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MySpendingPlanTM - Privacy Policy
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American Homeownership Association LLC ("AmHome", "us", "we" or "our", "MySpendingPlanTM"),
owner and operator of MySpendingPlan.com, is committed to protecting your privacy.
This Privacy Policy ("Privacy Policy") describes all of the information handling
practices for the web site located at www.myspendingplan.com (the "Web Site"), including
how we handle personal information we may obtain when you use the Web Site, and
how we may share it. This Privacy Policy does not apply to information we
may obtain through other means, including offline or online in another forum, such
as elsewhere at other AmHome-owned web sites. This Privacy Policy is effective
upon acceptance in registration for new registering users, and is otherwise effective
on August 31, 2006 for all users. The previous Privacy Policy was effective for all
users on June 12, 2006.
OVERVIEW
The Web Site provides free and secure online personal finance software for using
in planning one's household budget or special events, including bills and task planning.
The Web Site also provides useful information regarding a variety of topics of consumer
interest, including debt help, debt management, mortgage refinance, real estate
and saving money. Lastly, the Web Site delivers promotional incentives (such
as coupons, rebates, savings notices, samples and trial offers) on behalf of online
and offline companies (our "Advertisers") to both registered consumers ("you", "your"
or "Registered Users") of our Web Site and unregistered visitors.
Collection of Your Information
Information Collected to Become A Registered
User of MySpendingPlanTM.
To set up your MySpendingPlanTM account, you will need to provide certain
contact and personal information. The requested information may include any
combination of data such as your name, mailing address, e-mail address, phone number,
username, and/or password, amongst other contact and personal information requirements.
This basic information is required if you wish to enroll on the Web Site.
The registration form information requests may change from time to time. We
may append additional data we obtain from our other owned web sites or third parties
to your enrollment information for analysis and marketing purposes. This information
will also allow us to provide better, more relevant services to you.
Once you’ve successfully set up your MySpendingPlanTM account, you should
expect to receive a Welcome email from the Web Site.
You will also receive a monthly email indicating the balances of your various
accounts and spending categories to help you manage your budgets – you may unsubscribe
from this email on the account preferences page of your account.
You may also receive bill due and task reminder emails, if you have chosen
to take advantage of those features in the Web Site.
You may also receive our newsletter and/or special offer emails periodically,
if you have elected to do so. You may
unsubscribe from these emails at any time by following the relevant link in the
email or visiting your account preferences page.
You may occasionally receive emails regarding Web Site maintenance and administration
issues – if you do not wish to receive these emails, you are welcome to cancel your
MySpendingPlanTM account at any time.
Information Collected During Use of the Web Site.
When you select an advertising offer on the Web Site or purchase a subscription
or merchandise through the MySpendingPlanTM service from one of our Advertisers,
we will collect certain personal information to permit you to complete your action.
MySpendingPlanTM will not collect sensitive or financial information
from you directly, including your Social Security number, your bank account number
or your credit card account number. If a future feature or offering does require
this information to allow you to take advantage of it, you will be made clearly
aware of this and still be protected by our secure server technology. However,
Advertisers may collect such financial information as it pertains to goods and services
you have chosen to purchase directly from them. Please note that if you decide
to take advantage of an offer or conduct a purchase with one of our advertising
or merchant partners, you will want to review their privacy and security policies
before providing any such sensitive information. This Advertiser-requested
information will only be collected by the specific sponsor of that offer or that
specific merchant you are purchasing goods and/or services from, and only if you
submit that offer or purchase said goods and/or services. In these situations,
the terms of use and privacy policy of the Advertiser in question will apply to
you, not those of MySpendingPlanTM. If you have consented to receive
e-mails from us, we also collect information relating to your e-mail response data
to enable us to provide more timely, relevant information and offers.
Information Use and Sharing
Generally.
When you become a MySpendingPlanTM Registered User, we use your enrollment
information and activity data to manage your account. We will not rent, sell
or share any personal information we gather from you to third parties except as
indicated below or to provide information regarding the products or services you
have requested (for example, with your express consent we may disclose your personally
identifiable information, such as your name and address, to specified third parties
that may then send you incentive offers and other promotional materials through
the mail or via e-mail). The following describes the ways that your information
may be used by us, or may be disclosed in the normal course of business to provide
our services.
Use of Information When You Select an Offer or Purchase a Product/Service.
We provide you with the opportunity to share some of your contact information
with Advertisers, who subject such information to their own privacy policies.
For example, you may wish to receive more information directly from an Advertiser
via e-mail or postal service, and you can use reply forms at various points on the
Web Site to communicate that information to an Advertiser. It is strictly your
decision to submit any form or "click" the button to reply. In addition,
some offers or services will require us, by their terms, to forward your personal
information (such as mailing address for delivery of orders) to an Advertiser so
that they can provide the service directly to you. Otherwise, your information
is shared with Advertisers only on an aggregate (non-personally identifiable) basis.
Use of Information to Notify You About Our Products and Services.
We may use your information to inform you of other products or services available
from the MySpendingPlanTM services by making opportunities available
to you on our Web Site, if you have chosen to receive these, by postal mail and
by e-mail. We may also send you offers tailored to your interests, as well
as information about us, about our products and services, and about special offers
such as sweepstakes or other promotions. Sometimes, we send offers via e-mail
to selected groups of members on behalf of our participating merchants. When
we do this, we do not give the participating merchants your name and address.
If you do not want to receive e-mails we send on behalf of our participating merchants,
you may opt out of receiving them as detailed in the Opting Out of Marketing E-mail
Messages section below.
Tell A Friend
If you choose to use our Tell A Friend feature to tell a friend about our Web
Site, we will ask you for your friend’s name and email address.
We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her
to visit the site. MySpendingPlanTM
stores this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email and
tracking the success of our referral program.
Testimonials
We do post testimonials from users on our Web Site.
We receive consent to post testimonials prior to the posting of the testimonial
and any personally identifiable information.
If for any reason the user would like us to remove their testimonial, they may contact
us at contactus@MySpendingPlan.com. Quotes in certain testimonials that
appear on the Web Site are representative of feedback received from registered users
to date. Aliases and stock photographs
are sometimes used to protect the users' privacy.
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable laws, we exclude all responsibility
and liability for your decision to use the Web Site based upon the recommendations
in these testimonials or for any losses or expenses resulting from their use and/or
appearance on the Web Site.
Use of Information About You We Obtain from Third Parties.
We may obtain information about you from our partner companies and other third parties
in order to provide you with opportunities tailored to your interests. We
may also use information obtained from our partner companies and other third parties
in conjunction with member account and enrollment information for analytical and
audit purposes.
Sharing Information with Our Business Partners and Service Providers.
We may need to share some personal information with our business partners, such
as service providers and third party processors who work with us to provide you
the MySpendingPlanTM service. These companies use your personal
information to provide us with the services we have hired them to perform, such
as to organize, administer, process, append and/or analyze our data on our behalf,
deliver offline materials to you or notify you of savings when you are visiting
other web sites. These companies will help us provide more relevant offers
to you and to eliminate the delivery of duplicate offers from an Advertiser(s) and
all such business partners are prohibited from using your personal information except
to provide these services to the MySpendingPlanTM program, and they are
required to maintain the confidentiality of your information. We may also share
certain data with our Advertisers or service providers in aggregate form for audit,
marketing and other purposes. We may transmit your search queries, if any, to business
partners who use this information to provide us with search results and other information,
which we then display to you. Because aggregated data is not associated with any
particular person, the third parties with whom we share this information will not
have access to your personally identifiable information.
Sharing Information with Our Direct Marketing Partners.
From time to time, we may provide your postal information and other relevant data
to trusted direct marketing partners who may mail direct marketing material on behalf
of us and also use this postal information and other data to market to you on their
own behalf. In our contact with these direct marketing partners, we have restricted
them from sharing or selling this information with any other third party. We do
not provide your e-mail address to these direct marketing partners.
You may opt-out of having your postal address shared with these direct marketing
partners emailing us at contactus@myspendingplan.com
or writing to us at the address below.
Legal Requests/Questionable Activities.
We will release or disclose your personal information, including to local, state,
or federal law enforcement officials, when we believe in good faith that the law
requires it, or when required to do so by order of a court or authorized administrative
agency.
Sale/Merger.
We will transfer information about you if we are acquired by or merged with another
company. We will notify you in accordance with the procedures contained in the Privacy
Policy Updates if your information will become subject to a different privacy policy.
ACCESS AND OPTIONS
Accessing and Updating Your MySpendingPlanTM Data.
You may access and update information stored in your account profile by visiting
the "My Account" page on the Web Site. Please keep your contact, account, and preference
information up-to-date. It is your responsibility to update and maintain accurate
contact information in your account. You can make changes by visiting your account
page and entering corrections. E-mail and street addresses that are entered into
a member's personal profile page are the addresses that will be used for all contact.
You must promptly notify us via e-mail at
contactus@MySpendingPlan.com
if your password is lost, stolen or used without permission. In such an event, we
will change your password and update our records.
Opting Out Of Marketing E-mail Messages.
With your consent, we will send you e-mail offers available to Registered Users.
You may opt-out of receiving marketing e-mail messages from the Web Site either
when you register with the Web Site or at a later date. To opt-out of receiving
e-mail after registration, you may either: (1) click on the unsubscribe link at
the bottom of any commercial e-mail you receive and follow the instructions on-screen
(you may do so anytime after receipt of the e-mail), (2) visiting your account preferences
page on the Web Site, or (3) by sending an e-mail
requesting to stop receiving e-mail to: contactus@MySpendingPlan.com.
Please note that it may take up to 72 hours for us to process an opt-out request
and that any e-mail communications within the queue prior to your decision to opt-out
will still be sent to you. You will still continue to receive e-mail messages from
other of our company-owned services that you have requested to receive e-mails from
if you opt-out of receiving marketing messages from the MySpendingPlanTM
program. If you wish to opt-out of receiving e-mail from our other company-owned
services, you need to contact customer support through the applicable service from
which you are requesting to opt-out. On occasion, we may contact you with specific
administrative notices that are required by law, regulation, or as needed to service
your account (i.e. if we update our Privacy Policy). While you can elect to stop
receiving commercial e-mail that we may send from our participating merchants through
the MySpendingPlanTM program, you cannot unsubscribe from these administrative
messages.
Delete/Deactivate from MySpendingPlanTM.
You may stop participating in the MySpendingPlanTM program at any time
and/or delete your personal information from our database so as not to receive future
communications from the Web Site. In order to deactivate and/or delete your information
from the Web Site's database, please go to the My Account page on the Web Site and
select Delete My Account and then the software will take you through the removal
process. Any e-mail communications within the queue prior to your decision
to deactivate will still be sent to you. We also reserve the right to deactivate
a Registered User at our sole discretion if we believe that a Registered User has
used the Web Site or e-mail in a way that is fraudulent or damaging to us, our Advertisers,
or any other third party.
SECURITY
We use a secure, encrypted connection (called an SSL connection) on all pages where
you transmit personally identifiable data to us. Whenever you access any of your
account pages or change any of your user information, it is done over an SSL connection.
Additionally, we have implemented procedural measures to safeguard your information.
For example, only a very limited number of our employees have access to your personal
information.
Despite these security measures, we cannot guarantee that a third party might not
unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, or that
users might not abuse or misuse your personal information that they may illegally
collect from the Web Site. Therefore, although we believe that our practices exceed
industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you
should not expect, that your personal information or private communications will
always remain private.
LINKS TO THIRD PARTY WEB SITES
Through the Web Site, we may provide links to third-party web sites, such as those
of our Advertisers. Each of these web sites have separate privacy and data-collection
practices, which may differ from this Web Site, and we are not responsible for the
actions or practices of these third parties, nor for the content on these web sites.
We encourage you to review the privacy policies of these web sites before providing
your personally identifiable information.
Framed Sections of The Web Site
MySpendingPlanTM maintains relationships with outside service providers
for some of the products and services offered through our site. Certain of these
service providers are found on our Coupons, Deals & Discounts or other pages.
The information these providers make available may be presented in a "framed" format,
where the MySpendingPlanTM header and footer will surround the pages
served by the service providers, or by directly linking the user to the vendors'
sites. In either case, the service provider is prominently identified. Please be
aware that any information you provide on those framed pages is provided directly
to those service providers and is subject to their security and privacy policies.
We encourage you to read the privacy policies of these outside service providers
because their privacy practices may differ from ours.
DIGITAL IDENTIFIERS
Cookies.
We use "cookies" to personalize the MySpendingPlanTM program to your
interests, to ensure that only you can access your account, to facilitate the automatic
log-in process and for web beacons (as described below in the "Web Beacons" section).
The primary purpose of cookies is to provide a convenience feature to save you time.
For example, we use them to store your Automatic Log-in ID so you do not have to
re-enter it each time you visit www.MySpendingPlan.com. A cookie is a text file
that is placed on your hard disk by a web page server. Cookies cannot be used to
run programs or deliver viruses to your computer. Cookies are uniquely assigned
to you, and can only be read by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie
to you. You have the ability to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically
accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies
if you prefer. If you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to fully experience
the interactive features of www.MySpendingPlan.com or the other web sites you visit. Cookies are not tied to personally identifiable
information. Some of our business partners
(e.g., advertisers) use cookies on our site.
We have no access to or control over these cookies.
We also review "log-file" data to monitor site performance and analyze traffic patterns
and usage of our Web Site. Each time you visit the Web Site, our server automatically
recognizes the following:
- Host origin of the request (your IP address or that of your ISP if using proxy servers)
- Referrer URL (the page you came from)
- Requested document (the page you're looking at)
- Your cookie
- Date and time of your visit
This information, sometimes called log-file or clickstream data, is used to monitor
Web Site performance and ensure that the MySpendingPlanTM services function
properly. It may also be appended to your personal profile so that we may further
tailor the MySpendingPlanTM program to your interests.
Log files are not tied to personally identifiable information.
Web Beacons.
The Web Site's pages and/or HTML e-mails may contain electronic images (called "web
beacons", "single-pixel GIFs", or "action tags") that allow us to count users who
have visited a certain web page or opened an e-mail, conduct research on partner
and Advertiser web sites for auditing purposes, or to access your www.MySpendingPlan.com
"cookie" to identify you when on third party web sites. Using web beacons allows
us to personalize your experience by tailoring advertisements, updates, and other
offers to your particular interests, and measuring the marketing effectiveness of
our e-mail communications.
Web beacons collect only a limited set of information including a cookie number,
time and date of a page view, and a description of the page on which the web beacon
resides. Information recorded through these web beacons may be used to report aggregate
demographic or usage information about Registered Users to our Advertisers, or user-level
usage information to our Third Party Processors. The Web Site's web pages may also
contain web beacons placed there by third parties to help determine the effectiveness
of our joint promotional or advertising campaigns. No personally identifiable information
about you is shared with an Advertiser or Third Party Processors except as otherwise
set forth in this Privacy Policy.
Third Party Ad Servers.
We may serve advertisements within our Web Site either ourselves or by allowing
other companies, called third-party ad servers or ad networks, to do so. In addition,
some of our advertisers may use the services of third-party ad networks. Some of
these third-party ad networks may place a persistent cookie on your computer. Doing
this allows the third-party ad network to recognize your computer each time they
send you an online advertisement. In this way, third-party ad networks may compile
information about where you, or others who are using your computer, saw their advertisements
and determine which ads are clicked on. This information allows a third-party ad
network to deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest
to you. We do not have access to or control of the cookies that may be placed by
the third-party ad servers or third-party ad networks. Those third-party ad networks
that use persistent cookies may offer you a way to opt-out of ad targeting. You
may find more information at the web site of either the individual third-party ad
network or the Network Advertising Initiative.
CHILDREN/MINORS
The Web Site will automatically block enrollment of any person once they indicate
they are under the age of 13. If we later learn that a user is under the age of
13, we will terminate the account and delete the user's information. Inherent in
the MySpendingPlanTM program is the responsibility of parents and/or
guardians to ensure that their children's privacy is protected.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER
We disclaim and you agree that we will not be liable to you for any damages caused
by acts or events beyond our reasonable control including, without limitation, acts
of God, fires, floods, acts of terrorism, wars, civil disturbances, sabotage, accidents,
labor disputes, governmental actions, and failures or delays of transportation that
result in our disclosure of your personally identifiable information.
PRIVACY POLICY UPDATES AND SITE MAINTENANCE
We reserve the right, at any time and without notice, to add to, update, change,
modify or revise this Privacy Policy, the Site or our services simply by posting
such change, update or modification on the Site. Any such addition, update, change,
modification or revision will be effective immediately upon posting. If we materially
change how we use your personal information, we will notify you via e-mail.
Contact Information
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, our information-handling practices,
or other aspects of privacy, please contact us by e-mail or via postal mail at:
MySpendingPlanTM Privacy
American Homeownership Association LLC
29488 Woodward Avenue
Suite 202
Royal Oak, MI 48073
contactus@MySpendingPlan.com
Last updated: August 31, 2006
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