Safeguard Privacy

Protect any data collected against mishandling and fraud, collect personal information only as needed, and respect the preferences of customers regarding the use of their information. An accredited business agrees to:

a. Respect Privacy. Businesses conducting e-commerce agree to disclose the following on its website(s): What information is collected, with whom it is shared, how it can be corrected, how it is secure, how policy changes will be communicated, and how to address concerns over misuse of personal data.

b. Secure Sensitive Data. Business that collect sensitive data online (credit card, bank account numbers, social security number, salary or other personal financial information, medical history or records, etc.) will ensure that it is transmitted via secure means; businesses will make best efforts to comply with industry standards for the protection and proper disposal of all sensitive data, both online and offline.

c. Honor Customer Preferences. Businesses agree to respect customer preference regarding contact by telephone, fax and email, and agree to remedy underlying cause of any failure to do so. 

TYPES OF INFORMATION WE COLLECT
The information we gather falls into two categories: (1) information (for example, your name and address) that you voluntarily supply (for example, when you register as a visitor to the site, or customize our service to provide you services specific to your neighborhood), and (2) information gathered on usage patterns and preferences as visitors navigate through our sites. In some cases, it is an agent or affiliate of ours that collects the information on our behalf. Third-party providers featured on or linked to by our site, such as vendors of products and services offered through our site, may be gathering the same kinds of information. We may use your registration information to contact you for customer service purposes, to inform you about the services offered over our site or of important changes or additions to our site, and to send you newsletters, offers and information that you request or that we think may interest you.

Contests and Other Promotions. From time to time, we may offer contests, sweepstakes or other promotions on our site. If you enter one of these promotions, you'll have to provide information about yourself (such as your name, address, telephone number and email address) so that we can contact you if you win. We may share this information with any wholly or majority-owned subsidiary of Ocean Computers, Inc. and any co-sponsor of the promotion (we will identify any co-sponsor in the official rules for the promotion). If you don't want us to collect the information requested in the registration form or to provide it to any wholly or majority-owned subsidiary of Ocean Computers, Inc. or contest co-sponsors, please do not enter the contest or sweepstakes.

Email Newsletters. We may offer you the opportunity to subscribe to email newsletters on topics that we believe are of interest to our visitors. If you have opted to receive a particular newsletter, you may always unsubscribe later if you decide not to receive further mailings of the newsletter from us. Each newsletter will include instructions on how to unsubscribe from future issues by using either a designated reply email address or hyperlink.

Cookies. To help make our sites more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we use a standard feature of browser software, called a "cookie," to assign each visitor a unique, random number, a sort of user ID, if you will, that resides on your computer. The cookie doesn't actually identify the visitor, just the computer that a visitor uses to access our site. The only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply. A cookie can't read unrelated data off your hard drive. Our advertisers and the third parties that provide products or services through our site may also assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we don't control. We use cookies to help us tailor our site to your needs, to deliver a better, more personalized service. For example, we may use cookies to allow you to search for those businesses closest to your home. In addition, we may use cookies to track the pages on our site visited by our users. We can build a better site if we know which pages our users are visiting and how often. Of course, you can set your browser not to accept cookies, but if you do, you may not be able to take advantage of the personalized features enjoyed by other visitors to our site.

Other Methods of Collecting Information. Our web pages may contain electronic images (called "single-pixel GIFs" or "web beacons") that allow us and our vendors to count users who have visited particular pages or to access certain cookies. We may use these tools and other technologies to recognize which pages users visit, and which links they click on. These features may also be included in our email newsletters so that we can learn which messages have been opened and acted upon. We may also be able to verify your online purchases from us or from third party sites that have agreed to share such information with us.

Browser Level Information and IP Addresses. Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer configuration when you visit our site, including the type of browser software you use, the operating system you're running, the resolution of your computer monitor, the Web site that referred you, and your IP address. (Your IP address is a numerical address that is used by computers connected to the Internet to identify your computer so that data such as the web pages you want to view can be transmitted to you.) We also use IP address information for systems administration and troubleshooting purposes. Your IP address does not tell us who you are. We use this information to deliver web pages to you upon request, to tailor our site to the interests of our users, and to measure traffic within our site.

DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION
Why we want to know. We collect information in order to make the Web site more useful and relevant to you. For example, we may ask you for an address so that you can map a route from your work or home address to that of a service provider, or so you can narrow your search to businesses that serve your neighborhood.

Third Parties. We will not share the personally-identifiable information you provide when registering on our site with third parties. We may, however, take the information you provide and aggregate it with data from all the other people that use this site and associated services. Then we would use that pool of information to inform third parties about our audience without identifying you personally. For example, we'll be able to say to a third party: "We have 3,470 site visitors in this ZIP code," which happens to be your location.

Vendors and Provider Partners. To make our sites more valuable to our visitors, we may offer some features in conjunction with other providers ("Provider Partners"). Our email newsletters, email services and online classifieds for example, may be made available through cooperative arrangements with providers that specialize in operating such services. In some instances, our Provider Partners will have the same access to your information as we do. Their use of the information will be subject to the terms of their respective privacy policies, which you can find on their Web sites. We may also use vendors and third-party contractors to help us operate our site, analyze or process data on our behalf, or improve the services that we offer to you. We may provide these vendors and contractors with information about our visitors that is necessary for them to perform the services that we request.

Statistical Information. Much of the information we collect is in the form of aggregated statistics, such as the traffic that visits various pages within our sites, and the habits and preferences of our audience. Such aggregated information does not include any information that would identify you personally. We may use such aggregated information and disclose it to third parties as we see fit.

Sites to Which We Link. Our site includes links to plenty of other Web sites, and provides access to services offered by third parties, whose privacy policies we don't control. When you access another site or purchase products or services or conduct other transactions through our sites, use of any information you provide is governed by the privacy policy of the operator of the site you're visiting or the provider of such products or services.

Other Disclosures. We may occasionally release information about our visitors when release is appropriate to comply with law, to enforce our Visitor Agreement, or to protect the rights, property or safety of visitors to our sites, the public, our customers, or our company and its employees, agents, partners and affiliates. As our business grows, we may buy or sell various assets. In the unlikely event that our company, or the bulk of our assets relating to this site, is acquired by another company, information on our visitors would be among the transferred assets.

CHILDREN'S PRIVACY
Children should always get permission from their parents before sending any information about themselves (such as their names, email addresses, and phone numbers) over the Internet, to us or to anyone else. We won't knowingly allow anyone under 18 to register with our site, to provide business information to our site, or to provide any other personally identifying information. If you're under 18, please do not provide us with any personally identifying information about yourself (such as your name, your email address or your phone number).

STORAGE OF INFORMATION
All information gathered on our site is stored within a database operated by us or by a contractor on our behalf. Sensitive information, such as password or information, is encoded (not encrypted) for storage. We cannot guarantee the security of our database, nor can we guarantee that information you supply won't be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the Internet.