|
This Privacy Policy describes the
information we collect about you and what may happen to that
information. Although this policy may seem long, we have prepared a
detailed policy because we believe you should know as much as possible
about BimmerZone practices so that you can make informed decisions. The
privacy practices of this statement apply to the BimmerZone website and
apply generally to our subsidiaries or joint venture partners websites
(collectively the "Site") whose specific privacy policies are
available from our other pages. All of our subsidiaries and joint
venture partners operate under similar privacy practices as described in
this Privacy Policy and, subject to the requirements of applicable law,
we strive to provide a consistent set of privacy practices throughout
the global BimmerZone trading community.
As described below, some of your personally identifiable information
is disclosed to third parties and used by us and third parties. By
accepting the User Agreement, you expressly consent to our use and
disclosure of your personally identifiable information. This Privacy
Policy is incorporated into and subject to the terms of the BimmerZone
User Agreement.
Table of Contents
- A Special Note About Children.
Children are not eligible to use our services and we ask that minors
(under the age of 18) do not submit any personal information to us. If
you are a minor, you can use this service only in conjunction with
your parents or guardians.
Information We Collect.
Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you
with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience. This allows us to
provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to
customize our service to make your experience easier.
Under some circumstances we may require some additional financial
information, such as, but not limited to: if you are registering using
an email account at a free email service, or registering to sell on
our site. We use your financial information, including credit card
information to verify your name, address, and other information, as
well as to bill you for your use of our services.
We automatically track certain information based upon your behavior
on our site. We use this information to do internal research on our
users' demographics, interests, and behavior to better understand and
serve you and our community. This information may include the URL that
you just came from (whether this URL is on our site or not), which URL
you next go to (whether this URL is on our site or not), what browser
you are using, and your IP address.
We use data collection devices such as "cookies" on
certain pages of our site. "Cookies" are small files placed
on your hard drive that assist us in providing customized services. We
also offer certain features that are only available through the use of
a "cookie". We also use cookies to allow you to enter your
password less frequently during a session. Cookies can also help us
provide information which is targeted to your interests. Most cookies
are "session cookies," meaning that they are automatically
deleted from your hard drive at the end of a session. You are always
free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, although in that
case you may not be able to use certain features on our site and you
may be required to reenter your password more frequently during a
session.
Additionally, you may encounter "cookies" or other
similar devices on certain pages of our site that are placed by third
parties. For example, if you view a web page created by a user, there
may be a "cookie" placed within that web page. We do not
control the use of cookies by third parties.
If you choose to bid, buy or sell on our site, we collect
information about your bidding, buying and selling behavior. We also
collect other users' comments about you in our feedback area.
If you establish a credit account with us to pay the fees we
charge, we collect some additional information, including a billing
address, a credit card number and a credit card expiration date and
tracking information from checks or money orders.
If you choose to post messages in our Cafés, chat rooms or other
message areas or leave feedback for other users, we will collect that
information you provide to us.
If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters,
or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your
activities or postings on the Site, we may collect such information
into a file specific to you.
If you register for BimmerZone on another web site or use a web
site providing a service for BimmerZone or a web site that helps
facilitate your activity on BimmerZone, that web site may provide
personal information about you and your transactions back to
BimmerZone.
For a chart showing what information we collect from or about you,
and who has access to that information, please see the Appendix.
- Our Use of Your Information.
We use information in the file we maintain about you, and other
information we obtain from your current and past activities on the
Site, to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User
Agreement. At times, we may look across multiple users to identify
problems or resolve disputes, and in particular we may examine your
information to identify users using multiple User IDs or aliases.
If you choose to list an item for sale on our site or open a credit
account, we use your address and billing information to bill you and
provide associated support.
You agree that we may use personally identifiable information about
you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyze site
usage, improve our content and product offerings, and customize our
site's content, layout, and services. These uses improve our site and
better tailor it to meet your needs.
You agree that we may use your information to contact you and
deliver information to you that, in some cases, are targeted to your
interests, such as targeted banner advertisements, administrative
notices, product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of
the Site. By accepting the User Agreement and Privacy Policy, you
expressly agree to receive this information. If you do not wish to
receive these communications, we encourage you to opt out of the
receipt of certain communications on the notification page. You may
make changes to your notification preferences at any time.
- Our Disclosure of Your Information.
Due to the existing regulatory environment, we cannot ensure that all
of your private communications and other personally identifiable
information will never be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in
this Privacy Policy. By way of example (without limiting the
foregoing), we may be forced to disclose information to the government
or third parties under certain circumstances, third parties may
unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private
communications, or users may abuse or misuse your information that
they collect from our Site. Therefore, although we use industry
standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you
should not expect, that your personally identifiable information or
private communications will always remain private.
As a matter of policy, we do not sell or rent any personally
identifiable information about you to any third party. However, the
following describes some of the ways that your personally identifiable
information may be disclosed.
BimmerZone Community. Throughout the Site,
you are identified by your User ID. If you select your email address
as your User ID you will disclose your email address to other users
and third parties. As a result, other users and third parties might
send you unsolicited email and be able to personally identify all of
your public activities on the Site. Although our pages are coded with
robot exclusion headers, others may illegally attempt to automatically
collect your email address from our site. We describe how to change
your User ID below in Section 8. Even if your User ID is not your
email address, your User ID can be used to identify you and your
activities throughout the Site. Other people can see your bids, items
that you have purchased in the past, your feedback rating and
associated comments, your postings on the Site, and so on. We also
provide a number of ways to allow other users to find out more about
you and your site activities, such as our feature that allows users to
quickly see all of the items you are offering at the time. If you are
involved in a transaction, we have a feature that allows other users
to view your email address and obtain your contact information.
External Service Providers. There are a
number of services offered by external service providers that help you
use our Site (e.g., co-branded sites, listing agents, escrow,
authentication, mediation). If you choose to use these optional
services, disclose information to the external service providers,
and/or grant them permission to collect information about you, then
their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy. We
may, for your convenience, provide some of your personally
identifiable information to the external service provider offering
such services. However, before we disclose your personally
identifiable information to an external service provider, you will see
what data is about to be sent and have the ability to approve the
disclosure. To prevent our disclosure of your personally identifiable
information to an external service provider, you can decline such
disclosures or simply not use their services. Because we do not
control the privacy practices of these third parties, you should
evaluate their practices before deciding to use their services. Users
who register on an BimmerZone co-branded web site (for example,
CompuServe, AOL.com, and AOL) grant BimmerZone permission to pass your
email address back to that co-branded web site and affiliated web
sites. The use of such information by the co-brand and affiliated web
sites is limited by their applicable privacy policies.
Internal Service Providers. We may use
internal service providers to facilitate our services (e.g., search,
discussion boards, surveys) and therefore we may provide some of your
personally identifiable information directly to them. In some
instances, the internal service provider may collect information
directly from you (such as the situation where we ask a internal
service provider to conduct a survey for us). In these cases, you will
be notified of the involvement of the internal service provider, and
all information disclosures you make will be strictly optional. In all
cases, these internal service providers' use of information we supply
them is restricted by confidentiality agreements. If you provide
additional information to an internal service provider directly, then
their use of your information is governed by their applicable privacy
policy.
Other Corporate Entities. We share much of
our data, including personally identifiable information about you,
with our subsidiaries and joint ventures that are committed to serving
your online trading needs and related services, throughout the world.
To the extent that these entities have access to your information,
they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information
they obtain from their other users. Our subsidiaries and joint
ventures follow privacy practices no less protective of all users than
our practices described in this document, to the extent allowed by
applicable law. It is possible that BimmerZone, its subsidiaries, its
joint ventures, or any combination of such, could merge with or be
acquired by another business entity. Should such a combination occur,
you should expect that BimmerZone would share some or all of your
information in order to continue to provide the service.
Legal Requests. BimmerZone cooperates with
law enforcement inquiries, as well as other third parties to enforce
laws, such as: intellectual property rights, fraud and other rights.
We can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you to
law enforcement or other government officials as we, in our sole
discretion, believe necessary or appropriate, in connection with an
investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringements, or other
activity that is illegal or may expose us or you to legal liability.
Further, we can (and you authorize us to) disclose your User ID, name,
street address, city, state, zip code, country, phone number, email,
and company name to BimmerZone participants as we in our sole
discretion believe necessary or appropriate in connection with an
investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringement, piracy, or
other unlawful activity.
- Your Use of Other Users' Information.
In order to facilitate interaction among all BimmerZone community
members, our service allows you limited access other users' contact
information. As a seller you have access to the User ID, email address
and other contact information of the buyer or winning bidder(s), and
as a buyer or winning bidder you have access to the User ID, email
address and other contact information of the seller.
By entering into our User Agreement, you agree that, with respect
to other users' personally identifiable information that you obtain
through the Site or through an BimmerZone-related communication or
BimmerZone-facilitated transaction, BimmerZone hereby grants to you a
license to use such information only for: (a) BimmerZone-related
communications that are not unsolicited commercial messages, (b) using
services offered through BimmerZone (e.g. escrow, insurance, shipping
and fraud complaints), and (c) any other purpose that such user
expressly agrees to after adequate disclosure of the purpose(s). In
all cases, you must give users an opportunity to remove themselves
from your database and a chance to review what information you have
collected about them. In addition, under no circumstances, except as
defined in this Section, can you disclose personally identifiable
information about another user to any third party without our consent
and the consent of such other user after adequate disclosure. Note
that law enforcement personnel, program participants, and other rights
holders are given different rights with respect to information they
access.
BimmerZone and our users do not tolerate spam. Therefore, without
limiting the foregoing, you are not licensed to add an BimmerZone
user, even a user who has purchased an item from you, to your mail
list (email or physical mail) without their express consent after
adequate disclosure. To report BimmerZone related spam to BimmerZone,
please send an email to info@bimmerzone.com
- Use of Email Tools.
You may not use the Email This to a Friend service or other email
forwarding services that we offer to send spam or otherwise send
content that would violate our User Agreement. We do not permanently
store the email messages or the email addresses.
If you send and email using the Email This to a Friend
service to an email address that is not registered in our community,
we do not use that email addresses for any purpose other than to send
your email. We do not rent or sell these email addresses. We generally
discard the email addresses some time after they have been used to
send your email.
- Control of Your Password.
You are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and
password, including fees. Therefore we do not recommend that you
disclose your BimmerZone password to any third parties. If you choose
to share your User ID and password or your information with third
parties to provide you additional services, you are responsible for
all actions taken with your User ID and password and therefore you
should review that third party's privacy policy. If you lose control
of your password, you may lose substantial control over your
personally identifiable information and may be subject to legally
binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password has
been compromised for any reason, you should immediately change your
password as detailed in Section 8.
- Reviewing and Changing Your Personally
Identifiable Information.
Following registration, you can review and change the information you
submitted during registration including:
Your User ID and email address. If you change your User ID we keep
track of your old User ID(s) and your new User ID. Your
registration information such as: name, company, address, city, state,
zip code, country, primary phone number, secondary phone number, fax
number and gender. Your password. Your credit card number and
expiration date, and other financial information. You must promptly
update your information if it changes. Once posted, you cannot change
or remove any public postings made in our chat rooms or other message
areas or the feedback area.
Upon your request, we will deactivate your account, contact
information, and financial information from our active databases. To
make this request, email info@bimmerzone.com.
Such information will be deactivated as soon as reasonably possible in
accordance with our deactivation policy and applicable law.
We will retain in our files information you have requested to
remove in some circumstances, such as to resolve disputes,
troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement. Further, such
prior information is never completely removed from our databases due
to technical and legal constraints, including stored "back
up" systems. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your
personally identifiable information will be completely removed from
our databases in response to your requests.
- Other Information Collectors.
Except as otherwise expressly included in this Privacy Policy, this
document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we
collect from you. To the extent that you disclose your information to
other parties, whether they are bidders, buyers or sellers on our Site
or other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to
their use or disclosure of the information you disclose to them. To
the extent that we use third party advertisers, they adhere to their
own privacy policies. Since BimmerZone does not control the privacy
policies of third parties, you are subject to the privacy policies of
that third party. We encourage you to ask questions before you
disclose your personal information to others.
- Security.
BimmerZone uses industry standard practices to safeguard the
confidentiality of your personal identifiable information, including
"firewalls" and Secure Socket Layers. BimmerZone treats 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 and outside the company.
However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.
- Notice.
We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time based on your
comments and our need to accurately reflect our data collection and
disclosure practices. All changes to this policy are effective after
we provide you with at least thirty (30) days' notice of the changes
by posting the changes on the announcements board and sending email to
users who select such notification preference. We provide you with
thirty (30) days notice to allow you the opportunity to notify
BimmerZone if you do not agree to such changes as described in Section
8.
Driving
can be extremely hazardous, and injury or death can occur. No warranty
is made or implied regarding any product sold by Bimmerzone to
protect users from injury or death. The customer, purchaser and/or user
assume all risks. Bimmerzone is not responsible
for typographical or photographic errors. Some of the products sold by
Bimmerzone may be illegal for use on public roads
(track use only), please check local laws. The use of the term
"BMW" is for reference only, and does not imply any connection
between Bimmerzone
and BMW A.G. Munich or BMW North America or any of their
affiliates. |