Privacy Policy Statement for USPTO

Thank you for visiting the United States Patent and Trademark Office website and reviewing our privacy policy. Our privacy policy is simple: we will collect no personal information about you when you visit our website unless you choose to provide that information to us.

Here is how we handle information about your visit to our website:

Information Collected and Stored Automatically

The USPTO web server collects and saves only the default information customarily logged by World-Wide Web server software. Specifically, for each http request received, the date and time, the originating IP address, the object requested, and the completion status of the request is collected and saved.

We analyze these logs monthly to determine the traffic through the server during that month in hits, the number of pages served, and the level of demand for pages of interest during each month. We may also analyze accesses to particular pages to determine US versus non-US use, government agency versus private use, and other statistics that may be of value to us in establishing priorities and allocating resources in order to better accomplish our dissemination mission.

E-mail submitted to USPTO is saved in accordance to Department of Commerce policy and NARA guidelines. If you choose to provide us with personal information in e-mail, we use that information to respond to your message and to help us get you the information you have requested. We do not collect personal information for any purpose other than to respond to you. We only share the information you give us with another government agency if your inquiry relates to that agency, or as otherwise required by law. Moreover, we do not store any personal information independent of the e-mail message, create individual profiles with the information you provide, or give it to any private organizations. We do not collect information for commercial marketing.

Links to Other Sites

Our Website has links to many other federal agencies. In a few cases we link to private organizations, with their permission. Before leaving our website, a page will appear informing you that you are leaving our server. Once you link to another site, you are subject to the privacy policy of the new site.

Kids Pages

We are especially concerned about protecting the privacy of children. We hope parents and teachers are involved in children’s Internet explorations. We respect the need to protect the identity of any children who participate in an Internet exhibition of their work. We do not request any information from children on the Kids Pages. We do, however, encourage them to participate in contests, but such participation is carried out through postal mail. Click here for more details on contest rules and regulations.

Use of Cookies on TEAS and OEMS:

We use memory resident cookies on our TEAS and OEMS systems to maintain browser session integrity. No personal information is gathered and it is not stored on your hard drive. When you exit our site, the cookie terminates.

Last updated: August 16, 2000