- Effective Date: June 2012
- AutoTrader.com, Inc. respects the privacy of users of our mobile website and applications. Please read this Privacy Statement carefully so that you understand what information we collect through our mobile website and applications and what we do with that information. This Privacy Statement applies only to information collected online through the AutoTrader.com mobile website and/or applications and does not describe the ways in which we may collect or use information obtained offline, through our traditional AutoTrader.com website or through any means other than our mobile website and/or applications. 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 mobile website and applications are not directed at children under 13 and we will not knowingly allow anyone under 13 to provide us any personally identifying information; if you are under 13, please do not provide any information about yourself via this mobile website or application.
- THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT
- The information we gather falls into two categories: (1) information supplied by visitors to the mobile website or application when they perform a search or inquire about a vehicle listed for sale; and (2) tracking information gathered as visitors navigate through our mobile website or application and review our email newsletters and other email messages. Searches and Listings - To make use of certain features, 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 are 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 are looking for. If you find a listing that interests you and elect to send the seller an email through our mobile website or an application, we will share with the seller the contact information you supply through our online "Email this Seller" form. Some dealerships that list vehicles for sale 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 mobile website or an application, we will also share the information you supply through our "Email this Seller" form with the manufacturer of the vehicle you are 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, lead management service providers, and vehicle manufacturers, you should not use our "Email this Seller" contact form. Many of the dealership listings that appear on our mobile website and/or application 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 without disclosing this information, please contact the dealership by email or by dialing its local telephone number.
Sweepstakes and Other Promotions - From time to time, we may offer sweepstakes or other promotions on our mobile website and/or applications. If you enter a sweepstakes or promotional contest, we will ask you to provide information about yourself (such as your name, phone number, address, date of birth, and email address). Among other things, we will 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 will 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 do not 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 (and other) site(s) and application(s), and to help us learn more about our audience and how they interact with our mobile site and applications. 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 AutoTrader.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 do not 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 cannot 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 mobile website and applications, our traditional website, or our other products and services, or to inquire about your experience using our mobile website or applications, our traditional website, or sites or applications operated by others. From time to time, we will 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 do not, you can always unsubscribe by following the simple instructions included in each email.
MyAutoTrader.com - MyAutoTrader.com helps you organize your search for the right car by allowing you to do things like saving your favorite searches and cars. To access MyAutoTrader.com, we will ask you to register with us on the form provided, which may include personally identifiable information like your email address. You may also be asked to provide additional personal information, such as your name, gender, and age. You agree to provide true, accurate, current, and complete information about yourself. We use this information to process your registration request, provide you with the services and communications that you request, customize features that appear on our mobile site or applications, measure traffic on our mobile site or applications, and improve our mobile site and applications and the services and features offered to MyAutoTrader.com users. We may share information we collect while you are using the MyAutoTrader.com, including registration information, with our affiliates and with trusted third-party service providers who assist us in providing services.
Cookies - To help us tailor our mobile website and applications 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 mobile device. 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 of our mobile website and applications to track overall visitor traffic patterns. We use this information to improve our mobile website and applications by making it more responsive to the needs of our users. We also use cookies to make sure you do not see the same ad repeatedly during a single visit to our mobile website or application. Cookies do not reveal personally identifying information; the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. Cookies cannot read unrelated data off your mobile device. Our advertisers and third parties that provide products and/or services through our mobile website may also assign their own cookies, a process we do not control. The help function on your mobile web browser may contain information on how to set your mobile web browser to notify you before accepting a cookie or to disable cookies entirely. However, if you do not accept cookies, you will not be able to take advantage of various features on our mobile website that are available to other visitors. Our "Find Your Car" feature, for example, will not 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 mobile website or applications, and to track how users respond to ads we place on third-party websites or applications, 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 mobile and traditional websites and applications. 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 cookies and web beacons on our mobile site and/or applications to gather "clickstream" information, plus additional information that may include your mobile device’s unique ID number, caller ID data (which may include your phone number), your wireless carrier, and your precise geographic location. These advertising networks and third-party advertising services may use this information to fine tune advertising messages delivered to our visitors and visitors to other websites and applications. (See "Data Collected in Connection with Ad Serving and Targeting," below, for more information.).
Browser Level Information - Our web server (and/or any web server used by our vendor(s)) automatically collects limited information about your mobile device configuration when you visit our mobile website, including the type of browser software you use, the operating system you are running, the make and model of your handset, the resolution of the screen of your mobile device, the site that referred you, and your IP address. (Your IP address is a numerical address that is used by hardware connected to the Internet to identify your mobile device 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 mobile site as useful as we can for as many users as possible.
Location-Based Information - With your permission (e.g., by agreeing to let us use your current location when you first log in to our applications), our mobile site and/or applications may use precise, real-time geolocation technology to collect information about the exact location of your mobile device. We use this information to provide you with the content you request, such as search results of dealerships that are closest to you. You can opt out of precise, real-time location-based information collection by visiting the “Settings” page of the application or by changing the location services settings on your device.
Data Collected in Connection with Ad Serving and Targeting - AutoTrader.com works with one or more third-party mobile advertising companies to serve ads on our mobile website and applications. Their services may include targeting and serving some of the advertisements, promotions, or other marketing messages you see on the pages of our mobile site and applications, and other mobile websites and applications. Anonymous tracking information called "clickstream" data is collected from our mobile website and applications and other websites and applications so that these third-party mobile advertising companies 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 AutoTrader.com’s mobile site and applications is used to serve targeted advertisements on our mobile site and applications and other websites and applications. 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 mobile device. These third-party mobile advertising companies may also use cookies and/or web beacons to collect anonymous information directly from our users.
- 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 mobile website or applications--it is usually in the form of aggregated statistics on traffic to various pages within our mobile site or applications. We may collect, or have a third party collect on our behalf, aggregated statistical information about how visitors use and navigate around our mobile site or applications, such as the number of users who visit various pages, 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 mobile site and applications. We may also disclose this aggregated information to third parties.
To provide you with a customized experience and enhance our services, we may combine information (including personal information) that we collect through our mobile site and/or applications with information about you and/or your device from other sources, including public databases and third parties.
Any credit card information you may provide to us is used only to bill you for the products and services you order from us. We do not share your credit card information with anyone, except as may be necessary to process your transactions or comply with law.
- LINKS AND FEATURES OFFERED IN CONJUNCTION WITH OTHER PROVIDERS
- To make our mobile website and applications 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 mobile site and applications include links to other websites, and provide access to products and services offered by third parties, whose privacy policies we do not control. When you access another website from our mobile site or applications, or purchase products or services or conduct other transactions on such other site, the use of any information you provide to that site is governed by the privacy policy posted on that site and not by our privacy policy. When you provide information in the course of obtaining products or services from a third-party site that you accessed through our mobile site or applications, the 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 cannot 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 mobile site or applications, our customers, the public or AutoTrader.com. As our business grows, we may buy or sell various assets. In the unlikely event that AutoTrader.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 visitors to our mobile website or applications 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 will only allow searches of the portions of our database that contain information that is otherwise publicly available on our mobile website or applications. When we use other companies to help us operate our mobile site or applications 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 mobile website, or through our applications, is stored within AutoTrader.com-controlled databases (or databases hosted on our behalf) on servers maintained in protected environments. 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 will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet.
- INTERNATIONAL USERS
- If you reside outside the United States, please be aware that (i) our databases are stored on servers and storage devices located in the United States, (ii) your information (including personal data) may be transferred to the United States for processing and storage, and (iii) the United States, and the localities within the United States where our databases are located, may not guarantee the same level of protection for personal data as the locality or country in which you reside. By using our Site, you expressly agree to our collection, use, disclosure and transfer of your information (including personal data) for the purposes identified herein, and you consent to the transfer of such information outside of your country.
- CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY STATEMENT
- If we need to change our privacy policy at some point in the future, we will post the revised Privacy Statement on this mobile website or in our applications (as applicable) and update the reference to the effective date to reflect the date of the amendment. By visiting AutoTrader.com Mobile, or by using one of our applications, you agree that your visit, and any dispute over privacy, is governed by this Privacy Statement and our Visitor Agreement.
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