OEM Sales Center Privacy
Statement
Last updated: July 2009
Microsoft is committed to protecting
your privacy. This privacy statement applies to the data collected by Microsoft
through the OEM Sales Center site (the "Site") hosted for
Microsoft by Ethofy; 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, company, job title, e-mail address, phone,
postal address or credit card information.
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.
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
Personal 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.
You can stop the
delivery of future promotional e-mail from Microsoft sites and services by
following the specific instructions in the e-mail you receive.
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
Customer information is collected by Ethofy,
a Microsoft vendor. It is stored at Ethofy,
plus sent back to Microsoft. You can review and edit the personal information
you provided at this Site by contacting us by e-mail 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, Platform-A,
Bidclix,
BlueStreak,
Burst Media,
DoubleClick,
EuroClick,
Eyeblaster,
EyeWonder,
Interpolls,
Kanoodle,
Mediaplex,
PointRoll,
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 e-mail at privacy@ethofytools.com or by
postal mail at:
Ethofy
110 Prefontaine
Place South
Suite 600
Seattle, WA 98104