At Google, we strive to develop innovative services to better serve our users. We recognize that privacy is an important issue, so we design and operate our services with the protection of your privacy in mind. This Privacy Policy outlines the types of personal information we gather when you use Google's services, as well as some of the steps we take to safeguard it.
The following principles apply to the personally identifying information we ask for and that you provide. "Personally identifying information" is information that individually identifies you, such as your name, physical address or email address. You can find more details about the data we collect on particular services by clicking the links on the side of this page.
Data collection
Google search, the Google Toolbar, Google News and some other services do not require any personally identifying information.
Google collects limited non-personally identifying information your browser makes available whenever you visit a website. This log information includes your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We use this information to operate, develop and improve our services.
Some of our services require you to register for an account. Google asks you for some personal information in order to create an account (typically your name, email address and a password for your account) and we will use that information to provide the service. For certain services, such as our advertising programs, we may request credit card or other payment information which we maintain in encrypted form on secure servers.
When we require personally identifying information, we will inform you about the types of information we collect and how we use it. We hope this will help you make an informed decision about sharing your personal information with us.
Cookies
Upon your first visit to Google, a cookie is sent to your computer that uniquely identifies your browser. A "cookie" is a small file containing a string of characters that is sent to your computer when you visit a website. We use cookies to improve the quality of our service and to better understand how people interact with us. Google does this by storing user preferences in cookies and by tracking user trends and patterns of how people search. Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies. You can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, some Google features or services may not function properly without cookies.
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