Privacy Policy

CenturyLink U.S. Privacy Notice

This Privacy Notice describes the types of Personal Information CenturyLink Residential and Small Business Services collects, processes, maintains, protects, and shares. In the event of any conflicts between this Privacy Notice and a separate agreement between you and CenturyLink, the terms of the separate agreement shall apply to the extent permitted by law.

Residents of states that provide privacy rights can view our state privacy details.

What does this Privacy Notice cover?

This Privacy Notice applies to the Personal Information collected when you use or interact with CenturyLink’s products, services, and networks, including our websites. These may include Internet, Phone, Fiber Internet, and other products and services CenturyLink and our affiliates provide.

It also applies to the Personal Information we collect from third parties and potential business customers to market our products and services, to enter service contracts, to complete installations, for support, and for billing for services. 

As used in this Privacy Notice, “Personal Information” refers to any information relating to you as a person.  It may be information that by itself can identify you, such as your name, or it may be information that identifies you only when combined with other available information, such as your social media username when combined with your email address.

What Personal Information do we Collect?

 We may collect the following types of Personal Information from you:

• Identifiers, such as your first name, middle name, last name, salutation, date of birth, social security, financial account details (i.e., credit card or bank account number), email address, postal address, service address, phone number, and similar contact data.
• Customer Records, such as customer account or profile information, name, account name, other characteristics, identifiers, or descriptions, email and physical address, phone number, and other contact information, account credentials, communications preferences, billing and payment information, online account/profile creation for an account, customer service and support tickets and records, preferred contact method, and other information you provide in order to purchase and use our products or services.
• Customer Support Records, such as email correspondence, recorded conversations with our agents and recorded online sessions for quality assurance, training, and online session analysis.
  • This may include the text or recording of “click to chat” sessions, screen shots for remote access for technical support.
  • For network support, we may log dates, times, and the telephone numbers of calls to and from our customers, for activities such as toll billing.
  • For the “call trace” feature, we will record the number of the calling party.
  • For My CenturyLink’s app, we may use third-party analytics and monitoring software to record system and user actions. This data is used to detect and resolve issues and to confirm the app is functioning properly.
• Employment and Applicant Information, such as information about your personal and employment background, current job title, job function, racial background (as required under law), gender, citizenship, veteran, or military status. For additional details regarding Privacy Practices for applicants, refer to the Global Employment Applicant and Talent Community Privacy Notice.  
• Internet or other Electronic Network Activity Information, such as information about your interaction with CenturyLink including cookies, session logs, search history and website interaction analysis your activity and any changes you made to the consumer account(s) you are authorized to manage, inquiries you submit, feedback and similar commercial activity information.
• Information from Third Parties, such as information about our customers from another business that sells our services, or when we bundle our services with services from a television or wireless company. Information for billing services on the behalf of a long-distance company or other type of service provider, information from businesses that gather it from external sources, such as the Census Bureau, public records, and demographic data. This could include information such as gender, age range, education, income levels, length of residence, and email addresses.
• Commercial Information, such as electronic marketing materials, products or services purchased, obtained, or considered, or other purchasing or consuming histories or tendencies. For telecommunications services like voice calling or text messaging, CenturyLink and third parties may also analyze Personal Information collected during such interactions.
• Sensitive Personal Information, such as your precise geolocation, government identifier, financial account information, and health data. (CenturyLink does not collect your health data as part of providing your services; however, if you provide this information this may be noted in your account.) Note: when required, CenturyLink will obtain your consent before collecting and using sensitive Personal Information.
• There may be circumstances where we request Personal Information other than as identified above.  CenturyLink will do this only where necessary or justified to improve the services we provide and to increase the relevance of your service portfolio and will be treated the same as the other Personal Information identified in this Privacy Notice.

How do we use your Personal Information: 

CenturyLink will use your Personal Information to provide services, to set up and maintain accounts, provide, and repair our services and equipment, respond to customers’ questions and concerns, bill and collect for our services, plan for future development of our network and services, to market our services, to communicate with our customers and to others about our services. We also use Personal Information we obtain from third parties, including demographic data to help us serve our customers, predict what new services they may want, and determine a customer’s creditworthiness. CenturyLink may also use your Personal Information to assess and implement mergers, acquisitions, reorganizations, bankruptcies, and other business transactions such as financings, and to administer our business, accounting, auditing, compliance, recordkeeping, and legal functions.

• Voice Services– When providing local, long distance, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, we use Personal Information as outlined in the section; What Personal Information do we Collect. For VoIP service, we use the customer-provided service address in your online customer profile. In the event of an emergency, we provide this information to 911 service providers and emergency responders locate you.
• Internet Services – We gather and use data generated on our networks to manage, plan for future network development, market our services, and for operational efficiencies.
  • We may monitor our networks to check for viruses, to control spam, to prevent attacks that might disable our services, to ensure that your traffic does not violate your subscriber agreement or our acceptable use policies, and to guard against other inappropriate or illegal activity. This may include network traffic patterns, such as traffic volumes, beginning and ending points of transmissions, and the types of electronic applications.
  • We may also gather details from gateways, modems and/or routers; for example, the number and types of devices connected and the method of connection (Wi-Fi versus wired).
  • We may analyze some elements of your online activity, including websites visited, cookies, session logs, search history and website interaction analysis of your activity to include third party analytics, any changes you made to your account and other communications, such as past customer service calls, for purposes relating to new services, service changes, or promotional offers that may improve your customer experience. Please see our cookie notice for more details.

 

Children’s use of CenturyLink internet services: We understand that children may use our internet services. When using our internet services, authorized legal guardians have the responsibility to monitor what their children are doing on the internet and what sites they are visiting. For more information about online safety, please visit the Federal Trade Commission resource for internet safety.

 

When and with whom do we share Personal Information: CenturyLink may share your Personal Information with other entities, including our affiliates, subsidiaries and third parties that provide support, such as service delivery, troubleshooting or marketing for our products and service offerings.  We may also share your Personal Information with other entities, including our affiliates and subsidiaries, and credit reporting agencies.

 

CenturyLink may also share Personal Information with others:

• When you direct us to do so, including to authorize other users on your account
• When required by law or to respond to legal process
• To protect or enforce our property or rights or the safety of our employees, our customers, or other individuals
• When merging, selling, or transferring segments of our business, assets or acquiring other businesses
• For use in Caller ID services, such a blocking or call-identification
• For sharing of Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI), a subcategory of protected personal information defined by federal law as information about a consumer’s account, including usage and billing of telecommunications services. CPNI includes what services you subscribe to, how you use them, and what you are charged for them. It does not include your name, address, telephone number or other types of information such as information about your telephone equipment. CenturyLink partners with other parties and partners to provide certain business products and services to including support, transmitting, collecting, processing, or storing information, or engaging in sales and marketing activities on behalf of CenturyLink. CenturyLink contractually requires these service providers and partners to handle the Personal Information shared as confidential and for use only for providing their services on our behalf. 

Where do we send your Personal Information? 

CenturyLink provides consumer (residential and small business) products and services in the United States. CenturyLink transfers your Personal Information as necessary to conduct business operations, provide services, and engage in marketing activities.  In particular, the Personal Information is used to confirm and enable those individuals who have been authorized by our customers to interact with CenturyLink on their behalf and Personal Information contained in our systems, records, activity logs and marketing databases may be accessible by our affiliates and subsidiaries. 

To provide and support our services, sometimes we send data to other companies as service providers to transmit, collect, process, or store information for us. We require these service providers to treat the information we share with them as confidential and to use it only for providing their services to us. These include:

• Billing, auditors, and collection providers, such as payment processors and organizations that assist us in assessing your credit and payment status.
• Analytics service providers, including entities that analyze traffic to and on our websites, analyze how our services are used, and assist with identifying and communicating with potential customers.
• Directory publishers. We are legally required to accept directory listings for publication, we must provide that listing information to all directory publishers – both our official publisher as well as third-party publishers.
• Directory assistance providers. The Federal Communications Commission requires carriers to share customer names, addresses, and telephone numbers with directory assistance providers (including names but not telephone numbers of non-published customers).
• Marketing, advertising, and sales providers to assist in creating and executing marketing, advertising, and sales programs, including order application processing, printing, mailing, and electronic communications.
• Identity confirmation services to match personal information such as name, address, and the length of their service with CenturyLink in our databases to confirm the assist in the identification of potential customers with our third-party partners.
• Security providers that assist with security incident verification and response, service notifications, fraud prevention, identity verification and management, and authentication.
• Responding to lawful process. We may provide personal information to the government in response to a subpoena, warrant or court order.
• Reporting of child pornography. We are required to report apparent violations of laws concerning child pornography when we have a reasonable belief of facts or circumstances that warrant a report. In those cases, we contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and may also contact law enforcement directly.
• Other voluntary releases of information. Under certain conditions, we voluntarily share personal information with governmental agencies:

• If we encounter situations where we think our customers or others that we might be in contact with are violating the law;
  • When customers complain about us to federal and state regulatory authorities, we provide pertinent information (including customer information) in response to those complaints;
  • We may share information with the government to protect or enforce our rights or property, including information indicating that some portion of our network or the network of another provider is or has been subject to a cyber-attack;
  • Periodically, we compare our customers’ name and address information with the information possessed by the U.S. Postal Service;
  • We also share information with federal and state agencies in connection with their programs to fund universal service and other communications assistance programs for low-income or otherwise eligible persons, including persons with disabilities.

How do we protect your Personal Information?

CenturyLink implements a variety of security and operational measures to help prevent your Personal Information from unauthorized access, use or disclosure. We limit our collection and use of your Personal Information to the minimum necessary.
CenturyLink limits the availability of your Personal Information to the purposes specified in this Privacy Notice. 

Your choices and control over your Personal Information:

In certain U.S. states, you have the right to ask us to provide you access to, and obtain a copy of, the Personal Information we have about you, to request correction and erasure of your Personal Information, the right to ask us to restrict our use of your Personal Information, to object to our use of your Personal Information, including selling or sharing Personal Information, and, in certain circumstances, the right to direct us to send your Personal Information to another entity, and not to be discriminated against for exercising your rights.
You may designate someone as an authorized agent to submit requests and act on your behalf. To do so, you must provide us with written permission to allow the authorized agent to act on your behalf. We may also ask you directly to verify that you have authorized your authorized agent to act on your behalf.

We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising, and analytics partners. You can exercise your rights to opt-out of sale or processing personal data for targeted advertising, by clicking on the link “Your Opt-Out Rights”. For more details see our cookie notice.

We do not have actual knowledge that we sell or share the Personal Information of individuals under sixteen (16) years of age.

Additional information for Residents of Certan U.S. States:

Your privacy rights may vary depending on where you live.  View the link here.

• Telephone directory – You can choose whether and how your entry appears in CenturyLink directories and through CenturyLink directory assistance. You can choose not to have your name and address in these directory services at all or opt for full names or initials, or full or partial addresses.
• Marketing options – CenturyLink provides an option to unsubscribe from any future marketing communications in every marketing communication we send out. Customers who use My CenturyLink may also specify their preferences in their account profile by selecting “Manage Notifications”. Preferences may be selected by accessing our Marketing Preferences form. Requesters do not have to be a customer to do so. Requests can also be made by contacting Privacy@centurylink.com.
• Account notification options –You can opt-out of service notifications such as repair, billing, and order status notifications from us via text or email messages. You may reply to a text message with “stop”, or customers who use My CenturyLink may also change their preferences in their account profile by selecting “Manage Notifications”. Requests can also be made by contacting Privacy@centurylink.com.
• Consumer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) – If you subscribe to CenturyLink services, when interacting with our customer service representatives, we may ask you for your consent to the use of your CPNI for the purpose of reviewing your account and providing you with an offer for other products and services. If you deny or restrict your consent for us to use your CPNI, CenturyLink will continue to provide services with no impact to service levels, now or in the future.
• Data Subject Requests (DSR) – To initiate the process, submit a DSR. Please identify the right(s) you wish to exercise, and the Personal Information involved, and why you believe CenturyLink possesses your Personal Information.  We may request additional information to help us search for the Personal Information you requested, so you should be as precise as possible in making your request.  We will provide you with one copy of Personal Information we have about you free of charge.  For any further copies requested, we may charge a reasonable fee based on administrative costs.  For any request made by email, unless you request otherwise, we will provide the information via email in a commonly used form, such as a Word document, Excel sheet or PDF as appropriate. CenturyLink is committed to maintaining and using deidentified information in compliance with applicable law.

Cookies and Web Beacons:

CenturyLink’s use of cookies and web beacons is managed by our Cookie Settings consent tool, which is presented on various CenturyLink websites. Cookie settings are based on your location and specific to the regulatory requirements outlined in various U.S.  jurisdictions. CenturyLink also honors browser-based blocking, so if a visitor has a blocker on their browser, the visitor can block all but “strictly necessary” cookies. CenturyLink also honors opt-out preference signals when required.

We also use third party tools, such as Google Analytics, which are operated by third party companies, to evaluate usage of our Site and Services. These third-party analytics companies use cookies, pixels, and other tracking technologies to collect usage data about our Services to provide us with reports and metrics that help us evaluate usage of our Services, improve our Site, and enhance performance and user experiences. To learn more about Google’s privacy practices, please review Google Privacy and Terms on How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services. You can also download the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on Page to prevent your data from being used by Google Analytics. Detailed information regarding CenturyLink’s cookie practices and terminology, can be reviewed in the cookie notice.

How long we keep your information:

We keep your Personal Information for different lengths of time depending on the type of information and business and legal requirements. For example, if you are a customer, we keep information that personally identifies you if you subscribe to one or more of our services. If you no longer subscribe to a service, we still may need that information for business and legal requirements, such as to protect against fraud, calculate taxes, respond to legal requests, or for pending litigation.

Changes to this Privacy Notice:

When we post changes to this Privacy Notice, we will revise the date at the beginning of this Privacy Notice. If we make material changes to this Privacy Notice that change the use of Personal Information that we have previously collected, we will notify you through written, electronic, or other means so that you can make any necessary decisions about your ongoing use of our services.

How can you contact us regarding questions about this Privacy Notice:

CenturyLink and its affiliates are controllers for Personal Information we collect from you as it relates to contacting you about our business products and service offerings that your employer may be interested in.  Our principal address for the purposes of this Privacy Notice is:

CenturyLink

Privacy Office

931 14th Street

Denver, CO 80202