Because we value your relationship with us, we have detailed below our privacy objectives for our website:

Security Practices

We recognize and respect your desire for privacy when it comes to your personal and health care affairs. We attempt to protect online information according to established company security standards and practices, and we continually evaluate new technologies for safeguarding information.

Use of Email

Please use your own best judgment when sending information via the Internet to an email address. Email sent via the Internet may pass through private and public networks with varying levels of security. Some networks may have taken steps to secure email transmissions while others have not, thereby compromising the privacy and integrity of an email. An email may be copied, altered or destroyed.

If you have personal or confidential information to relay to our company, please call the appropriate customer service phone number that you will find in Contact Us.

We preserve the content of your email, your email address and our response so that we can efficiently respond to questions you might have. We also do this in an effort to meet legal and regulatory requirements.

We will respect your request to be, or not to be, contacted by email.

Cookies, Surveys and Forms

You may have the opportunity to provide information to us through online surveys and forms. We use this information to better understand health care needs and to provide quality products, services and other opportunities.

BCBSAL wants your visit to our website to be informative and enjoyable. We plan to use any information we obtain from you to help us continually improve the content, functionality and overall usefulness of our website; but in no way will make specific and individually identifiable information given to us available without your specific consent.

As you browse, we may install cookies (tiny text files stored on your computer which record your preferences) in your browser. Cookies cannot harm your computer and they do not contain any personally identifiable information. We may disclose this non-personally identifiable information to our staff and to trusted third parties involved in the marketing of our products and services. We do not sell or rent this non-personally identifiable information to third parties.

In addition to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama using first party cookies on our website, we allow certain third parties to include web beacons within our web pages. Web beacons are image requests which are used by the third party to install their own cookie in your browser. These companies are vendors of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama who have been hired for marketing or research purposes. Member identifiable data will not be transmitted. The use of these web beacons is subject to the privacy policies of these third parties, not the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama Privacy Policy.

• Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama's websites use a variety of Web measurement software tools. The tools collect information automatically and continuously. No personally identifiable information is collected by these tools.
• When you browse through any website, certain information about your visit can be collected. We automatically collect and temporarily store the following types of information about your visit:
  • Domain from which you access the Internet
  • IP address (an IP or internet protocol address is a number that is automatically given to a computer connected to the Web)
  • Operating system on your computer and information about the browser you used when visiting the site
  • Date and time of your visit
  • Pages you visited
  • Address of the website that connected you to a Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama website (such as google.com or bing.com)
• At Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama's discretion, Google Analytics data may be examined in concert with data about Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama ads that have been shown using the Google Display Network or DoubleClick for Advertisers. Thus, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama can understand how anonymous users interacted with our website after seeing our ads.
• Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama may use this data to inform and optimize our ad campaigns.

• If you wish to opt out of the DoubleClick cookie, visit the Google advertising opt-out page. You may also opt out of the use of Analytics by visiting the Google Analytics Opt-out page .

Updates to the Statement

Evolving technology will continue to provide us with new and better ways to collect and use information so that we may better serve your health coverage needs. We may revise or update the BCBSAL Privacy Statement in the future to reflect these technological advances, and we encourage you to return to this page from time to time for any updates.

Confidentiality

Again, please use your own best judgment when sending information via the Internet to an email address.

If you have personal or confidential information to relay to our company and have concerns about the security of your email, please call the appropriate member service phone number that you will find in Contact Us.

If you do provide personal information, such as an email, telephone or fax number, or other identifying information, we do not plan to disclose it without your consent. We maintain this information, as well as all web-based transactions, according to our usual high, government regulated, security and confidentiality standards.