This Privacy Statement describes our
privacy policies and procedures for information
provided to us by consumers who visit the Auto
Buying Program Web site,
www.samsclubauto.com, and obtain or seek to
obtain Auto Buying Program’s referral services.
The Auto Buying Program is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy
Program. TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit organization whose
mission is to build users’ trust and confidence in the Internet by
promoting the use of fair information practices. Because this web
site wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has
agreed to disclose its information practices and have its privacy
practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe. By displaying the
TRUSTe Trustmark, this web site has agreed to notify you of:
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What personally identifiable information of yours
or third party personally identifiable information that is
collected from you through the web site.
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The organization collecting the information.
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How the information is used.
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With whom the information may be shared.
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What choices are available to you regarding
collection, use and distribution of the information.
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The kind of security procedures that are in place
to protect the loss, misuse, or alteration of information under
the Auto Buying Program's control.
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How you can correct any inaccuracies in the
information.
If you have questions or concerns regarding this
statement, you should first contact
help@samsclubauto.com,
call us at 888.525.4286, or write to us at Auto Buying Program;
13016 N. Walton Blvd.; Bentonville, Arkansas 72712. If you do not
receive acknowledgment of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been
satisfactorily addressed, you should then contact TRUSTe at TRUSTe
Watchdog. TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with the Web site to
resolve your concerns.
Information Collection and Use
The Auto Buying Program collects information from our users at
several different points on our web site.
New and Pre Owned Vehicle Requests
The Auto Buying Program will collect and use your personal
information to respond to your requests for information on new
and pre-owned vehicles. When you enter this information on the
request form, the Auto Buying Program will collect your
name, address, day and evening telephone numbers, e-mail address
and member number. This information will be provided to state
franchised new and used vehicle dealers who participate in this
program. If there are no participating dealers selling your
desired make of vehicle in your immediate area, we may forward
your information to a partner of the Auto Buying Program who
will endeavor to fulfill your request.
Member Classifieds
When you list your vehicle for sale in the Member Classifieds on
www.SamsClubAuto.com,
the Auto Buying Program will collect your name, zip code,
email address, and a credit card number for use in collecting
the publication fee. This personal data will be collected in a
secure environment. When another website user is interested in
your vehicle, you will be notified by email and you can choose
to respond to the potential purchaser or not. Only your zip code
will be provided to a user inquiring about your vehicle.
Sharing Information with Third Parties
All personally identifiable information provided by our users is
used only as the user directs. Unless you give us permission to do
so or unless required by law, we do not use or disclose personally
identifiable information to any third party unless we notify you in
advance of your providing us that information. We may share
aggregated statistical information about the use of our site with
our business partners. Such aggregated statistical information does
not include personally identifiable information. We reserve the
right to disclose your personally identifiable information as
required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to
protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding,
court order, or legal process served on our Web site.
The Auto Buying Program has third party business
partners who provide services for auto buying such as loans, leases,
etc. The Auto Buying Program web site frames the partner's web
sites. When our business partners offer you their products or
services through the Auto Buying Program’s web site, we notify
you at the point of collection. As the Auto Buying Program does
not have access to the information these business partners collect
about you, we encourage you to read their privacy policies prior to
providing them with your personal information as their privacy
policies and practices may be different from ours.
The Auto Buying Program utilizes masking
techniques (disguising the URL) in order to provide the user a
seamless web experience. You can check your location on the web at
any time by clicking the right mouse button and selecting
"properties."
We currently contract with Omniture, Inc. to help
manage and optimize our Internet business and communications. We use
the services of Omniture, Inc. to help us measure the effectiveness
of our advertising and how visitors use our site. To do this, we use
Web beacons and cookies provided by our marketing company on this
site. The type of information we collect includes the type of
vehicles selected by our users, the participating dealers that users
are referred to, the pages visited, the pages exited from, etc. By
supplementing our records, this information helps us learn things
like what pages are most attractive to our visitors, which of our
services most interest our customers, and what kinds of offers our
customers like to see. Although our marketing company logs the
information coming from our site on our behalf, we control how that
data may and may not be used. If you do not want to help us learn
how to improve our site, services, offers and marketing strategy,
you can “opt-out” of this website analysis tool by clicking
here.
We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable
information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure
is necessary to protect our rights and/or comply with a judicial
proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Web site.
We obtain your permission prior to posting your testimonial on our
website. When you decide to provide a testimonial, we publish your
first name and last initial along with the city and state in your
testimonial. To opt-out of having a testimonial on our page please
email us at
help@samsclubauto.com, call us at 888.525.4286.
If you use a bulletin board, blog, or chat room on this Web site,
you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you
submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these
forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are
not responsible for the personally identifiable information you
choose to submit in these forums.
Cookies
A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user’s hard drive
containing information about the user. Technical information
collected from your web browser (IP address and permanent cookies)
is gathered for routine web site maintenance and for purposes of
assessing the effectiveness of our products and services. If you
choose not to accept cookies, you will still be able to access all
pages throughout the Auto Buying Program web site, but may
receive cookie notifications and popup windows more frequently. Some
of our business partners (e.g., advertisers) may use cookies on our
site. We have no access to or control over these cookies.
If you enter your name, address, phone number, and email address
into the user profile page on our website, this information will be
retained, on your machine, in a cookie that will be used to
pre-populate those fields on the user profile page should you return
to the website at a later date.
E-mail Communications from the Auto Buying Program
The Auto Buying Program will send you e-mails restating the
information that is provided to you on our web site and asking you
about the experiences that you have with our participating dealers.
These communications are intended to serve as a customer service
follow-up and to gather information about the effectiveness of our
products and services.
If you wish not to receive or to stop receiving these
e-mail communications, please e-mail us at
help@samsclubauto.com.
Safeguarding your Personal Information
Auto Buying Program uses a variety of security safeguards to
protect your information from loss, misuse, alteration or
destruction. Access to your personal information by Auto Buying
Program employees and other authorized parties is provided on a
"need to know" basis. In addition, all employees must sign a Privacy
Pledge, which indicates that they are aware of Auto Buying
Program’s privacy policies regarding using and disclosing
information.
Security
We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the
personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and
once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or
method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore,
while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your
personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If you have any questions about security on our Web site, you can
send email us at
help@samsclubauto.com.
If a user’s personally identifiable information changes (such as zip
code, phone, e-mail or postal address), or if a user no longer
desires our service, we provide a way to correct, update or
delete/deactivate users’ personally identifiable information. This
can usually be done by e-mailing our Customer Support at
help@samsclubauto.com,
call us at 888.525.4286, or write to us at Auto Buying Program;
13016 N. Walton Blvd.; Bentonville, Arkansas 72712.
Security Breaches
Please contact
help@samsclubauto.com or 888.525.4286 to report any known or
suspected privacy or security breaches or to submit privacy related
question or complaint. After receiving your inquiry, we will respond
within five business days. The Auto Buying Program reserves the
right to modify or amend the Privacy Statement at any time and for
any reason. We will post those changes prominently on our web site
30-days prior to implementation. Should we make Material Changes to
this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a
notice on our home page. We will make the current version of the
Privacy Statement available to you at the Auto Buying Program
web site.
Last Update
This Privacy Policy was last updated on August 14, 2008.