HFM Privacy Policy

 

The Privacy Policy below governs your HFM account and any information you provide on this site. If you order on-line, your financial information will be handled by the Paypal Privacy Policy.  If you are approved for a PayPal VISA credit card, your credit card account will be governed by the Providian Privacy Policy.

 

 

A. Overview
B. Information We Collect
C. Our Use and Disclosure of Information
D. Information Security
E. Accessing and Changing Your Information
F. Contacting Us

 


A. Overview

In order to serve you, Home Furnishings Marketing (HFM) must ask you to provide us information.  This Privacy Policy describes the information we collect and how we use that information. HFM takes the privacy of your personal information very seriously and will use your information only in accordance with the terms of this Privacy Policy. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information or a list of our customers to third parties. However, as described in more detail in Part C below, there are limited circumstances in which some of your information will be shared with third parties, under strict restrictions, so it is important for you to review this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy applies to all services that are hosted on the hfmllc.com Web site, whether the services are offered by HFM or by PayPal.

By accepting the Privacy Policy when you place an order with us, you expressly consent to our use and disclosure of your personal information in the manner described in this Privacy Policy.  This Privacy Policy will take effect on May 1, 2003. This Privacy Policy was last updated on May 1, 2003.

Please note that your personal information will be stored and processed on our computer in the United States. The laws on holding personal data in the United States may be less stringent than the laws of your country but HFM will hold and transmit your personal information in a safe, confidential and secure environment. If you object to your personal information being transferred or used as described in this Privacy Policy, please do not inquire or order from HFM.

Notification of Changes
This policy may be revised over time as new features are added to the HFM service or as we incorporate suggestions from our customers. If we are going to use or disclose your personally identifiable information in a manner materially different from that stated at the time we collected the information, you will have a choice as to whether or not we use or disclose your information in this new manner.
We will post the amended Privacy Policy prominently on our Web site so that you can always review what information we gather, how we might use that information, and whether we will disclose it to anyone. Please check the HFM Web site at www.hfmllc.com at any time for the most current version of our Privacy Policy.

Third party Web sites are governed by their own privacy statements, and HFM is not responsible for their operations, including but not limited to their information practices. Users submitting information to or through these third party Web sites should review the privacy statement of these sites before providing them with personally identifiable information.

A Special Note About Children. Children are not eligible to use our service and we ask that minors (under the age of 18) do not submit any personal information to us or use the service.


B. Information We Collect

Required Information
To open a HFM account, you must provide your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. You must provide payments via credit card, personal check, certified check or money order direct to HFM or credit card on-line through PayPal.  In order to make payments through PayPal, you must provide credit card, debit card or bank account information (bank account information is required to make payments totaling more than $1,000). This required information is necessary for HFM and PayPal to process transactions, protect you against credit card fraud and checking account fraud, and to contact you should the need arise in administering your account.


Transaction Information
When you use PayPal to send money to HFM for the purchase of goods, we ask you to provide information related to each transaction. PayPal retains this information for each of your transactions through PayPal. PayPal will also collect the Internet address (IP address) of the computer or device you use to access your PayPal account, in order to help detect possible instances of unauthorized transactions.

Information About You From Third Parties
In order to protect all our customers against potential fraud, PayPal will verify with third parties the information you provide. In the course of such verification, PayPal will receive personally identifiable information about you from such services. In particular, if you register a credit card or debit card with PayPal, PayPal will use card authorization and fraud screening services to verify that your card information and address matches the information that you supplied to PayPal, and that the card has not been reported as lost or stolen.

PayPal, at its sole discretion, also reserves the right periodically to retrieve and review a business and / or consumer credit report for any account, and reserves the right to close an account based on information obtained during this credit review process.

Additional Verification
If Paypal cannot verify the information that you provide, or if you request a withdrawal by check to an address other than your verified credit card billing address, PayPal will ask you to send them additional information by fax (such as your drivers' license, credit card statement, and/or a recent utility bill or other information linking you to the applicable address), or to answer additional questions online to help verify your information.

Web Site Traffic Information
Because of the way that World Wide Web communication standards work, when you arrive at or leave the HFM Web site, we automatically collect information on which pages of our Web site you visit while you are on the HFM site, the type of browser you use and the times you access our Web site. We use this information only to try to understand our customers' preferences better and to manage the load on our servers, so as to improve our service and your experience with HFM. We do not track the Web sites that you visit before or after you leave the HFM site.

Customer Service Correspondence
If you send us correspondence, including e-mails and faxes, we retain such information in the records of your account. We will also retain customer service correspondence and other correspondence from HFM to you. We retain these records in order to measure and improve our customer service, and to investigate potential fraud and violations of our User Agreement. We may, over time, delete these records if permitted by law.

Questionnaires, Surveys and Profile Data
From time to time, we offer optional questionnaires and surveys to our users for such purposes as collecting demographic information or assessing users' interests and needs. The use of the information collected will be explained in detail in the survey itself. If we collect personally identifiable information from our users in these questionnaires and surveys, the users will be given notice of how the information will be used prior to their participation in the survey or questionnaire.


 

C. Our Use and Disclosure of Information

Internal Uses
We collect, store and process your personal information on servers located in the United States. We use the information we collect about you in order 1) to provide our services and process your orders, 2) to provide customer service, and 3) to improve our products and services. We give access to individually identifiable information about our users only to those employees who require it to fulfill customer service requests.

Disclosure From PayPal to HFM
If you are a registered PayPal user, your name, e-mail address, date of sign-up, and whether you have verified control of a bank account are displayed to HFM.  However, your credit card number, bank account and other financial information will NEVER be revealed to HFM or anyone whom you have paid through PayPal, except if PayPal is required to do so pursuant to a subpoena or other legal process.

If you are paying through PayPal, HFM request that you provide a mailing address that PayPal has confirmed as matching the billing address in the credit card system. If you do not provide the information, HFM will not accept your PayPal payment and will not complete the transaction.


 


Disclosure to Third Parties Other Than PayPal

HFM will not sell or rent any of your personally identifiable information to third parties. HFM will not share any of your personally identifiable information with third parties except in the limited circumstances described below, or with your express permission. These third parties are limited by law or by contract from using the information for secondary purposes beyond the purposes for which the information is shared.

1.      We share information with home delivery companies that help us process the orders you request and protect our customers' transactions from fraud, such as sharing your credit card number with a service that screens for lost and stolen card numbers. Additionally, if you go into a negative balance and owe us money, we may share information with processing companies including collection agencies.

2.    We disclose the information we collect, as described in Section B above, to companies that perform marketing services on our behalf.  These companies are subject to confidentiality agreements with us and other legal restrictions that prohibit using the information, unless you have affirmatively agreed or given your prior permission for other uses.

3.    We disclose information that we in good faith believe is appropriate to cooperate in investigations of fraud or other illegal activity, or to conduct investigations of violations of our User Agreement. Specifically, this means that if we conduct a fraud investigation and conclude that one side has engaged in deceptive practices, we can give that person or entity's contact information (but not bank account or credit card information) to victims who request it.

4.    We disclose information in response to a subpoena, warrant, court order, levy, attachment, order of a court-appointed receiver or other comparable legal process, including subpoenas from private parties in a civil action.

5.    As with any other business, it is possible that HFM in the future could merge with or be acquired by another company. If such an acquisition occurs, the successor company would have access to the information maintained by HFM, including customer account information, but would continue to be bound by this Privacy Policy unless an until it is amended as described in Section A above.

6.    We share your information with our parent, subsidiaries and joint ventures to help coordinate the services we provide to you, enforce our terms and conditions, and promote trust and safety.


Our Contacts with Customers
We communicate with users on a regular basis via e-mail to provide requested services, and we also communicate by phone to resolve customer complaints or investigate suspicious transactions. We use your e-mail address to confirm your opening of a HFM account, to send you notice of payments that you send or receive through PayPal (including referral payments described below), to send information about important changes to our products and services, and to send notices and other disclosures required by law. Generally, users cannot opt out of these communications, but they will be primarily informational in nature rather than promotional.

In connection with independent audits of our financial statements and operations, the auditors may seek to contact a sample of our customers to confirm that our records are accurate. However, these auditors cannot use personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes.


Internet Address Information
We use IP addresses, browser types and access times to analyze trends, administer the site, improve site performance and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.

Your Use of Information and Our Services
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 PayPal-related communication or HFM-facilitated transaction, you will only use this information for: (a) HFM-related communications that are not unsolicited commercial messages, (b) using services offered through HFM and (c) any other purpose that such user expressly agrees to after adequate disclosure of the purpose(s).

In all cases, we will provide users with the opportunity to remove them from our database and review any information we have collected about them. In addition, under no circumstances, except as defined in this Section, we cannot disclose personally identifiable information about another customer to any third party without our consent and the consent of such other user after adequate disclosure. Note that law enforcement personnel and other rights holders are given different rights with respect to information they access.


D. Information Security

Information Security
HFM is committed to handling your customer information with high standards of information security. Your credit card and bank account information are stored only in encrypted form on computers that are not connected to the Internet. We restrict access to your personally identifiable information to employees who need to know that information in order to provide products or services to you.

 

 

 

 

 


E. Accessing and Changing Your Information

Once we ship your order, we will mark your account in our database as "Closed," but will keep your contact information in our database. Your personally identifiable information will not be used by us for any further purposes, nor sold or shared with third parties, except as necessary to prevent fraud and assist law enforcement, or as required by law.


F. Contacting Us

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, HFM’s information practices, or your dealings with HFM, you can contact us by call (828) 459-9308 Monday through Friday between the hours of 9am and 5pm EST, or write us at HFM, LLC, P.O. Box 1269, Claremont, NC  28610.