Primerates.com Privacy Policy

What This Privacy Policy Covers

We at Primerates LLC (“Primerates”) take your privacy very seriously.  Accordingly, the information you submit to www.primerates.com (“primerates.com” or the “Website”) shall be governed by this Privacy Policy.  With this Privacy Policy, we want to let you know how we treat personal information that we collect and receive from users of the Website. Personal information is information about you that is personally identifiable like your name, address, email address, or phone number. By visiting, using and/or submitting information to the Website, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy and the terms and conditions of Primerates’ Terms of Use Agreement.

This Privacy Policy covers the following:

• The information we collect and use, including how we generally use that information.
• What we share and disclose and why and to whom.
• What “Cookies” and “Web beacons” are and how we use them.
• How to update and delete your account information.
• How you will be notified of changes to our Privacy Policy.
• How and whom to contact if you have questions or suggestions regarding our Privacy Policy.

Primerates’ Privacy Policy applies only to the Website. While other Web sites may be displayed as search results or links from within the Website, those sites are owned and operated by others, and they may have different privacy policies. When linking from primerates.com to other Web sites, if you have privacy concerns, we urge you to review the privacy policies of those sites.

It’s also important to note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to information that you post, yourself, in public areas of the Website. For example, if you choose to let other people see your name and your answers to profile questions, or if you post information or comments on a discussion board, that information will be made public. Your messages and other information you make available in public areas of the Website will be seen by people and organizations not related to or controlled by Primerates, and may be used by others to contact you.

Information Collection and Use

• We collect personal information from you whenever you interact with the Website, such as when you:
• register with the Website,
• use our products or services,
• transmit, submit or post information in the Website’s chat rooms, bulletin boards or other forums,
• enter promotions or sweepstakes, and
• visit web pages on the Website or on the Web sites of certain of our partners.
• We may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other companies.
• When you register, we may ask for information such as your name, email address, birth date, gender, zip code, occupation, industry, and personal interests. Once you register with the Website and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us. You are free to use Primerates.com without registering or setting up a personal Primerates Account; however, some of our services and web pages are available only to those who are registered users.
• We collect information about your transactions with us and with some of our business partners, including information about your use of financial products and services that we offer.
• We automatically receive and record information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, Primerates cookie information, and the pages you request.
• We use your personal information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, deliver information to you that, in some cases, is targeted to your interests, such as product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of the Website, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.
• In general, we provide access to your personal information only to Primerates employees and contractors who we believe need that access in order to do their jobs and to provide products or services to you.

Information Sharing and Disclosure

• We do not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies except to provide products or services you request, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances:
• We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with Primerates under confidentiality agreements. These companies may use your personal information to help Primerates communicate with you about offers from Primerates and our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have any independent right to share this information.
• We may sometimes share aggregate non-personal information with third parties such as the media, advertisers, and government agencies. This aggregate information is typically in the form of statistics, such as numbers of the Website’s users who live in a particular state or fall within a particular age group. Such aggregate information is gathered from individual Primerates users’ information but is not traceable to any specific identifiable Primerates user.
• We respond to subpoenas, court orders, or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims.
• We believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of the Primerates terms of use agreement, or as otherwise required or permitted by law.
• We may transfer personally identifiable information and other personal information collected from you to a third party as a result of a sale, acquisition, merger, reorganization, other transfer or bankruptcy (a “Transfer”) involving Primerates and/or its affiliates. Primerates specifically reserves the right to transfer personally identifiable information collected from primerates.com, and any of its databases, together with any personally identifiable information contained therein, to a third party in connection with a Transfer, and nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to interfere with the ability of Primerates to transfer all or part of its business and/or assets (including primerates.com) to an affiliate or independent third party at any time, for any purpose, without any limitation whatsoever.

In addition, due to the existing regulatory environment, Primerates 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), Primerates may be forced to disclose personal information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances or third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. Therefore, although Primerates uses commercially reasonable practices to protect your privacy, Primerates does not promise, and you should not expect, that your personally identifiable information or private communications will always remain private.

Our Advertisers

We do not share your personal information with our advertisers. However, the advertising we display is targeted to users of particular services and content. So if you view or click on a targeted ad, the advertiser (or other companies affiliated with the advertiser) may assume that you meet the targeting criteria for example, women ages 50-60 from a particular geographic area or with children or grandchildren of a certain age.

Newsletters and CAN-SPAM Compliance

Primerates.com sends only verified, double-opt-in e-mail newsletters, specifically requested by Website subscribers. Subscriptions to primerates.com newsletters are verified by sending an e-mail confirmation to your e-mail address, which requires a positive response before an e-mail address is added to Primerates’ list. Primerates.com is fully compliant with the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003.

Cookies and Web Beacons

The Website, like many Web sites, uses cookies to prepare customized Web pages for you. A cookie is a file containing a string of code that we transfer to your computer’s hard drive, to be kept there for later use. With cookies in place, whenever you use your Web browser (such as Internet Explorer, AOL, or Mozilla Firefox) to connect to the Website, our systems are able to recognize you. This enables Primerates to present you with custom Web pages. So, for example, instead of seeing just a generic welcome page, you see a welcome page with your name on it and information that relates to where you live (your zip code) and products or services that reflect your interests.

In addition to Primerates’ cookies, when you visit the Website, your computer may receive cookies from our advertisers, and from other sites displayed as search results or links. The cookies inserted by those third parties are not covered by this Privacy Policy, but rather, by the policies of those advertisers and outside Web sites.

You can set up your browser to reject cookies or tell you when a cookie has been sent. However, cookies allow you to take full advantage of the Website’s interactive features, and we hope you will leave them turned on. The Website also uses web beacons (also known as action tags or single pixel gifs) to access Primerates cookies inside and outside our Web pages and in connection with Primerates products and services. A web beacon is a transparent image placed on a web page that sends a signal when a person visits that page. This enables us to assess the popularity and effectiveness of the material posted on the Website. We may also use web beacons in connection with e-mails sent to the Website’s users, to let us know whether and when the e-mail was opened. No personal information is transmitted through web beacons.

Third-party Ad Serving

• Primerates contracts with third party companies to help us make sure that our content and advertising are relevant and effective, and to analyze 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, for example, the pages you visited at the Website. This information helps us learn things like what pages are most attractive to our visitors, which products are most interesting, and what kinds of offers our visitors like to see. Although our third party marketing partners manage the information coming from our site on our behalf, we control how that data may and may not be used.

Your Ability to Update and Delete Your Account Information and Preferences

• You can update your primerates.com account information, including your biographical and profile information, at any time, by going to primerates.com.
• We reserve the right to send you certain important communications relating to the Website, such as service announcements and administrative messages, throughout the term of your personal Primerates account, without offering you the opportunity to opt-out of receiving these important communications.
• You can terminate your Primerates account at any time by sending a request to support@primerates.com.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

Primerates reserves the right to update, amend and/or change this Privacy Policy at any time in its sole discretion and without notice. Updates to this Privacy Policy will be posted here. Any information Primerates collects from you online is subject only to Primerates’ most current Privacy Policy. You are encouraged to revisit this Privacy Policy from time to time in order to review any changes that have been made. Primerates’ last update of this Privacy Policy was December 1, 2011. Your continued access and use of primerates.com following the posting of any such changes shall automatically be deemed your acceptance of the same.

Questions and Suggestions

If you have questions or suggestions about our Privacy Policy, please complete a feedback form or you can contact us at:

Primerates, LLC.
920 Florida Avenue
Washington, DC 20009
202-656-5190
editor@primerates.com

Effective Date: December 1, 2011