The American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.
Internet Privacy and Confidentiality Policy

The American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc. (AUAER) understands the importance of privacy of personal information. The AUA is committed to honoring your privacy, and to offering special protections for any personal information you choose to share with us. The document you are reading is our privacy policy, and it describes what information we may collect about you, what uses we may make of it, and what precautions we take against unauthorized access or use of your information.

Continuing Medical Education

When you use our site or register for a Continuing Medical Education ("CME") or a Continuing Education ("CE") activity through our Web site, we collect certain personally identifiable information from you such as your name, e-mail address and mailing address. In addition to personally identifiable information, we collect aggregated non-personally identifiable information about the activities undertaken by our users. We use the information that we collect in several ways:

1. The AUA is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education ("ACCME") to provide continuing medical education for physicians. As an ACCME accredited entity, we are required periodically to submit aggregated data about CME participants and the CME activities we certify. These reports may include personally identifiable information about you and credits issued to you, for the purpose of maintaining records that you can request from the accredited provider for up to six (6) years;
2. Commercial supporters of CME/CE and other activities on our Web site will receive only aggregated data about activities that are relevant to their interests and/or the courses they support;
3. The AUA staff will have internal access to files containing personally identifiable information, including evaluation forms and aggregated CME/CE participant information. These files can be accessed in order to respond to your questions or comments. Our staff may also use personally identifiable information, including registration information and evaluation data, in assessing educational needs and planning marketing activities; and
4. We may use the information we collect as otherwise permitted in this Privacy Policy.

Use of Cookies

Cookies are a technology used by the AUA's web sites to identify a user as the user moves through the Web site. Your browser allows us to place some information on your computer's hard drive that identifies the computer you are using. We use cookies to personalize our Web sites and to track your usage across all of our Web sites.

Your Web browser can be set to allow you to control whether you will accept cookies, reject cookies, or to notify you each time a cookie is sent to you. If your browser is set to reject cookies, Web sites that are cookie-enabled will not recognize you when you return to the Web site, and some Web site functionality may be lost. The Help section of your browser will tell you how to prevent your browser from accepting cookies.

Uses We Make of Information

In this section of our privacy policy, we identify the ways we may use information about you that we have collected.

Aggregate Data

We create aggregate data about visitors to our Web sites for product development and improvement activities. We also use it for market analysis.

Third Parties

In addition to aggregate information (discussed previously), we may share some kinds of information with third parties as described below. We may contract with other companies and individuals to help us provide services. For example, we may host some of our Web sites on another company's computers or hire technical consultants to assist with Web-based tools. In order to perform their jobs, these other companies may have limited access to some of the personal information we maintain about our users. We require all such companies to comply with the terms of our privacy policies, to limit their access to any personal information to the minimum necessary to perform their obligations, and not to use the information they may access for purposes other than fulfilling their responsibilities to us. We use our best efforts to limit the use of other companies in areas where personally identifiable information may be involved.

If we discover that a third party inadvertently disclosed personal information about any of our customers, we will take immediate action to prevent further occurrences.

Protection of Information

In this section of our privacy policy, we discuss the security measures we take to protect information that we have collected about you.

General Policies

We have implemented technology and security policies, rules and other measures to protect the personal data that we have under our control from unauthorized access, improper use, alteration, unlawful or accidental destruction, and accidental loss. We also protect your information by requiring that all our employees and others who have access to or are associated with the processing of your data respect your confidentiality.

Storage of Health Information

Personally identifiable health information you share with us is stored on our database servers. We have a firewall to prevent individuals from accessing information without authorization. Data centers are physically secure and protected from unauthorized access by unauthorized persons. Physical access to the servers requires individual authorization and authentication.

Information in our data centers is backed up routinely, in order to aid in the recovery of information in the event of accidental damage of information or due to a natural disaster. The backup media is stored in a physically secure storage facility.

Access to Information and Choices

In this section of our privacy policy, we tell you how to obtain and correct information we have about you, and how to choose what types of information you may share with us.

Privacy Questions or Concerns about One of Our Web Sites

For privacy questions or concerns about one of the AUA's Web sites, please contact education@AUAnet.org.