Last Updated: September 26, 2015
This Privacy Policy discloses our privacy practices and the possible uses of the information that we gather via www.homewateradvisor.com and via other submissions by you to HomeWaterAdvisor (together, the “Site and Services”). By using the Site and Services you consent to the terms of this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy, including having your personally identifiable information (“Personal Information” as defined below) used in any of the ways described in this Privacy Policy, you may not be able to use certain parts or features of our Site and Services, and in some instances, this may necessitate the revocation of your membership. HomeWaterAdvisor may update this Privacy Policy from time-to-time in our sole discretion. It is your responsibility to review the Privacy Policy for any changes each time that you use the Site and Services and you are bound by such changes. Use of the Site and Services by you following us posting a new privacy policy on our Site constitutes your acceptance of the Privacy Policy as modified.
This Privacy Policy is part of our Terms and Conditions, and all other terms of using our Site and Services.
Information Collected
HomeWaterAdvisor collects information on our users in various ways, such as, by your voluntary submissions, participation in services provided via the Site and Services, from third parties with your consent, and through cookie and other tracking technology. HomeWaterAdvisor collects the following information:
• Personal Information
“Personal Information” refers to information that tells us specifically who you are, such as your name, phone number, email, postal address, and possibly information relating to certain support or customer service issues. In many cases, we need this information to provide to you many of the services that you may have requested.
• Cellular Phone Numbers
By providing a cellular telephone number to us, you expressly consent to, and authorize us or a third party on our behalf to deliver autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls and/or text messages to the number you provide. You are not required to consent to these calls as a condition to purchasing any goods or services, but withholding your consent may prevent us from providing certain services to you. This consent encompasses all future autodialed or pre-recorded telemarketing calls and text messages from us or a third party placing these calls on our behalf.
• Submission of Reviews, Ratings, and Comments
We collect information that you voluntarily provide as part of our Site and Services, including messages, posts, comments, responses, reviews, and ratings you submit through the Site and Services, (“User Generated Content”). HomeWaterAdvisor may in our sole discretion share your User Generated Content with others such as your business reviews. If you do not want certain information shared with others, you should not submit User Generated Content, or should not submit User Generated Content that contains information or Personal Information you do not want shared in this manner. Once You have submitted User Generated Content, we reserve the right to publish it in any medium to others.
• Aggregate Information
We may collect general, non-personal, statistical information about the use of the Site and Services, such as how many visitors visit a specific page on the Site, how long they stay on that page, and which hyperlinks, if any, they click on. This information represents a generic overview of our users, including their collective viewing habits, and allows us and other third parties to modify information, promotions, offers and/or discounts on products and services based on user traffic and behavior. We collect this information through the use of technologies such as ‘cookies’ and web beacons, which are discussed in greater detail below. We collect this information in order to help enhance the Site and Services to make for a better visitor experience.
• Third Party Information
We may supplement information you provide to us with information from other sources, such as information to validate or update your address, payment card or other demographic and lifestyle information. We use this information to help us maintain the accuracy of the information we collect, to enable us to fulfill our products and services, to target our communications so that we can inform you of products, services and offers that may be of interest, and for internal business analysis or other business purposes consistent with our mission.
• Cookies
HomeWaterAdvisor may automatically collect non-personally identifiable information and data through the use of cookies. Cookies are small text files a website uses to recognize repeat users, facilitate the user’s ongoing access to the website and facilitate the use of the website. Cookies also allow a website to track usage behavior and compile site usage information that will allow for the improvement of content and target advertising. Most browsers allow you to control cookies, including whether or not to accept them and how to remove them. You may set your browsers to notify you if you receive a cookie, or you may choose to block cookies with your browser. However, please be aware that some features of our Site and Services may not function or may be slower if you refuse cookies. You may also get cookies from our advertisers or other third parties with links on the Site as described below. We do not directly control these cookies. The use of advertising cookies sent by third party ad servers is standard in the Internet industry.
• We may use the services of third parties to collect and use anonymous information about your visits to and interactions with our website through the use of technologies such as cookies to personalize advertisements for goods and services.
• Other Tracking Technologies
Tracking technologies may record information such as Internet domain and host names; Internet protocol (IP) addresses; browser software and operating system types; clickstream patterns; and dates and times that our Site and Services are accessed. An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the web. Web servers, the computers that ‘serve up’ webpages, automatically identify your computer by its IP address. The Site and Services may also use technology called “tracer tags”. These may also be referred to as “Pixels”, “Clear GIFs” or “Web Beacons”. This technology allows us to understand which pages you visit on our Site and other ways you interact with our Site and Services, such as purchases made through the Site and Services. These tracer tags are used to help us to optimize and tailor our Site and Services for you and other users of our Site and Services. We may link the information we record using tracking technologies to Personal Information we collect.
Use of Information
The information HomeWaterAdvisor collects is used in a variety of ways, including
• for internal review;
• to improve the Site and Services;
• to optimize third-party offers of products and/or services;
• to verify the legitimacy of reviews and ratings;
• to notify you about updates to the Site and Services;
• to let you know about products, services, and promotions that you may be interested in;
• to get reviews and ratings;
• for our marketing purposes and the marketing of discounts offered through our Site and Services by service contractors or health care related providers (collectively “Service Providers”);
• to fulfill and provide products and services, including personalized or enhanced services, requested by you; and
• internal business analysis or other business purposes consistent with our mission; and to carry out other purposes that are disclosed to you and to which you consent.
With whom we share your information
We want you to understand when and with whom we may share personal or other information we have collected about you or your activities on our web site or while using our services.
Personal information.
We do not share your personal information with others except as indicated below or when we inform you and give you an opportunity to opt out of having your personal information shared. We may share personal information with:
• Authorized service providers:
We may share your personal information with our authorized service providers that perform certain services on our behalf. These services may include fulfilling orders, processing credit card payments, delivering packages, providing customer service and marketing assistance, performing business and sales analysis, supporting our website functionality, and supporting contests, sweepstakes, surveys and other features offered through our website or performing background checks of Service Professionals.
• Marketing Affiliates:
When you are referred to us via a third party marketing affiliate, we may share your email address, and other information that you provide, to such marketing affiliate.
• Business partners:
When you make purchases, reservations or engage in promotions offered through our website or our services, we may share personal information with the businesses with which we partner to offer you those products, services, promotions, contests and/or sweepstakes. When you elect to engage in a particular merchant’s offer or program, you authorize us to provide your email address and other information to that merchant.
• Service Professionals:
We match your information and service request against our list of Service Professionals. When you submit a service request through our website, you consent to our providing your personal information and request to the Service Professionals we match with your request. Sharing this information with Service Professionals allows them to contact you using the e-mail address or other contact information you provided. In addition, we have other approved contractual partners that fulfill service requests, or that utilize their own Service Professionals to supplement our network, and we share your information with them in order to attempt to provide the services requested. If using our services pursuant to a membership with one of our partners, HomeWaterAdvisor may share your service request activity information with such partner.
• Direct mail partners:
From time to time we may share our postal mailing list with selected providers of goods and services that may be of interest to you.
• Other Situations:
We also may disclose your information:
◦ In response to a subpoena or similar investigative demand, a court order, or a request for cooperation from a law enforcement or other government agency; to establish or exercise our legal rights; to defend against legal claims; or as otherwise required by law. In such cases, we may raise or waive any legal objection or right available to us.
◦ When we believe disclosure is appropriate in connection with efforts to investigate, prevent, or take other action regarding illegal activity, suspected fraud or other wrongdoing; to protect and defend the rights, property or safety of our company, our users, our employees, or others; to comply with applicable law or cooperate with law enforcement; or to enforce our website terms and conditions or other agreements or policies.
◦ In connection with a substantial corporate transaction, such as the sale of our business, a divestiture, merger, consolidation, or asset sale, or in the unlikely event of bankruptcy.
For Service Professionals, we may share your business contact information with third parties, including but not limited to, business name, address, telephone number, email address and name of owner or proprietor of the business.
Any third parties to whom we may disclose personal information may have their own privacy policies which describe how they use and disclose personal information. Those policies will govern use, handling and disclosure of your personal information once we have shared it with those third parties as described in this Privacy Policy. If you want to learn more about their privacy practices, we encourage you to visit the websites of those third parties. These entities or their servers may be located either inside or outside the United States.
Aggregated and non-personal information. We may share aggregated and non-personal information we collect under any of the above circumstances. We may also share it with third parties to develop and deliver targeted advertising on our websites and on websites of third parties. We may combine non-personal information we collect with additional non-personal information collected from other sources. We also may share aggregated information with third parties, including advisors, advertisers and investors, for the purpose of conducting general business analysis. For example, we may tell our advertisers the number of visitors to our website and the most popular features or services accessed. This information does not contain any personal information and may be used to develop website content and services that we hope you and other users will find of interest and to target content and advertising.
Data Security, Integrity, and Access
The Personal Information you provide and we collect is stored within databases that we control directly or through our Administrative Service Providers. As we deem appropriate and as required by the applicable law, we use security measures appropriate for the sensitivity of the Personal Information and consistent with industry standards, including physical, organizational and technological protections, such as firewalls, to protect your Personal Information. We also use industry standard encryption technology to protect credit card and password information. However, since no security system is impenetrable, we cannot guarantee the security of our databases, nor can we guarantee that information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet.
Personal Information may only be accessed by persons within our organization, our third party service providers who require such access to provide you with the services indicated above, or any other party that you have provided us with authorization to share such information with.
We retain Personal Information that we collect only as long as reasonably necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected or to otherwise meet any legal requirements.
Visiting our websites from outside the United States
This Privacy Policy is intended to cover collection of information on our website from residents of the United States. If you are visiting our website from outside the United States, please be aware that your information may be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States where our servers are located and our central database is operated. The data protection and other laws of the United States and other countries might not be as comprehensive as those in your country. By using our services, you understand that your information may be transferred to our facilities and those third parties with whom we share it as described in this privacy policy.
No Rights of Third Parties
This Privacy Policy does not create rights enforceable by third parties or require disclosure of any personal information relating to users of the website.
Third Party Websites and Links
Please note that you may have cookies placed on your computer by third party websites that refer you to the Site. Although we do not share your Personal Information with these third party websites unless you have authorized us to do so, they may be able to link certain non-personally identifiable information we transfer to them with Personal Information they previously collected from you. Please review the privacy policies of each website you visit to better understand their privacy practices. In addition, HomeWaterAdvisor would like to inform you that anytime you click on links (including advertising banners), which take you to third party websites, you will be subject to the third parties’ privacy policies. While we support the protection of our customer’s privacy on the Internet, HomeWaterAdvisor expressly disclaims any and all liability for the actions of third parties, including but without limitation to actions relating to the use and/or disclosure of Personal Information by third parties.
Our Site and Services may contain links to other sites operated by third parties. HomeWaterAdvisor does not control such other sites and is not responsible for their content, their privacy policies, or their use of Personal Information. HomeWaterAdvisor’s inclusion of such links does not, by itself, imply any endorsement of the content on such sites or of their owners or operators except as disclosed on the Site and Services. Any information submitted by you directly to these third parties is subject to that third party’s privacy policy.
Your choices about collection and use of your information
• At any time a consumer user can choose to no longer receive commercial or promotional emails or newsletters from us by accessing your user account and opting out. You also will be given the opportunity, in any commercial e-mail that we send to you, to opt out of receiving such messages in the future. It may take up to 10 days for us to process an opt-out request. We may send you other types of transactional and relationship e-mail communications, such as service announcements, administrative notices, and surveys, without offering you the opportunity to opt out of receiving them.
• If you prefer not to have us share your postal mailing information with these selected providers of goods and services that may be of interest to you, you can notify us at any time by emailing us at [email protected].
Blogs, bulletin boards, reviews and chat rooms
We may provide areas on our websites where you can post information about yourself and others and communicate with others, as well as post reviews of products, establishments, contractors, and the like, or upload content (e.g. pictures, videos, audio files, etc.). Such postings are governed by our Terms of Use. In addition, such postings may appear on other websites or when searches are executed on the subject of your posting. Also, whenever you voluntarily disclose personal information on publicly-viewable web pages, that information will be publicly available and can be collected and used by others. For example, if you post your email address, you may receive unsolicited messages. We cannot control who reads your posting or what other users may do with the information you voluntarily post, so we encourage you to exercise discretion and caution with respect to your personal information. Once you have posted information, you may not be able to edit or delete such information.
Children’s Privacy
HomeWaterAdvisor does not intend the Site and Services to be used by individuals under the age of majority within the jurisdiction within which they reside without the supervision of a parent or guardian of majority age. HomeWaterAdvisor relies upon such parents or guardians to determine if the Site and Services is appropriate for the viewing, access, or participation by such individuals under the age of majority. If an individual under the age of majority uses the Site and Services, such individual may only use the Site and Services under the supervision of a parent or guardian of majority age.
We do not seek or knowingly collect any Personal Information about children under 13 years of age. If we become aware that we have unknowingly collected Personal Information from a child under the age of 13, we will make commercially reasonable efforts to delete such information from our database.
If you are the parent or guardian of a minor child who has provided us with Personal Information, you may contact us using the information below to request it be deleted.
Governing Law; Visitors Residing Outside the United States
This Privacy Policy and the privacy practices of HomeWaterAdvisor will be subject exclusively to the laws in which HomeWaterAdvisor provides its services.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
We will occasionally update this Privacy Policy to reflect changes in our practices and services. When we post changes to this Privacy Policy, we will revise the “last updated” date at the top of this Privacy Policy. If we make any material changes in the way we collect, use, and/or share your personal information, we will notify you by posting the updated policy on our website, with a link denoting that the policy has been updated. We recommend that you check our website from time to time to inform yourself of any changes in this Privacy Policy or any of our other policies. To see the prior version of the HomeWaterAdvisor Privacy Policy you may make your request here.
How To Contact us
All requests, questions, concerns, or complaints about your Personal Information or this Privacy Policy, please contact us here.
We welcome your questions and comments.
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