Applied Materials
Information Technology
26
out of 100. Number 442 of 512, counting from the worst.
Where Applied Materials does well
- Arbitration 2 of 20. Few problems found.
- Renewals 0 of 20. Nothing found.
- Data sharing 4 of 20. Few problems found.
- No forced arbitration or class-action waiver for website visitors — claims are simply governed by California law, with no arbitration clause at all in the website terms.
- The privacy policy states plainly that Applied Materials does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and it will not use your data for marketing unless you affirmatively opt in.
- The policy grants a broad rights list (access, rectification, erasure, portability, objection, consent withdrawal) plus an explicit right of non-retaliation for exercising them.
- CCTV is stated not to be used for monitoring employee work performance or attendance, and meeting recordings are stated not to be used to generate biometric identifiers like voiceprints.
- There are no auto-renewing subscriptions, cancellation traps, or price-change clauses on the consumer surface — because there is barely a consumer surface at all.
The company can rewrite the website's terms whenever it wants without telling you, and it's your job to keep re-checking the page — the new terms bind you anyway.
The fine print
6 clauses and findings from the draft archive, dated 1 October 2026. The plain English comes first; the small print is the company's own words. None of these has been checked yet.
-
The company can rewrite the website's terms whenever it wants without telling you, and it's your job to keep re-checking the page — the new terms bind you anyway.
Applied Materials Inc. may, without notice, at any time revise these Terms of Use and any other information contained on this site by posting same. ... Users should re-visit this page from time to time to review the then current Terms because they are legally enforceable.
Applied Materials, Inc. Web Site User Agreement Terms and Conditions ('Legal Information')
-
Same story for your data: the privacy rules can be rewritten unilaterally at any time; you get notice only 'where necessary and possible' if a change needs your renewed consent.
We reserve the right to change this Privacy Policy at any time at our own discretion in compliance with applicable legal requirements.
-
If you pitch them a business idea or fill in a contact form, everything you send is deemed non-confidential — even if you stamp it 'confidential' — and they have zero obligation to protect it.
By submitting this form, you agree and represent to us that any information or data that you provide to us ('Information') is considered non-confidential and non-proprietary to you or any other party, and Applied Ventures has no obligation towards you or any other party to protect such information. Any information you transmit shall be considered non-confidential and non-proprietary information regardless if marked 'confidential' or 'proprietary.'
-
Any meeting or call with them can be recorded, screens and chats included, and fed through AI transcription — justified by their own 'legitimate interests' rather than your explicit consent.
When you participate in a virtual, telephone, or in-person meeting, call, webinar, or training session with Applied Materials ... we may record the session. ... a recording may capture audio, video, images, screen or other content shared during the session, chat messages, and a transcript or AI-generated notes or summary of the discussion.
-
There is no concrete deadline for deleting your data — 'as long as necessary' based on their own criteria, with the actual schedule locked in an internal retention document you can't see.
Your personal information is retained for as long as necessary to accomplish the purposes for which it was collected unless otherwise required by applicable law. Where we cannot state a fixed retention period in advance, we determine the period by reference to the following criteria ...
-
Your browser's 'do not track' and Global Privacy Control signals are ignored; the only reason they give is that they currently claim not to sell or share data.
Browser 'do-not-track' signals are not a standardized mechanism and we do not currently respond to them. ... Because we do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, we do not act on opt-out preference signals such as Global Privacy Control (GPC) for those purposes.
How these were found
Documents read October 1, 2026 via direct fetch. Applied Materials is a B2B semiconductor-equipment maker with almost no consumer surface (no accounts, subscriptions, or checkouts), so scoring covers only the public website User Agreement ('Legal Information' page), the global Privacy Policy, and the US Privacy Notice. The Privacy Policy page shows no version/effective date in the fetched text. B2B documents (CloudSim Terms of Use 02/08/2023 PDF; Semiconductor Equipment, Parts and Service Terms and Conditions of Sale, 3 March 2025 PDF) exist but are negotiated commercial contracts, not consumer terms — the ICC arbitration clauses in them were excluded from consumer scoring. The Applied Ventures/Ginestra 'non-confidential submission' clauses come from official-domain search snippets (appliedmaterials.com), verified against the live page text in the snippet index. No forced arbitration applies to ordinary website visitors: claims are governed by California law with no arbitration clause in the website terms, so the arbitration category scores near zero. Because there is little to find, the total is deliberately modest.
These notes come from the original draft and are not independent verification.