InteroperabilityBridges Privacy Statement
Last updated: May 2009
Microsoft is committed to protecting your privacy. This privacy
statement applies to the data collected by Microsoft through
the InteroperabilityBridges site (the "Site"); it does not
apply to other online or offline Microsoft sites, products, or
services.
Collection of Your Information
We will ask you when we need information that personally
identifies you or allows us to contact you. The personal
information we collect may include name or e-mail address.
We may collect information about your visit, including the pages
you view, the links you click, and other actions you take in
connection with the Site. We also collect certain standard
information that your browser sends to every Web site you visit,
such as your IP address, browser type and language, access times,
and referring Web site addresses.
In order to offer you a more consistent and personalized
experience in your interactions with Microsoft, information
collected through one Microsoft service may be combined with
information obtained through other Microsoft services. We may also
supplement the information we collect with information obtained
from other companies. For example, we may use services from other
companies that enable us to derive a general geographic area based
on your IP address in order to customize certain services to your
geographic area.
To sign in to the Site, you will be asked to enter an e-mail
address and password, which we refer to as your Windows Live™ ID.
After you create your Windows Live ID, you can use the same
credentials to sign in to many different Microsoft sites and
services, as well as those of select Microsoft partners that
display the Windows Live ID logo. By signing in on one Microsoft
site or service, you may be automatically signed in when you
visit other Microsoft sites and services. To learn more
about how your credential information is used when you
sign in to participating sites, please read the Microsoft
Online Privacy Statement at http://privacy.microsoft.com/.
Use of Your Information
The information collected on this Site will be used to operate
the Site and to provide the service(s) or carry out the
transaction(s) you have requested or authorized.
In support of these uses, Microsoft may use your information to
provide you with more effective customer service, improve the Site
and any related Microsoft products or services, perform statistical
analysis, and make the Site easier to use by eliminating the need
for you to repeatedly enter the same information or by customizing
the Site to your particular preferences or interests.
We may use your information to provide you with important
information about the product or service that you are using,
including critical updates and notifications. Additionally,
with your permission, we may send you information about other
Microsoft products and services, and/or share your personal
information with Microsoft partners so they may send you
information about their products and services.
Microsoft occasionally hires other companies to provide limited
services on our behalf, such as Web site hosting, packaging,
mailing, and delivering prizes, answering customer questions about
products and services, and sending information about our products,
special offers, and other new services. We will only provide those
companies the personal information they need to deliver the
service. They are required to maintain the confidentiality of the
information and are prohibited from using that information for any
other purpose.
We may access or disclose information about you, including the
content of your communications, in order to: (a) comply with the
law or respond to lawful requests or legal process; (b) protect the
rights or property of Microsoft or our customers, including the
enforcement of our agreements or policies governing your use of the
services; or (c) act on a good faith belief that such access or
disclosure is necessary to protect the personal safety of Microsoft
employees, customers or the public.
Information that is collected on the Site may be stored and
processed in the United States or any other country in which
Microsoft or its affiliates, subsidiaries, or service providers
maintain facilities. Microsoft abides by the safe harbor framework
as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the
collection, use, and retention of data from the European Union.
Control of Your Information
Except as otherwise described in this statement, personal
information you provide on the Site will not be shared outside of
Microsoft and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates without
your permission.
Please be aware that this privacy statement and any choices you
make on the Site will not necessarily apply to personal information
you may have provided to Microsoft in the context of other,
separately operated, Microsoft products or services.
Access to Your Personal Information
You can review and edit the personal information you provided at
this Site by You may view or edit your personal information online
at the MyProfile page on the web site. In order to help prevent
your personal information from being viewed by others, you will be
required to sign in with your LiveID account. Alternatively, you
can write us by using the Contact Us
form and we will contact you within 30 days regarding your
request.
Security of Your Information
At Microsoft, we take the security of your personal information
very seriously. We use a variety of security technologies and
procedures to help protect your personal information from
unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. For example, we store the
personal information you provide on computer servers with limited
access that are located in controlled facilities.
Additionally, if we transmit sensitive personal information
(such as a credit card number) over the Internet, we protect it
through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer
(SSL) protocol.
Use of Cookies
We may use cookies on this Site to enable you to sign in to our
services or to help personalize the Site. A cookie is a small
text file that is placed on your hard disk by a Web server. Cookies
contain information that can later be read by a Web server in the
domain that issued the cookie to you. Cookies cannot be used to run
programs or deliver viruses to your computer. One of the
primary purposes of cookies is to provide a convenience feature to
save you time. For example, if you personalize a Web page, or
navigate within a site, a cookie helps the site to recall your
specific information on subsequent visits. This simplifies the
process of delivering relevant content, eases site navigation, and
so on. When you return to the Web site, the information you
previously provided can be retrieved, so you can easily use the
site's features that you customized.
You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Most Web
browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify
your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. If you are
using Internet Explorer, search for "Cookies" in the Help menu to
find detailed instructions. If you choose to decline cookies, you
may not be able to use interactive features of this or other
Web sites that depend on cookies.
Use of Web Beacons
Pages on this Site may contain electronic images known as Web
beacons - sometimes called single-pixel gifs - that may be used to
assist in delivering cookies, to allow us to count users who have
visited those pages, and to deliver co-branded services. We may
also include Web beacons in promotional e-mail messages or our
newsletters in order to determine whether messages have been opened
and acted upon.
Microsoft may also employ Web beacons from third parties in
order to help us compile aggregated statistics and determine the
effectiveness of our promotional campaigns or other operations of
our sites. We prohibit Web beacons on our sites from being used by
third parties to collect or access your personal information. We
may work with other companies that advertise on our sites to place
Web beacons on their sites in order to allow us to develop
statistics on how often clicking on an advertisement on a Microsoft
site results in a purchase or other action on the advertiser's
site.
Display of Advertising
Many of the Web sites and online services we offer, as well as
those of our partners, are supported by advertising. Through
our ad delivery platform, we may display ads on our own sites and
the sites of our advertising partners.
When we display online advertisements to you, we will place a
persistent cookie on your computer in order to recognize your
computer each time we display an ad to you. Because we may
serve advertisements on many different Web sites, we are able to
compile information over time about where you, or others who are
using your computer, saw and/or clicked on the advertisements we
display. We use this information to make predictions about
your characteristics, interests, or preferences, and to display
targeted advertisements that we believe may be of interest to
you. We may also associate this information with your
subsequent visit, purchase, or other activity on participating
advertisers' Web sites in order to determine the effectiveness of
the advertisements.
While we may use some of the information we collect in order to
personalize the ads we show you, we designed our systems to select
ads based only on data that does not personally and directly
identify you. For example, we may select the ads we display
according to certain general interest categories or segments that
we have inferred based on (a) demographic or interest data,
including any you may have provided when creating an account (e.g.
age, zip or postal code, and gender), demographic or interest data
acquired from other companies, and a general geographic location
derived from your IP address; (b) the pages you view and links you
click when using Microsoft's and its advertising partners' Web
sites and services; and (c) the search terms you enter when using
Microsoft's Internet search services, such as Live Search.
As we serve ads, we take a number of steps designed to protect
your privacy. For example, we store page views, clicks,
and search terms used for ad personalization separately from your
contact information or other data that directly identifies you
(such as your name, e-mail address, etc.). Further, we have
built in administrative, technical, and physical safeguards
designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this
data. We also give you the ability to opt-out of personalized
ads. For more information or to use the opt-out feature, you
may visit our opt-out
page.
We also provide third party ad delivery through our Atlas
subsidiary, and you may read the Atlas privacy statement at http://www.atlassolutions.com/privacy.aspx.
Although the majority of the online advertisements on Microsoft
sites are displayed by Microsoft, we also allow third-party
ad-serving companies, including other ad networks, to display
advertisements on our sites. These companies currently include, but
are not limited to: 24/7
Real Media, Advertising.com, Bidclix, BlueStreak, Burst Media, DoubleClick, EuroClick, Eyeblaster, EyeWonder, Falk, Interpolls, Kanoodle, Mediaplex, Pointroll, TangoZebra, Yahoo! Publisher
Network, and Zedo.
These companies may offer you a way to opt out of ad targeting
based on their cookies. You may find more information by clicking
on the company names above and following the links to the Web sites
of each company. Some of these companies are members of the
Network Advertising
Initiative, which offers a single location to opt out of ad
targeting from member companies.
Changes to this Privacy Statement
We may occasionally update this privacy statement. When we do,
we will also revise the "last updated" date at the top of the
privacy statement. For material changes to this privacy statement,
we will notify you either by placing a prominent notice on the home
page of our Web site or by directly sending you a notification. We
encourage you to periodically review this privacy statement to stay
informed about how we are helping to protect the personal
information we collect.
Contact Information
Microsoft welcomes your comments regarding this privacy statement.
If you have questions about this statement or believe that we have
not adhered to it, please contact us by clickinghere.
Microsoft Privacy
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399 USA
