Digital
Distribution Privacy
Statement
Last
updated: April 2009
Microsoft is committed to
protecting your privacy. This
privacy statement applies to the data collected by Microsoft
through digital
distribution sites (each one is a “Site”) hosted
for Microsoft by Digital
River;
it does not apply to other online or offline Microsoft sites,
products, or services. For purposes of this privacy statement,
“digital
distribution sites” refers to sites that sell or otherwise
distribute digital
media for Microsoft products and 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 your name, email address,
phone
number, and postal 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 may 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.
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. You may also have the option of proactively making
choices
about the communications you receive through a Site by signing into the
Site
and accessing your account information.
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 Digital
River,
a Microsoft vendor.
It is stored at Digital River,
plus sent back to Microsoft. You can review and
edit the personal information you provided at this Site by sending e-mail to privacypolicy@reply.digitalriver.com or writing to:
Digital
River
Attn: Microsoft Privacy Information
9625 West 76th Street
Eden Prairie, MN 55344
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 e-mail at privacypolicy@reply.digitalriver.com or
by postal mail at:
Digital
River
Attn: Microsoft Privacy Information
9625 West 76th Street
Eden Prairie, MN 55344