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