Protecting your privacy is very important to us. Our Web site links to other National Institutes of Health (NIH) sites, federal agency sites and occasionally, to private organizations. Once you leave the primary NIH.gov site, you are subject to the privacy policy for the site(s) you are visiting. We do not collect any personally identifiable information (PII) about you during your visit to NIH Web sites unless you choose to provide it to us. We do, however, collect some data about your visit to our Web site to help us better understand how the public uses the site and how to make it more helpful. We collect information from visitors who read, browse, and/or download information from our Web site. NIH never collects information for commercial marketing or any purpose unrelated to the NIH mission and goals. When visitors submit questions or comments via the Ask NIH online form, NIH staff responds to the inquiries and files them. Only designated staff members requiring access to the emails to respond, may view, or answer them.
When you browse through any Web site, certain information about your visit can be collected. We automatically collect and temporarily store the following type of information about your visit:
- Domain from which you access the Internet;
- IP address (an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to a computer when surfing the Web);
- Operating system and information about the browser used when visiting the site;
- Date and time of your visit;
- Pages you visited; and,
- Address of the Web site that connected you to an NIH Web site (such as google.com or bing.com); and,
- Demographic and interest data.
We use this information to measure the number of visitors to our site and its various sections and to help make our site more useful to visitors. This information cannot be used to identify you as an individual.