Commitment to Privacy

AltaVista, a division of Overture Services, Inc., and Overture Services, Inc ("Overture"are committed to respecting and protecting the privacy of the users of our services. The following describes our information collection and use practices for our AltaVista Toolbar service ("Toolbar"). This Toolbar Privacy Policy supplements AltaVista's primary privacy policy located here (http://www.altavista.com/about/privacy), which is incorporated by reference herein. Any conflicts between this Toolbar Privacy Policy and the primary privacy policy should be resolved in favor of this Toolbar Privacy Policy with respect to the information collection and use practices for the Toolbar By using the Toolbar, you consent to the collection and use of your information as described in these policies. In addition, Overture may have different privacy policies for other products and services we offer. Please see http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/about/company/privacypolicy.jhtml for a description of Overture's privacy policies with respect to other products and services. Certain services and content made available through, or accessible from, the Toolbar may be provided by third parties. The collection and use of your information in connection with such services and content may be governed by the privacy policies, terms of use or other terms and conditions of such third parties.

Toolbar Service

The Toolbar is a value-added service AltaVista offers to its users who wish to take advantage of advanced search functionality and other features, regardless of where they are on the Internet.

Users may configure the Toolbar in various ways to enable them easy access to a variety of search tools made available through AltaVista and/or Overture.

Absence of Personally Identifiable Information

No personally identifiable information is ever requested by the Toolbar. This means the Toolbar never seeks any information related to your name, telephone number, address, or even your email address. The Toolbar is intended to be a completely anonymous service.

Information Collection

In order to improve the Toolbar, and our search services, we may collect certain information from you via the Toolbar. This information includes information about how you interact with the Toolbar, such as your queries and your use of Toolbar functionality, such as clicks on specific Toolbar buttons. (At this time, the Toolbar does not collect any information regarding your Internet activity and computer use, such as the URLs of the Web sites you visit. If we change the functionality of the Toolbar to collect such information, we will notify you in advance and provide you instruction on how to uninstall the Toolbar and/or allow you to disable the new functionality.) We also collect the normal type of information that is already available to the Web sites you visit, such as your operating system and IP address. None of this data contains personally identifiable information; it merely allow us to improve the Toolbar and our search services to better serve you.

From time to time, the Toolbar will contact our servers to provide us with the above information. The Toolbar will also contact our servers to see if you are running the most current version. If we have updates or patches to the Toolbar we may automatically provide you with these at this time.

If you are a user of some of our other services, such as the AltaVista Web site, we may have set a cookie (http://www.altavista.com/about/priv_details#3e) on your computer to help us remember some of your preferences. The Toolbar may read the cookie while you are using our services in order for us to customize these services for you. Rest assured, these cookies are completely anonymous and do not contain or transmit any personally identifiable information.

You may choose set to your browser software to refuse these cookies, however doing so may prevent us from optimizing our services to better serve you.

Use of Collected Information

We use the information collected from you to improve the Toolbar and our other services, including the services that are made available to you through the Toolbar. We may also share the anonymous information that we collect from you with our business partners or clients so that they may improve their services, which may be made available to you through the Toolbar.

Policy Changes

As Overture constantly strives to provide the best services in the industry, and as new products and changes to existing products are made, Overture reserves the right to amend this Toolbar Privacy Policy at any time. Any changes to this Toolbar Privacy Policy will be posted on this page and/or as a link from http://www.altavista.com/toolbar/ so that you are always aware of the current information collection and usage practices associated with your use of the Toolbar. Your use of the Toolbar is also governed by the End-User License Agreement, which may be accessed from http://www.altavista.com/toolbar/eula.

More Information

If you have any comments or questions about your privacy and the Toolbar, please contact us at privacy-support.