Symptom

You are concerned about the privacy of your Internet browsing and activity while K9 Web Protection is installed.

Solution
Blue Coat Systems is dedicated to our customers' privacy and security in every way. For obvious privacy reasons, we do not collect any personal information beyond that which you voluntarily provide (i.e. your name and email address), and the little information we do receive from you is never given or sold to any third party.

Blue Coat has build a massive database and dynamic rating system which thousands of corporations pay to use so they can filter traffic in their organization. K9 Web Protection is allowed to utilize that same database.

For instance, if you were to browse to www.google.com, the K9 program on your computer would simply ask one of our servers "what is google.com rated?" Google returns a rating of "Search Engines/Portals." If the site was not yet rated in our database, it would be passed on to our Dynamic Real-Time Rating system to be rated instantly. This all usually happens within 1/2 second. When K9 receives the response, it checks the settings you have set to determine whether to allow or block the request. All logs of your internet activity are stored only on your local computer.

The information transmitted from your K9 software to our ratings service is covered in our license agreement which each user agrees to when installing the product. The section pertaining to your privacy states:

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"In order to function, the Product sends information from your computer to Blue Coat's Web rating service. When communicating with the Product, the Blue Coat rating service receives from your computer (i) information identifying your Product license, (ii) information that relates your Product license to your authorized computer and (iii) the URLs of the web sites you need rated. The Service logs the number of web site rating requests made under your Product license in order to monitor and track fraudulent use of the Blue Coat rating service. However, the Service does not track which web sites you request to have rated under your Product license, and the Service does not develop any history of any of your web browsing activities."
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We feel we have done everything possible to protect our customers' privacy, while providing the best filtering solution available.