Effective Date:
June 2, 2009MyUsedCarsOnline.com respects the privacy of visitors to our website. Please read
this Privacy Statement carefully so that you understand what information we
collect through our website and what we do with that information. This
Privacy Statement applies only to information collected online through the
MyUsedCarsOnline.com website and does not describe the ways in which we may
collect or use information obtained offline or through any means other than
our website. If you have any questions about this Privacy Statement, please
contact Customer Service.
PROTECTING THE PRIVACY OF CHILDREN
Children should always get permission from their parents before sending
any information about themselves (such as their names, email addresses, and
phone numbers) over the Internet, to us or to anyone else. Our website is
not directed at children under 13 and we won't knowingly allow anyone under
13 to provide us any personally identifying information; if you're under 13,
please don't provide any information about yourself on this website.
THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT
The information we gather falls into two categories: (1) information
supplied by visitors to the site when they list a car for sale, perform a
search, enter a sweepstakes or other promotional contest, or inquire about a
vehicle listed for sale or about another product or service offered through
our website; and (2) tracking information gathered as visitors navigate
through our website and review our email newsletters and other email
messages. Third-party providers featured on or linked to by our website,
such as vendors of products and services offered through our site, may be
gathering information, as well, through processes we don't control.
Searches and Listings To make use of certain features on
our site, visitors need to provide limited information about themselves and
their interests so that we can tailor the information we provide to their
needs. For example, to help you find the car you want close to home, we need
to know what kind of car you're looking for and your zip code. We ask you to
provide this information when you perform a search. We use this information
to help you find the car you're looking for. If you find a listing that
interests you and elect to send the seller an email through our website,
we'll share with the seller the contact information you supply through our
online "Email this Seller" form. Some dealerships that list vehicles for
sale on our site use third-party service providers to manage their "leads"
(that is, the inquiries they receive from consumers who are interested in
the vehicles they've listed for sale). If a dealership has designated a
provider of lead management services, we may also share with that provider
any information you elect to send to the dealership through our "Email this
Seller" form. Vehicle manufacturers like to monitor how responsive their
franchised dealers are to consumer inquiries. To help them monitor and
improve dealer performance, we may also provide vehicle manufacturers with
the information you send their franchised dealers using our "Email this
Seller" tool. If you find a listing for a certified pre-owned vehicle that
interests you and elect to send the seller an email through our website,
we'll also share the information you supply through our "Email this Seller"
form with the manufacturer of the vehicle you're inquiring about (which
administers the certified pre-owned program) to use for quality assurance,
internal business analysis, process management, and other similar purposes.
If you do not wish to share your email address or other contact information
with sellers who advertise on our website, lead management service
providers, and vehicle manufacturers, you should not use our "Email Seller"
contact form. Many of the dealership listings that appear on our website
include toll-free telephone numbers that can be used to contact the
dealership that is selling the advertised vehicle. If you call a dealership
using one of these toll-free numbers, we may provide the dealership with the
date, time, and duration of your call, as well as the number from which your
call originated. If you wish to contact a dealership that advertises on our
website without disclosing this information, please contact the dealership
by email or by dialing its local telephone number. When you list a car for
sale, we ask for information on the car and on how you can be contacted by
potential buyers. We also ask for your credit card number and the expiration
date on your card. We use this information to create your ad and to process
your payment.
Sweepstakes and Other Promotions From time to time, we
may offer sweepstakes or other promotions on our website. If you enter a
sweepstakes or promotional contest, we'll ask you to provide information
about yourself (such as your name, address, and email address). Among other
things, we'll need this information to contact you if you win, and we may
also use this information for marketing purposes. We may share this
information with any co-sponsor of the contest or sweepstakes; we'll
identify the co-sponsor in the contest rules. We may also share this
information with shipping or fulfillment companies or other third-party
service providers that help administer our promotions, such as by conducting
drawings, and/or delivering prizes to winners. If you don't want us to
collect the information requested in the contest or sweepstakes registration
form or to provide it to co-sponsors, please do not enter the contest or
sweepstakes.
Online Surveys From time to time, we survey our users to
measure their satisfaction with our site and other sites and to help us
learn more about our audience and how they interact with our site.
Third-party research firms often conduct these surveys on our behalf. We use
the survey results to help us improve the services we offer to you. Except
in the circumstances described below in the "Other Disclosures" section of
this policy, we will not share, without your consent, any
personally-identifying information you submit in response to an
MyUsedCarsOnline.com survey with any company other than the research firm
conducting the survey. We will, however, take the information you provide
and aggregate it on an anonymous basis with data collected from other survey
participants. We may use and disclose that pool of anonymous information as
we see fit, without identifying you personally.
You may also find on our site invitations to participate surveys
conducted by our advertisers, whose privacy practices we don't control.
These invitations will usually link to an online survey form that is hosted
either by the advertiser conducting the survey or by a third-party research
firm working on the advertiser's behalf. When you access an advertiser's
survey through our website, use and disclosure of any information you submit
will be governed by the advertiser's privacy policy (or by the privacy
policy of the advertiser's research firm), which may differ from ours. If
you can't find the applicable privacy policy via a link either from the
advertiser's survey invitation or from the online survey form, you should
contact the advertiser directly for more information.
Email Addresses If you provide us your email address, we
may email you about our website or our services, or to inquire about your
experience using our website or sites operated by others. From time to time,
we'll also send you emails that may include automotive information, special
promotions and other commercial offers that we think may be of interest to
you. Though we hope you'll find these communications informative and useful,
if you don't, you can always unsubscribe by following the simple
instructions included in each email. And you can opt-out of receiving these
types of commercial offers at all by indicating, when you list a car for
sale or inquire about a car listed on our website, that you'd prefer not to
receive these communications.
Cookies To help us tailor our website to the needs and
interests of our visitors, we keep track of the pages visited by our users
by placing a cookie, a small entry in text file, on your hard drive. The
cookie contains an ID number that allows us to track the pages you've
visited. We aggregate this data with data on the pages visited by other
users to track overall visitor traffic patterns. We use this information to
improve our site by making it more responsive to the needs of our users. We
also use cookies to make sure you don't see the same ad repeatedly during a
single visit to our site. Cookies don't reveal personally identifying
information; the only personal information a cookie can contain is
information you supply yourself. Cookies can't read unrelated data off your
hard drive. Our advertisers and third parties that provide products and/or
services through our site may also assign their own cookies, a process we
don't control. The help function on most web browsers contains information
on how to set your browser to notify you before accepting a cookie or to
disable cookies entirely. However, if you don't accept cookies, you won't be
able to take advantage of various features on our site that are available to
other visitors. Our "Find Your Car" feature, for example, won't work
properly if you configure your browser not to accept cookies.
Web Beacons To help us (and in some cases our
advertisers) keep track of how many users are accessing particular pages and
listings within our website, and to track how users respond to ads we place
on third-party websites, we may place a small file, called a web beacon, on
some of our pages and on some of the listings we distribute. In combination
with cookies, these web beacons allow us (or our advertisers) to track the
number of users who view particular pages and listings to fine tune the
advertising messages delivered to users of this and other websites,
including sites in the MyUsedCarsOnline.com Access advertising network (www.autotraderaccess.com).
We may use "clickstream" data collected using web beacons and cookies to
help us tailor the content of promotional messages, including email
messages, to the perceived interests of our users. Advertising networks with
which we are affiliated and third-party advertising services that we use may
also use web beacons on our site to gather similar anonymous "clickstream"
information, which is used to fine tune advertising messages delivered to
our visitors and visitors to other websites. (See "Data Collected in
Connection with Ad Serving and Targeting," below, for more information.).
Browser Level Information Our web server automatically
collects limited information about your computer configuration when you
visit our site, including the type of browser software you use, the
operating system you're running, the resolution of your computer monitor,
the website that referred you, and your IP address. (Your IP address is a
numerical address that is used by computers connected to the Internet to
identify your computer so that data (such as the web pages you want to view)
can be transmitted to you. We also use IP address information for systems
administration and trouble shooting purposes. Your IP address does not tell
us who you are.) We use this information to make our site as useful as we
can for as many users as possible.
Data Collected in Connection with Ad Serving and Targeting
MyUsedCarsOnline.com works with leading third-party advertising companies.
Their services include targeting and serving some of the advertisements,
promotions, or other marketing messages you see on the pages of our site and
other websites. Anonymous tracking information called "clickstream" data is collected from
our website and other websites so that MyUsedCarsOnline.com, and others can use such information, sometimes in
conjunction with similar anonymous information gathered through other
websites, to deliver advertisements tailored to match the perceived
interests of consumers. Clickstream information collected from users of
MyUsedCarsOnline.com is used to serve targeted advertisements on this site
and other websites, including sites in the MyUsedCarsOnline.com Access
advertising network. This clickstream data does not identify you personally
and does not include your name, address, email address or telephone number,
but it may include the IP address of your computer.
USE AND DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION
When we present information to our advertisers-to help them understand
our audience and confirm the value of advertising on our website--it is
usually in the form of aggregated statistics on traffic to various pages
within our site. Any credit card information you may provide to us is
secured during transmission over the Internet using industry--standard
secure socket layer (SSL) encryption and is stored on our secure servers.
(See "Security," below.) We use your credit card information only to bill
you for the products and services you order from us. We don't share your
credit card information with anyone, except as may be necessary to process
your transactions or comply with law. We may collect, or have a third party
collect on our behalf, aggregated statistical information about how visitors
use and navigate around our site, such as the number of users who visit
various pages within the site, what they click on, whether they scroll up or
down on particular pages, fill out forms, etc. This aggregated information
does not identify you personally. We use this information to improve our
site. We may also disclose this aggregated information to third parties.
LINKS AND FEATURES OFFERED IN CONJUNCTION WITH OTHER PROVIDERS
To make our website more valuable to our visitors, we feature some
products and services that come from other providers. Our finance,
insurance, warranty, and inspection services, for example, are made
available through cooperative arrangements with companies that specialize in
providing such services. We share with these third parties such information
as is necessary for them to provide the products or services. Of course, our site includes links to other
websites, and provides access to products and services offered by third
parties, whose privacy policies we don't control. When you access another
website or purchase products or services or conduct other transactions
through our website, use of any information you provide is governed by the
privacy policy of the operator of the site you're visiting or the provider
of such products or services. When you provide information in the course of
obtaining products or services through our site, use of any information you
provide may be governed by the privacy policy of the provider of those
products or services. The provider's privacy policy may differ from ours. If
you can't find the privacy policy of any of our provider partners via a link
either from their site's homepage or from the pages on which the products or
services are offered, you should contact the provider directly for more
information.
OTHER DISCLOSURES
We may occasionally release information about our visitors when release
is appropriate to comply with law, to enforce our Visitor Agreement, or to
protect the rights, property or safety of visitors to our site, our
customers, the public or MyUsedCarsOnline.com. As our business grows, we may buy
or sell various assets. In the unlikely event that MyUsedCarsOnline.com, Inc., one
of its business units, or substantially all of its assets is acquired by
another company, information on our visitors would be among the transferred
assets. If you choose to unsubscribe in response to an email message that we
send on behalf of an advertiser, we will share your email address and
opt-out instructions with the advertiser to ensure that your email privacy
preferences are honored. Similarly, if we ask a third-party company to send
its customers email offers on our behalf, we will share with that company
(or its agent) a list of email addresses collected from website visitors who
have opted out of our email program to ensure that their privacy preferences
are honored. We may allow others to search some of our databases (our
listings database, for example) and to analyze the data they find there or
aggregate it with other data, either for their business purposes, or ours.
Though some of the information in our databases may be personally
identifying (such as the contact information included in a vehicle listing),
we'll only allow searches of the portions of our database that contain
information that is otherwise publicly available on our website. When we use
other companies to help us operate our site or improve the services we offer
to you, we may provide them with information about our visitors that is
necessary for them to perform their services. We require that these
companies commit to use the information only to perform the services that we
request.
SECURITY
Information we gather on our website is stored within
MyUsedCarsOnline.com-controlled
databases (or databases hosted on our behalf) on servers maintained in
protected environments. Any credit card information you provide us is
secured for transmission over the Internet using industry-standard secure
sockets layer (SSL) encryption.
Click here to learn
more about the SSL protocol on webopedia.com. However, no physical or
electronic security system is impenetrable. We cannot guarantee the security
of our servers or databases, nor can we guarantee that information you
supply won't be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet.
And, of course, any information you include in a vehicle listing is
available to anyone with Internet access.
CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY STATEMENT
The web is an evolving medium. If we need to change our privacy policy at
some point in the future, we'll post the changes to this Privacy Statement
on this website and update the reference to the effective date to reflect
the date of the amendment. By visiting MyUsedCarsOnline.com, you agree that your
visit, and any dispute over privacy, is governed by this Privacy Statement
and our Visitor Agreement.
