Site Security

Practices for School of Medicine sites

All Web sites at the UM-Miller School of Medicine are subject to the organization's privacy and security policies.  In general, those policies limit use of your personal information to appropriate business and regulatory functions, consistent with the conditions under which the information was originally provided.

In general, there will be no disclosures of your personal information to third parties or government agencies unless state or federal law so requires, or such action is required to protect the integrity, safety and security of UM information systems.  For details, read the full School of Medicine Web Privacy Statement.

The remainder of this page provides information about the privacy practices for the Web sites of the School of Medicine's Department of Medical Information Technology ("Medical IT").

Identifiable personal information

Medical IT makes every effort to minimize the amount of identifiable personal information that is collected or stored, and to assure appropriate security practices where such collection or storage cannot be avoided.

All transactions involving sensitive personal information use secure (encrypted) Web page transfers.  Such information is stored in access-controlled data repositories.  Particularly sensitive personal information is stored in encrypted form within these repositories.  This includes the personal data necessary to identify you for transactions purposes, such as answers to your security questions.

As on School of Medicine sites generally, there are no disclosures of your personal information to third parties or government agencies unless state or federal law so requires, or such action is required to protect the integrity, safety and security of information systems. 

If you believe information about you has been compromised or used inappropriately in any way, please contact the Medical IT Information Security group immediately. 

Information about your browsing

When you access Medical IT Web sites, "logging" software automatically records data about your visit.  That includes, but is not limited to:

• the domain name, host, and Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer you used;
• the operating system and browser used on that computer;
• the time, date and duration of your access; and
• the "referring" location (the site you visited just prior to your arrival).

Installation of tracking software (including "cookies") can reveal additional information, such as the sequence of pages viewed, and the time spent on each, during a particular "visit."

In general, we do not use such information to track your individual behavior.  Only in the case of suspected malicious or illegal uses would we access logged data for this purpose.  We do monitor page views and other utilization statistics, but only in the aggregate in order to improve the usefulness of site content.

Information sent in electronic mail

Information you send in electronic mail (email) is generally not immune from transmission errors or interception by third parties.  We recommend that communications outside of the secured areas on this Web site make every effort to avoid reliance on email for transmission of sensitive information.

Information sent entirely within the medical campus Exchange system is more secure than that sent to or from an external email system.  However, even this cannot be guaranteed as secure enough for sensitive information transfers.

For additional material on electronic mail and Web security, and recommended practices, click here.

Information sent in secured and unsecured forms

Forms that solicit non-sensitive information, such as requests for help or to provide feedback, do not use secure (encrypted) connections.  Accordingly, sensitive information should not be sent via such forms.

Forms that solicit sensitive information always use secure (encrypted) connections, identified by "https" in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address for the page and, usually, a "lock" icon on the status bar of your browser.  Be aware of these signals before entering any sensitive information.

Privacy and security on linked sites

Medical IT is not responsible for, and can make no representations about, the privacy and security policies of third-party linked sites.