Privacy Policy

Privacy Statements

Privacy Statement

Last updated as of April 23, 2012

Who We Are

Thank you for your trust in Alcon Laboratories, Inc. and Ciba Vision Corporation and our affiliates, and for taking the time to read our Privacy Statement. We are part of the Novartis Group, world leaders in healthcare, with core businesses in pharmaceuticals, consumer health, generics, vaccines, and diagnostics. Alcon Laboratories, Inc. and Ciba Vision Corporation, together with our affiliates, constitute the Eye Care Division of the Novartis Group and are collectively referred to as “Alcon/Ciba” in this Privacy Statement. This Privacy Statement applies to information collected through this website and any mobile sites, applications, widgets, and other interactive features that link to this Privacy Statement.

Collection of Personal Information

The purpose of this Privacy Statement is to explain what Alcon/Ciba may do with personal information that you provide to us, such as your name, mailing address, title, employer, email address, eye care interests, health information, or other information you choose to provide to us. We want you to know how your personal information will be protected, with whom we may share it, and for what purposes.

Use of Personal Information

Many of our services do not require any form of registration or identification. However, some of our services may require registration or that you provide personal information. Below are some examples of how we may use personal information:

to respond to your inquiries and fulfill your requests, such as to send you newsletters.
to send you important information regarding the Site, changes to our terms, conditions, and policies and/or other administrative information.
to complete and fulfill your purchase, for example, to process your payments, have your order delivered to you, communicate with you regarding your purchase, and provide you with related customer service.
to send you marketing communications that we believe may be of interest to you.
to help you identify a local doctor.
to provide educational materials to you.
to help you manage your eye care appointments. By using this functionality, you are telling us that you are entitled to use and provide us with any of your family member's personal information, including health information, that you provide.
to personalize your experience on the Site by presenting products and offers tailored to you.
to allow you to participate in sweepstakes, contests, and similar promotions, and to administer these activities. Some of these activities have additional rules, which could contain additional information about how we use and disclose your personal information, so we suggest that you read these rules carefully.
to allow you to send messages to a friend through the Site. By using this functionality, you are telling us that you are entitled to use and provide us with your friend’s name and email address.
for our business purposes, such as data analysis, audits, developing new products, enhancing our website, improving our services, identifying usage trends, and determining the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns.
as we believe to be necessary or appropriate: (a) under applicable law, including laws outside your country of residence; (b) to comply with legal process; (c) to respond to requests from public and government authorities, including public and government authorities outside your country of residence; (d) to enforce our terms and conditions; (e) to protect our operations or those of any of our affiliates; (f) to protect our rights, privacy, safety, or property, and/or that of our affiliates, you, or others; and (g) to allow us to pursue available remedies or limit the damages that we may sustain.

Collection and Use of Other Information

When you visit our website, we may collect other information if your computer is set to allow the collection of browser information, information collected through cookies, pixel tags, or other technologies, demographic information or other information provided by you, and aggregated information (“Other Information”). (You can turn off our ability to collect some of this information on most computers.) This type of information allows us to evaluate customer interest in Sites and perform other market research activities, such as surveying browsing habits on our sites. It also allows us to monitor traffic to our Sites. Some of the typical computer techniques we may use are "cookies,” "internet tags" which are also called "action tags,” "single-pixel GIFs,” clear GIFs, "invisible GIFs,” and "1-by-1 GIFs”. If you would like more information about web tags and cookies associated with online advertising or how to opt out of third-party collection of information, please visit the Network Advertising Initiative website.

Your “IP Address” is a number that is automatically assigned to the computer that you are using by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). An IP Address is identified and logged automatically in our server log files whenever a user visits the Site, along with the time of the visit and the page(s) that were visited. Collecting IP Addresses is standard practice on the Internet and is done automatically by many websites. We use IP Addresses for purposes such as calculating Site usage levels, helping diagnose server problems, and administering the Site.

Information such as your location and zip code, as well as other information, such as your preferred means of communication and the products that you use, is collected when you voluntarily provide this information. Unless combined with personal information, this information does not personally identify you or any other user of the Site.

Please note that we may use and disclose Other Information for any purpose, except where we are required to do otherwise under applicable law. If we are required to treat Other Information as personal information under applicable law, then we may use and disclose Other Information for all the purposes for which we use and disclose personal information.

In some instances, we may combine Other Information with personal information (such as combining your name with your zip code). If we combine any Other Information with personal information, the combined information will be treated by us as personal information as long as it is combined.

Sharing of Personal information

Your personal information may be disclosed:

to our affiliates for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy (you can find a list of most of the Novartis Group affiliates in Novartis' latest annual report, which may be found at Novartis.com.
to our third-party service providers who provide services such as website hosting, data analysis, payment processing, order fulfillment, infrastructure provision, IT services, customer service, email delivery services, credit card processing, auditing services, and other similar services.
to enable them to provide services.
to third parties to permit them to send you marketing communications.
to third-party sponsors of sweepstakes, contests, and similar promotions.
to identify you to anyone to whom you send messages through the Site.
by you, on message boards, chat, profile pages, and blogs, and other services to which you are able to post information and materials. Please note that any information you post or disclose through these services will become public information, and may be available to visitors to the Site and to the general public. We urge you to be very careful when deciding to disclose your personal information, or any other information, on the Site.
to a third party in the event of any reorganization, merger, sale, joint venture, assignment, transfer, or other disposition of all or any portion of our business, assets, or stock (including in connection with any bankruptcy or similar proceedings).
as we believe to be necessary or appropriate: (a) under applicable law, including laws outside your country of residence; (b) to comply with legal process; (c) to respond to requests from public and government authorities including public and government authorities outside your country of residence; (d) to enforce our terms and conditions; (e) to protect our operations or those of any of our affiliates; (f) to protect our rights, privacy, safety, or property, and/or that of our affiliates, you, or others; and (g) to allow us to pursue available remedies or limit the damages that we may sustain.

Choices and Access

We give you many choices regarding our use and disclosure of your personal information for marketing purposes. You may opt out from receiving electronic marketing communications from us or from our sharing personal information for marketing purposes with affiliates or unaffiliated third parties. Please indicate your choices by contacting us. We will endeavor to comply with your request(s) as soon as reasonably practicable. Please note that if you opt out as described above, we will not be able to remove your personal information from the databases of our affiliates or unaffiliated third parties with which we have already shared your personal information (i.e., to which we have already provided your personal information as of the date that we implement your opt-out request). Please also note that if you do opt out of receiving marketing-related messages from us, we may still send you important administrative messages, and you cannot opt out from receiving administrative messages.

How You Can Access, Change, or Suppress Your Personal Information

We encourage you to update the information that you provide to us, such as providing us with a new mailing or email address. This will help us continue to provide information to you that best meets your needs. If you would like to review, correct, update, suppress, delete, or otherwise limit our use of your personal information that has been previously provided to us, you may contact us. In your request, please make clear what information you would like to have changed or whether you would like to have your personal information suppressed from our database or otherwise let us know what limitations you would like to put on our use of your personal information. We will try to comply with your request as soon as reasonably practicable.

Cross-Border Transfer

Due to the global nature of our company, your personal information may be stored and processed in any country where we have facilities or in which we engage service providers. We endeavor to protect personal information entrusted to us no matter what country it is stored in or transferred to and seek to have appropriate procedures in place to help ensure the security of your personal information. By using our Site you consent to the transfer of information to countries outside of your country of residence, including the United States, which may have different data protection rules than in your country.

As part of our commitment to privacy, Ciba Vision Corporation has certified to the Safe Harbor privacy program for information it receives from affiliates, customers, clinical trials, physicians and investigators and business partners in the European Union and Switzerland relating to customers, vendors, clinical trial, participants, patients, physicians, investigators and consumers. For more information about Ciba Vision Corporation's Safe Harbor privacy policy, please visit the Ciba Vision Corporation Safe Harbor Privacy Statement. Alcon is in the process of certifying for Safe Harbor and hopes to be certified within 12 months of the date of this updated policy.

Data Retention

We will retain your personal information for the period necessary to fulfill the purpose outlined in this Privacy Statement, unless a longer retention period is required or allowed by law.

Security of Your Information

We use appropriate technical, administrative, and physical safeguards to protect data that pertains to you from loss, misuse, or alteration. Of course, no organization can guarantee the absolute security of personal information. You should keep in mind that Internet transmissions, particularly email transmissions, are never 100 percent secure or error-free. Accordingly, we also caution you to guard your own computer and password against unauthorized access by others.

Links to Other Sites

This Privacy Statement applies only to this website and not to third-party websites. We may provide links to other websites which we believe may be of interest to our visitors. However, due to the nature of the World Wide Web, we cannot guarantee the privacy standards of websites to which we link or be responsible for the contents of sites other than this one. This Privacy Policy is not intended to be applicable to any linked, non-Alcon/Ciba site.

Protection of Children

The Site is not directed to individuals under the age of thirteen (13), and we request that these individuals do not provide personal information through the Site.

Sensitive Information

We ask that you not send us, and you not disclose, any sensitive personal information (e.g., social security numbers, or information related to racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religion or other beliefs, health, criminal background, or trade union membership) on or through the Site.

Updated Privacy Statement

We may change this Privacy Policy. Please take a look at the “Last Updated” legend on this page to see when this Privacy Policy was last revised. Any changes to this Privacy Policy will become effective when we post the revised Privacy Policy on the Site. Your use of the Site following these changes means that you accept the revised Privacy Policy.

How to Contact Us

If you have any questions about our Privacy Statement, please write to us at:

Alcon Laboratories, Inc.
Privacy Officer
6201 South Freeway
Fort Worth, Texas 76134