Harvard Medical School acknowledges the importance of privacy to its users. To that end, we have adopted the following policy with regard to the collection, use, and dissemination of personal information requested from visitors to this site. Personal information is information associated with a user’s name or personal identity. We are providing this policy below so that you may understand the terms and conditions associated with the provision of any personal information to us. Please note, however, that this policy has been developed with the recognition that Internet technologies continue to develop and evolve rapidly, and that such changes may require us to alter our Privacy Policy. Any such alterations will not affect our general commitment to the protection of our visitors’ privacy. We will post any changes to our Privacy Policy on this page. Your continued use of this Website constitutes acceptance of such terms and policies.

You may visit our website without identifying yourself or revealing any personally identifiable information. However, certain transactions that you choose to engage in on this site will require your submission of personal information, including, but not limited to, news feed requests, survey responses, brochure or video requests, listservs and mailing lists, applications and certain databases. As a general rule, Harvard Medical School will not sell, swap, rent, or otherwise disclose to any third party any such personal information for commercial purposes. Information will be utilized only for the general purpose stated. Harvard Medical School may disclose the information to its employees, consultants and agents (including, for purposes of the application process, alumni interviewers) who have a legitimate need to know the information. Harvard Medical School reserves the right to disclose this information under special circumstances, including disclosures required by law, court order or circumstances under which disclosure, in the sole discretion of Harvard Medical School, is necessary to protect the legal rights, including the intellectual property rights, of Harvard Medical School or the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Admissions processes for Harvard Medical School degree programs and external education programs (including continuing medical education, distance offerings and other global professional programs) require applicants to provide personal information and preferences. The applicant also has the option of providing additional company information during this process. We encourage our applicants to fill in all of this information, so that applicable Admissions Committees can select the most qualified and diverse group from among the pool of candidates. Information provided as part of an admissions process will generally be utilized only for the purpose for which it has been requested.

We do not intentionally collect personally identifiable information about children age 13 or younger. If you suspect that we have personal, identifying information about your child, please notify us immediately so that we may remove this information from our database.

Harvard Medical School may collect other information about its users that is not connected with any specific personal identity, such as data about usage and service operation. The following summarizes the types of information that we may collect.

System Information, IP Addresses and Referrers

When you connect to our website, our web server may record the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer you are using, information about your browser and operating system, date and time of access and the internet address and page which linked you to our site. The School’s staff uses such information to help diagnose problems with our server, to administer and improve our website and to generate aggregate statistical reports that analyze general user information and demographics. Unless required by legal process, we do not link IP addresses to anything personally identifiable. This means that user sessions may be tracked by IP address, but a user’s identity remains anonymous.

In addition, we ordinarily do not disclose to third parties site usage by individual IP addresses, but may do so in very limited circumstances when complying with law or legal process, working with consultants assisting us in fixing or improving our site, or in monitoring and improving the security of our network. Our staff monitors search terms that users enter into our Search Engine, but this tracking is never associated with individual users.

Cookies

Cookies are small files that are stored on your computer (unless you block them). We use cookies to understand and save your preferences for future visits and compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future. We may contract with third-party service providers to assist us in better understanding our site visitors. These service providers are not permitted to use the information collected on our behalf except to help us conduct and improve our business.

Third-Party Cookies

Cookies may be set by an organization other than hms.harvard.edu. These “third-party cookies” may, for example, originate from websites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus or other social media services for which hms.harvard.edu implemented “plug-ins.” Since the cookie policies of these sites change over time, you should determine their policies by visiting the privacy policy pages of these sites directly.

You may disable cookies through your individual browser options. If you would like to learn more about cookies please refer to the following website: allaboutcookies.org

The Harvard Medical School site contains links to other independently run Web sites within the Harvard network and to some sites outside both the “hms.edu” and “harvard.edu” domains that are not controlled by Harvard Medical School or Harvard University and are not covered by this privacy policy. Harvard Medical School is not responsible for the privacy practices, security or content of such Web sites.

If you are located in the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway (the “European Economic Area”), please click here for additional information about ways that certain Harvard University Schools, Centers, units and controlled entities, including this one, may collect, use, and share information about you.

This site has security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Internet communications, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure. While Harvard Medical School remains committed to protecting the privacy of our users, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems. We do so by using secure technology, privacy protection controls, and restrictions on employee access, however, we make no representations regarding the veracity of such measures.