If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we will gather and store certain information about your visit automatically. This information does not identify you personally. We automatically collect and store only the following information about your visit:

• The date and time you access our site.
• The Internet domain (for example, “yourisp.net” if you use a private Internet access account, or “yourschool.edu” if you connect from a university’s domain) and IP address (an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web) from which you access our website.
• The pages you visit.
• The type of browser and operating system used to access our site.
• If you linked to our website from another website, the address of that website.

We use the information we collect to count the number and type of visitors to the different pages on our site, and to help us make our site more useful to visitors like you.

In a few areas on our Web Site, we may ask you to provide information that will enable us to verify whether you are entitled to access and use certain information, materials and services available from our Web Site, or to enable us to enhance your site visit. It is completely optional for you to participate. However, failure to participate may mean that you cannot access and use certain information, materials and services.

For example, we request information from you when you:

• Provide feedback in an online survey.
• Register as a museum member.

In each of the instances above, we typically ask for your name, e-mail address, phone number, address, as well as other similar personal information that is needed to register or subscribe you to our services. On occasion, we may ask for additional information to enable us to provide you with access to and use of certain information, materials and services.

Bishop Museum will make every effort to secure personal and sensitive information. All personal information gathered via our web pages will utilize SSL encryption technologies to keep your sensitive information from unwanted eyes.

You may choose to provide us with personal information, as in e-mail with a comment or question. We use the information to improve our service to you or to respond to your request. Except for authorized legal investigations, we do not share our e-mail with any other outside organizations.

Certain Bishop Museum publications can be explored using an “Ask this paper” feature, which lets you ask questions about a publication and receive answers drawn from its text. This feature uses third-party artificial intelligence (AI) services to generate responses.

The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum does not retain the content of your questions or the answers you receive. Conversations exist only within your browser and are not stored in our systems. We do not log, archive, or analyze question content for any purpose.

When you ask a question, your question and the relevant text of the publication are sent to a third-party AI provider, along with earlier turns in the same conversation so follow-up questions make sense. The provider does not receive your IP address, browser information, the page you came from, cookies, account information, or any visitor identifier. The provider receives an anonymous question with no way to link it to you. Each provider applies its own data policies, which are independent of Bishop Museum’s. The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum may use one or more reputable AI providers for this feature and may change providers to maintain service quality; the same data-minimization principles apply in every case.

As with any web traffic, our servers receive your IP address when you use this feature. We use it only to detect and prevent abuse — for example, to limit the rate of questions sent from a single source. Your IP address is not stored alongside the content of your questions, is not used for analytics, and is not shared with the AI provider or any other third party.

The “Ask this paper” feature is optional. You can read any Bishop Museum publication without using it.

Bishop Museum only uses your personal information for specific purposes. Personal information you provide to us when using our Web Site, such as your name, postal or e-mail address or telephone number will be kept confidential and used to support your relationship with the Bishop Museum.