or 33A (Telecommunications Crimes).

Secure Email Messages

Our job is to protect the unprotected. We use email encryption to protect your personal information and to protect our clients' well-being, safety, and privacy. Secure email is encrypted with the equivalence of a 1024-bit key. Each message is signed by the sender to ensure authenticity and data security of the message.

Visit the DFPS Email Encryption Page for more information on how to get and reply to secure messages, and how to get encrypted messages on a smartphone.