Privacy policy

By Mayo Clinic staff

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Privacy policy

By Mayo Clinic staff

Updated August 10, 2012

MayoClinic.com is committed to protecting your online privacy. We feel it is important for you to know how we handle the information we receive from you via the Internet. You can visit MayoClinic.com without revealing any personal information. However, you are required to provide an email address to subscribe to a newsletter.

How we and our affiliates collect and use personal information

MayoClinic.com may contain links to websites operated by third parties. MayoClinic.com has no control over the privacy policies and practices of such third party sites, and if you have any concerns, you are urged to review the terms of those sites for more information about the policies applicable to those sites.

IP addresses

We collect and log the Internet Protocol address (IP) of all visitors to MayoClinic.com. An IP address is a number automatically assigned to your computer whenever you access the Internet. IP addresses allow computers and servers to recognize and communicate with one another. We collect IP address information so that we can properly administer our system and gather aggregate information about how our site is being used, including the pages visitors are viewing. This aggregate information may be shared with advertisers, sponsors and other businesses. To maintain your anonymity, we do not associate IP addresses with records containing personal information. We will use IP address information, however, to personally identify you in order to enforce our legal rights or when required to do so by law enforcement authorities.

Newsletters

We require you to provide an email address to subscribe to a newsletter. If you subscribe, we may also use this email address to send you communications about other Mayo Clinic products and services. We may also share this email address with our third party email management vendor for purposes of delivering the newsletter to you; however, we do not share your email address with groups outside of Mayo Clinic for any marketing purposes.

How we use cookies

"Cookies" are small pieces of information that some websites store on your computer's hard drive when you visit them. Like many other websites, MayoClinic.com uses cookies to provide us with information relating to the sources of our site traffic. Collecting this information, however, does not allow us to personally identify you.

Most Web browsers automatically accept cookies but allow you to modify security settings so that you can approve or reject cookies on a case-by-case basis. Our site requires that both cookies and JavaScript be enabled. If you reject cookies from our site, some parts of the site may not work properly for you.

Health tools information

You may need to provide personal information in order to use some of the health tools on our site. This information may include your answers to questions about your health status. We use this information to calculate risk. We don't store or share it.

Surveys

You may be asked to complete surveys when you visit MayoClinic.com. We use information from surveys to better understand the needs of our users and to gather information about health care trends and issues. We generally do not ask for information in surveys that would personally identify you; if we do request contact information for follow-up, you may decline to provide it. If survey respondents provide personal information (such as an email address) in a survey, it is shared only with those people who need to see it to respond to the question or request, or with third parties who perform data management services for our site. Those third parties have agreed to keep all data from surveys confidential. Also, we may share information from surveys in an aggregated, de-identified form with third parties with whom we have a business relationship.

How we protect your personal information

All data that you enter on this site are encrypted with secure server software (SSL). The encryption means that your data are protected while they are being transferred over the Internet to our servers.

Once your data reach our servers, the same state-of-the art security software that guards our company's essential business data protects your data as well.

In addition to using the most secure technology available, we de-identify all data before they are used in any aggregate reporting that may be done.

What we provide to third parties

We may share your personally identifiable information with third parties who we have engaged to help us provide the services. In each case, we will ensure that these third parties have agreed not to use or disclose your personal information except to help us provide the services.

Except as noted above for newsletters and surveys, MayoClinic.com does not provide any third party access to your IP address and email address.

We may provide third parties with aggregate statistics about our visitors, traffic patterns and related site information. These data reflect site-usage patterns gathered during visits to our website each month, but they do not contain behavioral or identifying information about any individual member unless that member has given us permission to share that information.

Use of cookies by advertisers

Our sponsors and advertisers and their ad servers may use cookies when you view pages on our site. They use those cookies to collect nonpersonal information as a way of measuring the effectiveness of their advertising, or to provide advertisements about goods and services that may be of interest to you or to avoid running the same ads to you over time. We do not control these third parties' use of cookies or how they manage the nonpersonal information they gather through them. However, our sponsors and advertisers have agreed that they will not collect any personally identifiable information from our site visitors while they are on MayoClinic.com. If you click on an advertisement on MayoClinic.com and visit a site maintained by one of our sponsors or advertisers, please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of that site. You should read the privacy policies of each site you visit to determine what information that site may be collecting about you.

Some of our advertisers may participate in the Facebook/Nielson program, which helps advertisers improve their measurement of advertising effectiveness. If you are a Facebook user and access a page on our site containing an ad from a participating advertiser, Facebook receives a random numeric code identifying the ad that was served to you. The ad is only identified to Facebook by the numeric code. Facebook does not receive information which identifies the product or the advertiser. Facebook, in turn, discloses only aggregate, de-identified information to Nielson and the advertiser, not any personally identifiable information from your Facebook profile. You can learn more about this program and find out how to opt out here: https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=211774365532736#What-is-the-Nielsen-partnership-with-Facebook-and-how-does-it-affect-me and here: http://www.nielsen-online.com/privacy.jsp?section=leg_scs.

Ads by Google

Note that Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site. Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our site users based on their visit to our site and other sites on the Internet. No personally identifiable information is collected as part of Google's process. Users may opt out of the use of this DART cookie by visiting Google's privacy document.

If you would like more information about these practices and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, visit the Network Advertising Initiative. Some ad servers allow you to opt out of anonymous data collection through the use of cookies. To do so, you must opt out of such data collection with each individual site. You can opt out of cookies for several ad servers by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative gateway opt-out site. At that site you can also review the privacy policies of those ad servers.

Everyday Health

Everyday Health may also use a third party ad network provider, Collective Media, to help present advertisements on this website. Third party ad serving enables Everyday Health to target advertisements on MayoClinic.com to you for products and services you might be interested in. These third party network advertisers, along with other advertisers and sponsors on the website, may use cookies, Web beacons (also called single pixel GIFs or action tags) or similar technologies (and, in the case of cookies, access them on your computer if you choose to have cookies enabled in your browser) to serve you advertisements tailored to interests you have shown by browsing on this and other sites you have visited, to determine whether you have seen a particular advertisement before, to avoid sending you duplicated advertisements and to serve you advertisements on other sites. In doing so, the provider collects non-personal data such as your browser type, your operating system, Web pages visited, time of visits, content viewed, ads viewed and other clickstream data. The use of third party cookies, Web beacons and similar technologies by these ad network providers is governed by each third party's specific privacy policy, not this one. Please visit Network Advertising Initiative to learn more about the information collection practices and opt-out procedures of third party ad networks we may use.

Aggregate information

We use general traffic, site usage and length-of-stay information in reports to advertisers and firms with which we have a business relationship. This sort of information is shared only in aggregate and does not personally identify you.

Children's privacy

This site is intended for adults age 18 and older. It is not intended for or designed to attract people under the age of 18. We do not collect personally identifiable information from any person we actually know to be under the age of 18.

E-mail communications, newsletter and related services

MayoClinic.com provides you with the opportunity to receive communications from us or third parties. You can sign up for a free email newsletter. You can unsubscribe from this newsletter at any time.

Email communication that you send to us via the email links on our site may be shared with a customer service representative, employee, medical expert or agent that is most able to address your inquiry. We make every effort to respond in a timely fashion once communications are received. Once we have responded to your communication, it is discarded or archived, depending on the nature of the inquiry.

The email functionality on our site does not provide a completely secure and confidential means of communication. It's possible that your e-mail communication may be accessed or viewed by another Internet user while in transit to us. If you wish to keep your communication private, do not use our email.

You may decide at some point that you no longer wish to receive communications from our site. To stop receiving communications, send an email message to mayoinfo@mayoclinic.com or send regular mail to the following postal address:

Security and Privacy Officer
MayoClinic.com
200 First St. SW
Rochester, MN 55905

Complaint process

If you have a complaint or problem, or if you believe your privacy rights have been violated, you may email us by clicking the "Contact us" link at the bottom of any page. Please indicate the following reason for contacting us: I want to provide feedback about your site. Our Customer Service department will forward your complaint to the appropriate MayoClinic.com department for response or resolution. If you don't receive adequate resolution of a privacy-related problem, you may write to MayoClinic.com's security and privacy officer at:

Security and Privacy Officer
MayoClinic.com
200 First St. SW
Rochester, MN 55905

If you've contacted MayoClinic.com about a privacy-related concern and you do not believe your problem has been addressed, you may file a complaint with the Mayo Clinic chief security officer by calling the Mayo Clinic general number at 507-284-2511 and asking for the chief security officer.

Changes to our Privacy policy

We will occasionally update this privacy policy. You will see the word "updated" followed by the date next to the privacy policy link near the bottom of all pages on the site. If the "updated" date has changed since you last visited, you're encouraged to review the policy to be informed of how this site is protecting your information.

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