Your Privacy is Our Concern
Date Last Revised: 07/20/2010
IsoTree, LLC and The BuyingAdvice Team (collectively referred to as “we”, “us” or “Buying Advice”) are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. We do not share your personal information with any third party that is not an affiliate or service provider as described in this privacy policy. Therefore, our privacy policy is straightforward.
BuyingAdvice is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to build user’s trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. This privacy statement covers the site http://www.buyingadvice.com. Because this Web site wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has agreed to disclose its information practices and have its privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe.
If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact our Consumer Privacy Advocate at insiderteam@buyingadvice.com. If you do not receive acknowledgement of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, you should contact TRUSTe at http://www.truste.org/consumers/watchdog_complaint.php. TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with us to resolve your concerns.
We collect and retain information about you to communicate with you and to process your requests for products and services. Except as explained here in our Privacy Policy, we do not share non-public information about our customers or former customers with anyone other than our affiliates and service providers, except as described in this Privacy Policy. The examples in this Privacy Policy are illustrative only and are not intended to be exclusive.
Information We Collect
We collect the following types of public and non-public personal information about you on our site which is then transferred to our affiliates (such as dealer networks):
- Information obtained from you on applications and other forms, and from other sources used to process your request for one or more of our products or services (e.g., your name, address, employment history, income, credit balances, property insurance coverage and other representations made by you).
- Information arising from your transactions with us or our affiliates (e.g., your payment history, account balance and other transactional information) to fulfill the service you have requested such as auto buying, financial services providers, such as mortgage and life insurance agencies, and auto finance services.
Other Information We Collect
- We collect name, email address, and comments in our BLOG area of the site if you choose to make a comment. See “BLOG” section below.
Who We Share Your information With and Why
Except as discussed herein (sharing with our affiliates and service providers), we will only share non-public personal information about you with non-affiliated third parties as permitted by law or with your consent. We do not share your information with our affiliates for unknown or unrelated purposes.
To provide you with superior service, inform you of product and service opportunities that may be of interest to you that you have requested to receive, and for other business purposes, we may disclose all of the information we collect, as described above, to the following types of affiliated companies: auto buying services, financial service providers, such as mortgage and life insurance agencies, and auto finance companies. If you do not want us to share this information with our affiliated companies, do not use our site. The primary purpose of this site is to facilitate the interaction between you and our affiliated companies.
Access to Personally Identifiable Information
If you wish to have a blog posting removed you may do so by contacting insiderteam@buyingadvice.com. See “BLOG” below.
If your personally identifiable information changes that we have transferred to an affiliate, you may correct, update, or delete your information by contacting the affiliated company in accordance with their access policies.
Security of Your Personal Information
We use industry standard practices to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information, including “firewalls”, and Secure Socket Layers (SSL) encryption of sensitive data such as your social security number. We treat data as an asset that must be protected against loss and unauthorized access. We employ many different security techniques to protect such data from unauthorized access by users inside or outside the company. However, “perfect security” does not exist on the Internet so we encourage our users to use discretion when sharing personally identifiable information on the Internet and always read the privacy policy of the sites that you visit.
U.S. Patriot Act of 2001 Disclosure
To help the government fight the funding of terrorism and money laundering activities, Federal law requires all financial institutions to obtain, verify and record information that identifies each person who opens an account. When you apply for or open an account, we will ask for your name, address, date of birth and other information that will allow our Financial Institution Partners to identify you.
Log Files
As is true of most Web sites, we gather certain information automatically and store it in log files. This information includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data.
We link this automatically-collected data to personally identifiable information. We use this information to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users’ movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole.
Cookies
A cookie is a small text file that is stored on a user’s computer for record-keeping purposes. We use cookies on this site. We do not link the information we store in cookies to any personally identifiable information you submit while on our site.
We save session ID in persistent cookies. A session ID cookie expires when you close your browser. A persistent cookie remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time. If you prefer not to accept cookies, most browsers will explain how to disable cookies under the help portion of the toolbar or notify you when you receive a new cookie.
Persistent cookies enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site.
Clear Gifs (Web Beacons/Web Bugs)
We employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons/Web Bugs), that help us better manage content on our site by informing us what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We do not tie the information gathered by clear gifs to our customers’ personally identifiable information.
BLOG
The information that you post to our BLOG will be displayed publicly. Please do not post your full name or any personally identifiable or sensitive information. If you wish to have a blog posting removed you may do so by contacting insiderteam@buyingadvice.com.
Communications From This Site
No communication will come to you from www.buyingadvice.com unless you have sent us an email, then we will respond to you. You may not opt out receiving our response emails. All other communication that you receive by requesting services on our site will come from our affiliate companies. If you no longer wish to be contacted by the affiliated company, please contact them directly.
Links to Other Sites
This Web site contains links to other sites that are not owned or controlled by Buying Advice. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites.
We encourage you to be aware when you leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every Web site that collects personally identifiable information.
This privacy statement applies only to information collected by this Web site.
Choice/Opt-out
We provide you the opportunity to ‘opt-out’ of having your personally identifiable information used for certain purposes, when we ask for this information. For example, if you leave a comment in our blog but do not wish us to retain your e-mail address, you can indicate your preference on our comments form.
You will be notified when your personal information is collected by any third party that is not our agent/service provider, so you can make an informed choice as to whether or not to share your information with that party.
Legal Disclaimer
We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Web site.
Our Former Customers
We treat information about our former customers in the same manner as we treat information about our current customers.
Updates to Our Privacy Policy
As long as you remain a customer, we will provide you with an annual notice of this policy. We will provide this notice to current customers and those consumers whose non-public personal information we share as described above. We reserve the right to change this policy at any time. If we decide to make a material change to our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the home page, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
For Vermont Residents
The information-sharing practices described above are in accordance with federal law. Vermont law places additional restrictions on sharing information about Vermont residents, for as long as they remain Vermont residents. In accordance with Vermont law:
- We will not share consumer credit reports with our affiliates without your consent, and
- We will only disclose your name, contact information and our own transaction and experience information to other financial institutions with which we have joint-marketing arrangements. Otherwise, we will share information in accordance with all of the practices described above
For any other issues, please contact our customer service department at insiderteam@buyingadvice.com. Our mailing address is: 774 Mays Blvd Ste 10-353, Incline Village, NV 89451-9613.
