Privacy Policy

Mayo Clinic is the owner of this social health network, which is operated by our trusted vendor, Alliance Health. Unless stated otherwise, “We” in this privacy policy refers to both Mayo Clinic and Alliance Health. We understand the importance and sensitivity of our member's information and we have created this statement to demonstrate our firm commitment to privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices.

• We will not disclose your personal information or any information you have posted on the site to any third party without your permission; however, information you choose to post in public forums, including any health information you choose to share or any comments you make on our sites can be viewed by other members of the site and the general public and can be viewed and displayed on search engines.

• We do not share any information about where, when or how you personally navigate our site with 3rd parties.

• We use secure technology, privacy protection controls, and restrictions on employee access in order to safeguard your personal information.

• We will advise you if and when changes to this policy are made.

• We do not share, sell, rent, or trade our members’ personal information with third parties.

By clicking the "Accept" button during registration or by using this site, you give us permission to collect, use, and disclose your personal information provided by you in the manner described in this policy. Please read this policy carefully as it affects your rights and liabilities under law. If you disagree with the way we collect and process personal information collected on the Web site, we recommend that you do not use it.

Collection and Use of Information

You do not have to give us any personal information in order to browse and read the content in the public portions of our site. You must register with the site in order to post comments or interact on the site. Our registration process collects both contact information (e.g., name, email address, phone number, and physical address) and demographic information (e.g., gender and age). We use this data to tailor your site experience at the site, display relevant content we think you might be interested in, and display the content according to your preferences. You control which (if any) of the details of your contact and demographic information that can be viewed by other members of the site.

When you use the site, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships with other members, send messages, perform searches and queries, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the various personalized services offered on the site such as discussions, ratings and reviews, and blog postings. In most cases, this information is retained and used, for instance, so you can return to view prior messages you have sent or easily see your friend list. When you update information, a backup copy of the prior version is kept for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information should the need arise.

Personal information is information that can be used to identify you, or any other individual to whom the information may relate, personally. We do not collect personal information unless you choose to provide it to us. Some examples of personal information that we collect in some areas of our site, depending on the services you use and local law, are:

• Your name

• Address

• Email address

• Telephone number

• Contact information

Demographic information is information that is not unique to you in the sense that it refers to selected population characteristics, such as your ZIP code or postal code, age, preferences, gender, race or ethnicity, occupation, career history, interests and favorites.

We also collect aggregate behavioral information regarding how visitors use our sites, the areas of our site that are visited, what services are accessed, and information about your computer hardware and software including your IP address, geolocation, browser and operating system type, domain names, access times and referring Web site addresses. This information is necessary for analyzing the use of resources, troubleshooting problems, preventing fraud, and improving our services.

By registering with this site, by managing your profile, or expressly opting in when presented with choices, you have consented for us to use your information, subject to local law, in the following ways:

• to allow you to create an account;

• to create a profile for you based on information that you have provided to us;

• to contact you about site updates, informational and service-related communications, including important security updates;

• to provide you additional communications, information, and promotions such as newsletters and treatment advice;

• to inform you of other services or websites available from Alliance Health or its affiliates;

• to enable you to provide feedback, to contact us and for us to respond to you;

• to conduct surveys, questionnaires, promotions and contests, and to provide the results thereof such as success stories and contest winners; and

• to generate internal reports about the use of our site.

You may choose to stop receiving our newsletter or marketing emails by following the unsubscribe instructions included in these emails or you can contact us.

Within the community site, you may post User Content on the site at your own risk. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your pages, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users with whom you may choose to share your pages and information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post on the site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.

Information you post in public areas of the site can, in some instances, be edited but not everything posted can be. We ask that you provide references for any medical information posted which isn't your own personal experience (something you have personally undergone). User Content you post will be accessed, used, and stored by others around the world, including countries that might not have legislation that guarantees adequate protection with respect to your country of residence. By providing your personal information for inclusion in our database, you acknowledge that you consent to your information being used as described here. While we take measures to safeguard your information from unauthorized access or inappropriate use by third parties, Mayo Clinic does not control other users of the site and we are not responsible for their use of information you post or otherwise make available in public areas of this site.

Any improper collection or misuse of information provided on the site is a violation of the terms of use and should be reported by contacting us.

If you choose to use our invitation service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for information relevant to the invitation process, such as your friend's email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email or instant message inviting him or her to visit the site. The site stores this one-time invitation information in order to register a friend connection if your invitation is accepted, and to track the success of our referral program. Your invited friend may contact us to request that we remove this information from our database.

From time to time, we share aggregated data regarding the users of our services (for example, information such as the percentage of our users that have a specific condition, or that users who choose one type of service request a related service a certain percentage of the time). Some of this data may include the data obtained as described in the "cookies" section, but no personally identifiable individual information is included in these types of shared statistics.

We may also disclose account information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact, or bring legal action against someone who may be violating the site's terms of use.

This same policy also applies in those cases where we believe an individual may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) the rights or property of Mayo Clinic, other site users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities.

We may disclose or access account information when we believe in good faith that the law requires it and for administrative and other purposes deemed necessary to maintain, service, and improve our products and services and/or comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Web site.

Updating Personally Identifiable Information

If your personally identifiable information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may correct, update, amend, or delete/remove it by logging in and editing your profile’s information in the "About Me" tab.

Service Providers

We use a third party email service provider to send out emails on our behalf. This provider is prohibited from using your personally identifiable information for promotional purposes.

Cookies and IP address information

We use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server and to administer our website. Your IP address is used to gather broad demographic information.

We use cookies for application functions, login purposes and to deliver content on our Web site that is specific to your interests, but we do not use information from cookies for any marketing purposes, nor do we make that information available to third parties.

The cookie does not track any personal information about you, provide us with any way to contact you, or extract any information from your computer.

We hope you will want the better service that cookies provide, but you may set your browser to refuse cookies. However, by doing so, you will not be able to successfully use this service.

Some of our business partners (e.g., advertisers) use cookies on our site. We have no access to or control over these cookies. This privacy statement covers the use of cookies by connect.mayoclinic.org only and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Mayo Clinic and Relationships With Other Companies

The site may contain links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of such websites.

Each and every Alliance Health and Mayo Clinic employee servicing the website is obligated to abide by this privacy policy. Employees who violate our privacy policies are subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

Only authorized Alliance Health and Mayo Clinic employees servicing the website are permitted to have access to your personal information, and such access is limited by need.

Securing information entered by visitors

We use industry-standard technology to keep your personal information and information you have entered into our site as secure as possible. We also have put in place privacy protection control systems designed to ensure that your personal data remains safe and private.

The security of your personal information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information such as private or personal health information on our registration forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). To learn more about SSL, click here.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our home page.

A Note to Parents on our Privacy Policy

Mayo Clinic is very sensitive to privacy issues. We are especially careful in any communications with one of our most treasured customers—children and families. We do not collect personal information from children 12 and under. We do not associate cookie data with personal information about children.

Mayo Clinic
200 1st St SW
Rochester, MN 55905