Effective Date: Sept. 2, 2009
Krause Capital, LLC, the owner of the Swap My Whip.com website 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 Swap My Whip.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 us at info@swapmywhip.com.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 trade or sale, perform a search, enter a sweepstakes or other promotional contest, or inquire about a vehicle listed for trade or 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 vehicle 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 "COntact this Owner" form. If you do not wish to share your email address or other contact information with vehicle owners or vendors who advertise on our website, you should not use our "Contact this Owner" contact form. When you list a car for sale, we ask for information on the car and on how you can be contacted by potential traders/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 a Swap My Whip.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 "What I Want" 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 website. 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 Swap My Whip.com works with leading third-party advertising companies, such as Google AdSense. 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 Google AdSense, Swap My Whip.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 Swap My Whip.com is used to serve targeted advertsements on this site. 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. Google AdSense may also use cookies and/or web beacons to collect anonymous information directly from our users. If you would like to know more about Google AdSense, please see the Google.com website for more information.
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. 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 Terms of Service, or to protect the rights, property or safety of visitors to our site, our customers, the public or Swap My Whip.com. As our business grows, we may buy or sell various assets. In the unlikely event that Swap My Whip.com, 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 Swap My Whip.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 Swap My Whip.com, you agree that your visit, and any dispute over privacy, is governed by this Privacy Statement and our Terms of Service.