Privacy Policy

Bay Networks Commitment to Protecting Your Privacy

Last Updated: 06/25/2024 02:45:37 UTC

Please read the Bay Networks Online Privacy Statement below and any supplemental information listed for additional details about particular Bay Networks sites and services that you may use.

This Bay Networks Online Privacy Statement applies to data collected by Bay Networks through most of its web site and services, as well as its offline product support services. It does not apply to those Bay Networks sites, services and products that do not display or link to this statement or that have their own privacy statements. Some products and services mentioned in this statement may not be available in all markets at this time.

Collection of Your Personal Information
On the Bay Networks site, we ask you to provide personal information, such as your e-mail address, name, home or work address, and telephone number. We may also collect demographic information, such as your ZIP code, age, gender, preferences, interests, and favorites. If you choose to make a purchase or sign up for a paid subscription service, we will ask for additional information, such as your credit card number and billing address, which is used to create a Bay Networks billing account.

To access some Bay Networks services, you will be asked to sign in with an email address and password, which we refer to as your credentials. You can use the same credentials to sign into many different Bay Networks sites and services, as well as those of select Bay Networks partners. By signing in on one Bay Networks site or service, you may be automatically signed into other Bay Networks sites and services. If you access our services via a mobile phone, you may also use your telephone number and a PIN as an alternative credential to your username and password. As part of creating your credentials, you may also be requested to provide an alternate email address, as well as questions and secret answers, which we use to help verify your identity and assist in resetting your password. Some services may require added security, and in these cases, you may be asked to create an additional security key. Finally, a unique ID number will be assigned to your credentials which will be used to identify your credentials and associated information.

We may collect information about your interaction with Bay Networks site and services. For example, we may use website analytics tools on our site to retrieve information from your browser, including the site you came from, the search engine(s) and the keywords you used to find our site, the pages you view within our site, your browser add-ons, and your browser’s width and height. We may also use technologies, such as cookies and web beacons (described below), to collect information about the pages you view, the links you click and other actions you take on our sites and services. Additionally, we collect certain standard information that your browser sends to every website you visit, such as your IP address, browser type and language, access times, and referring web site addresses. We also deliver advertisements (See the Display of Advertising section below.) and provide web site analytics tools on non-Bay Networks sites and services, and we may collect information about page views on these third-party sites as well.

When you receive newsletters or promotional email from Bay Networks, we may use web beacons (described below), customized links, or similar technologies to determine whether the email has been opened and which links you click. We do this to provide you more focused email communications or other information.

To offer you a more consistent and personalized experience in your interactions with Bay Networks, information collected through one Bay Networks service may be combined with information obtained through other Bay Networks 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 to customize certain services to your geographic area.

Use of Your Personal Information

Bay Networks collects and uses your personal information to operate and improve its sites and services. These uses may include providing you with more effective customer service, making the sites or services easier to use by eliminating the need for you to repeatedly enter the same information, performing research and analysis aimed at improving our products, services and technologies, and displaying content and advertising that are customized to your interests and preferences. For more information about the use of information for advertising, see the Display of Advertising section below.

We also use your personal information to communicate with you. We may send certain mandatory service communications such as welcome letters, billing reminders, information on technical service issues, and security announcements. Some Bay Networks services, such as Windows Teams, may send periodic member letters that are considered part of the service. We may also occasionally send you product surveys or promotional mailings to inform you of other products or services available from Bay Networks and its affiliates.

Personal information collected on Bay Networks sites and services may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Bay Networks or its affiliates, subsidiaries or service providers maintain facilities. Bay Networks abides by the Privacy Shield as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of data from United States, and the European Union Swiss Privacy Shield.

Sharing of Your Personal Information

Except as described in this statement, we will not disclose your personal information outside of Bay Networks and its controlled subsidiaries and affiliates without your consent. Some Bay Networks sites allow you to choose to share your personal information with select Bay Networks partners so that they can contact you about their products, services, or offers. Other sites do not share your contact information with third parties for marketing purposes, but instead may give you a choice as to whether you wish to receive communications from Bay Networks on behalf of external business partners about a partner’s particular offering (without transferring your personal information to the third party). See the Communication Preferences section below for more information.

Some Bay Networks services may be co-branded and offered in conjunction with another company. If you register for or use such services, both Bay Networks and the other company may receive information collected in conjunction with the co-branded services.

We occasionally hire other companies to provide limited services on our behalf, such as handling the processing and delivery of mailings, providing customer support, hosting websites, processing transactions, or performing statistical analysis of our services. Those service providers will be permitted to obtain only the personal information they need to deliver the service. They are required to maintain the confidentiality of the information and are prohibited from using it for any other purpose. However, for credit card processing, our fraud detection vendors may use aggregate data to help improve their service. This helps them more accurately detect fraudulent uses of credit cards. 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 Bay Networks 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 Bay Networks employees, customers or the public.

Accessing Your Personal Information

You may have the ability to view or edit your personal information online. In order to help prevent your personal information from being viewed by others, you will be required to sign in with your credentials (email address and password). The appropriate method(s) for accessing your personal information will depend on which sites or services you have used.

baynetworks.com — You can access and update your profile on baynetworks.com by visiting the baynetworks.com Profile Center.
Bay Networks Billing and Account Services — If you have a Bay Networks Billing account, you can add to or update your information at “Personal Information” or “Billing Information” links.
Bay Networks Connect — If you are a registered user of Bay Networks, you can access and edit your personal information.
Bay Networks Partner Programs — If you are registered with Bay Networks Partner Programs, you can review and edit your profile by clicking Manage Your Account.
Communication Preferences
You can stop the delivery of future promotional email from Bay Networks sites and services by following the specific instructions in the email you receive.

You may also have the option of proactively making choices about the receipt of promotional email, telephone calls, and postal mail from Bay Networks site, or services by visiting and signing into the following pages:

The baynetworks.com Newsletter Center allows you to choose whether you wish to receive marketing communications from baynetworks.com, to select whether baynetworks.com may share your contact information with selected third parties, and to subscribe or unsubscribe to newsletters about our products and services.
If you are registered with Bay Networks Partner Programs, you can set your contact preferences or choose to share your contact information with other Bay Networks partners.

These choices do not apply to the display of online advertising. Nor do they apply to the receipt of mandatory service communications that are considered part of certain Bay Networks services, which you may receive periodically unless you cancel the service.

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 the Bay Networks Advertising 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 this data 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, 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 Bay Networks and its advertising partners’ web sites and services, and (c) the search terms you enter when using Bay Networks Internet search services, such as Google, Yahoo and other.

When we display personalized ads, we take several 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, email address, etc.). Further, we have built in technological and process safeguards designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data. We also give you the ability to opt-out of personalized ads.

Although most of the online advertisements on Bay Networks sites are displayed by Bay Networks, we also allow third-party ad serving companies.

These companies may offer you a way to opt out of ad targeting based on their cookies.

Security of Your Personal Information

Bay Networks is committed to protecting the security of your personal information. 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 systems with limited access, and which are located in controlled facilities. When we transmit highly confidential information (such as a credit card numbers or passwords) over the Internet, we protect it using encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol.

If a password is used to help protect your accounts and personal information, it is your responsibility to keep your password confidential. Do not share this information with anyone. If you are sharing a computer with anyone you should always log out before leaving a site or service to protect access to your information from subsequent users.

Collection and Use of Children’s Personal Information

Bay Networks site and services are intended for general audiences, and we do not knowingly collect any personal information from children. When a Bay Networks site does collect age information, and users identify themselves as under 13, the site will either block such users from providing personal information or will seek to obtain consent from parents for the collection, use, and sharing of their children’s personal information. We will not knowingly ask children under the age of 13 to provide more information than is reasonably necessary to provide our services.

We encourage you to talk with your children about communicating with strangers and disclosing personal information online.

Use of Cookies

Bay Networks web sites use “cookies” to enable you to sign into our services and to help personalize your online experience. A cookie is a small text file that is placed on your hard disk by a web page 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 store your preferences and other information on your computer to save you time. We do this by eliminating the need to repeatedly enter the same information, to display your personalized content, and to display appropriate advertising on your later visits to these sites. Bay Networks web sites also use cookies as described in the “Collection of Your Information” and “Display of Advertising” sections of this privacy statement.

When you sign into a site using your ID or credentials, we store your unique ID number and the time you signed in, in an encrypted cookie on your hard drive. This cookie allows you to move from page to page on the site without having to sign in again on each page. When you sign out, these cookies are deleted from your computer. We also use cookies to improve the sign in experience. For example, your email address may be stored in a cookie that will remain on your computer after you sign out. This cookie allows your email address to be pre-populated, so that you will only need to type your password the next time you sign in. If you are using a public computer or do not otherwise want this information to be stored, you can select the appropriate radio button on the sign-in page, and this cookie will not be used.

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 choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to sign in or use other interactive features of Bay Networks sites and services that depend on cookies, and some advertising preferences that are dependent on cookies may not be able to be displayed.

If you choose to accept cookies, you also have the ability to later delete cookies that you have accepted. In Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and Chrome you can delete cookies by selecting “Tools”, “Delete Browsing History” and clicking the “Delete Cookies” button. In Firefox, in “Tools” choose “Clear Private Data”. If you choose to delete cookies, any settings and preferences controlled by those cookies, including advertising preferences, will be deleted and may need to be recreated.

Use of Web Beacons

Bay Networks web pages may contain electronic images known as Web Beacons — sometimes called single-pixel gifs — that may be used to assist in delivering cookies on our sites, allowing us to count users who have visited those pages, and to deliver co-branded services. We may include web beacons in promotional email messages or our newsletters to determine whether messages have been opened and acted upon.

Bay Networks may also employ web beacons from third parties to help us compile aggregated statistics regarding 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.

Finally, we may work with other companies that advertise on Bay Networks sites. We may place web beacons on their sites to allow us to develop statistics on how often clicking on an advertisement on a Bay Networks site results in a purchase or other action on the advertiser’s site.

Controlling Unsolicited E-mail (“Spam”)

Bay Networks is concerned about controlling unsolicited commercial email, or “spam.” Bay Networks has a strict Anti-Spam Policy prohibiting the use of any Bay Networks-provided email or IM account, to send spam. Bay Networks will not sell, lease, or rent its email subscriber lists to third parties. While Bay Networks continues to actively review and implement new technology, such as expanded filtering features, there is no currently available technology that will totally prevent the sending and receiving of unsolicited email. Using junk e-mail tools and being cautious about the sharing of your email address while online will help reduce the amount of unsolicited email you receive.

Enforcement of This Privacy Statement

If you have questions regarding this statement, you should first contact us by using our web form. If you do not receive acknowledgement of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, you should then contact TRUSTe for support. TRUSTe will serve as a liaison with Bay Networks to resolve your concerns.

Changes to This Privacy Statement

We will occasionally update this privacy statement to reflect changes in our services and customer feedback. When we post changes to this Statement, we will revise the “last updated” date at the top of this statement. If there are material changes to this statement or in how Bay Networks will use your personal information, we will notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes prior to implementing the change, or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to periodically review this statement to be informed of how Bay Networks is protecting your information.