Web Privacy Policy

The staff of Communications Services is constantly striving to provide excellent service to you, our customers. To achieve this goal, we occasionally need information about you when you visit our website.

We respect your right to privacy. When you visit our website, you may be providing information to us on two different levels about your visit:

• Anonymous statistics collected as you browse the site, and
• Personal information you knowingly give us.

We want you to be aware of how we handle this information.

Our Commitment to Your Privacy

We would like to assure you that we do not:

• Collect personal information from you unless you provide it to us.
• Provide or sell the names, addresses, electronic mail addresses, or any other information from our customers [site users] to anyone outside of our department.

We do:

• Safeguard customers' information from unauthorized access.
• Collect, maintain, and use customer information as necessary to provide the most helpful and targeted products and services to meet customers' needs (e.g., customer care or new products or services).
• Maintain confidentiality of customer information when undertaking projects with other campus departments or off-campus agencies.

We value your privacy. Your information will be protected as described unless the specific web page says otherwise. If you have further questions or comments about our privacy policy, please send them via e-mail to our Web contact.

Information This Site Gathers/Tracks

Statistics about Your Visit

As you browse the site, our web servers collect information about your visit, not about you personally. Via web server logs, we monitor statistics such as:

• How many people visit our site
• Which pages people visit on our site
• From which domains our visitors come (e.g., "verizon.net" or "ucsb.edu")
• Which browsers people use to visit our site

While we gather this information, none of it is associated with you as an individual. We use these statistics to improve our website, to monitor its performance, and to make it easier for you and other visitors to use.

Organizational and Personal Information You Knowingly Give Us

Within commserv.ucsb.edu, you may be asked to give us personal or organizational information to subscribe to services or receive information about a product or service. This information may range from your generic housing location or department, to your specific phone number, account number, email address, and mailing address.

Use of the Information This Site Gathers/Tracks

Our website logs Host Names and IP addresses (when the Host Name is not available) for systems administration and security purposes. These logs are monitored and analyzed to maintain systems and information security and allow us to constantly improve the value and the availability of the web content.

Sharing of the Information This Site Gathers/Tracks

The information you submit on our order forms is never shared with any third parties unless it is necessary to complete your request and you give us your prior approval to share the information.

Order Forms and Enrollment Forms

Our order forms securely collect a visitor's contact information (like your telephone number or Registration PERM/PIN numbers). Contact information on the order form is used for order fulfillment and will not be shared with others. The information that we require on our order form is only used to process your order quickly and accurately. Your contact information will only be used to provide you with the product or service that you request, and your billing information will only be used to bill you for that product or service.

As our online systems become more sophisticated, you may also be given the option of registering a profile with our site. This would store your name, ordering history, and billing information to make it easier for you to order products or services from us in the future. Once profiling is available, you may opt out of this feature at any time by changing/canceling your profile online.

Cookies

A cookie is a small, encrypted data string our server creates to contain your unique Identification Number as you move between some applications on our website. We use "non-persistent" cookies, which are stored in your computer's memory, only while your web browser is running on your computer. Once you close your browser application, the cookie is gone.

A cookie cannot be used to access or otherwise compromise the data in your computer or on your hard drive. You can choose to change your browser settings to disable cookies if you do not want us to establish and maintain a unique Identification Number when you enter our site. Please be aware that cookies may be required to access certain functions on our website (for example, BORIS, our Billing, Order and Repair Information System), and if you disable cookies you may not be able to access these functions.

Information Security

Some of our applications (BORIS, for example) use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology to provide privacy, integrity and authentication.

• Privacy protects messages from being read by unintended recipients. SSL supports privacy by encrypting the data that is communicated between your computer and our website.
• Integrity protects messages from being altered. If altered, messages cannot be decrypted correctly. SSL supports integrity by using the MD5 message-digest algorithm.
• Authentication verifies that the person or machine on the other end of the connection is who it claims it is. SSL supports authentication by using certificates. When a browser connects to a server, the server presents its certificate. The browser then either accepts that certificate automatically (if it is included in the "site certificates" in the browser) or prompts the customer to decide whether to accept the certificate. The certificate allows the customer to be sure that the server is who it is claiming to be. We use certificates from GeoTrust, a leading provider of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and digital certificate solutions used by enterprises, websites, and consumers to conduct secure communications and transactions over the Internet and private networks.

Our site provides users the opportunity to opt out of receiving communications from us at the point where we request information about the visitor. Visitors who wish to remove their information from our database so that they will not receive future communications or will no longer receive our service can send email to our Web Contact.

Correcting/Update Policy

If you would like to correct and/or update your account information, please send an email request to our Web Contact.

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