Mortgage Metrix Website Privacy Policy
Updated December 31, 2019
Mortgage Metrix LLC (collectively referred to as “Mortgage Metrix,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) believes in the importance of thoughtfully handling personal information and is committed to privacy practices that are transparent and compliant. This Privacy Statement sets out how Mortgage Metrix uses the personal information we collect and receive about you.
Categories of Personal Information Collected
Mortgage Metrix collects personal information to help people see and understand their data. This personal information is collected through a variety of ways. You provide some information directly to us; we receive some information when you visit our website or use our products and services; and we receive some information from third parties.
The categories of information we collect will depend on your interactions with Mortgage Metrix:
Contact information. Name, employer, title, email address, physical address, phone number, and similar contact info, user names and passwords.
Demographic Information. Employment status, occupation, region.
Inferred and derived information. Data such as propensities and attributes that Mortgage Metrix generates to help us understand you and your preferences.
Usage and geographic data. Mortgage Metrix collects information related to your use of our products, services and websites. We analyze that usage data so that we can improve our products and your experience with them. In certain instances, Mortgage Metrix provides administrative tools so you can opt out of the collection of some usage data.
Usage data includes online and technical information about your computer’s or mobile device’s operating system and browser type; your device type; details about how you are using our products (including natural language queries); your Internet Protocol (IP) address, and geographic areas derived from your IP address; networking connection data; Mortgage Metrix cookie information; file information; metadata; time stamped logs regarding access times and duration of visits; the web pages you visited before coming to Mortgage Metrix websites (referring URL); and other usage data relating to your activities on our Sites, including the pages you request. We may link this information to the personal information we have collected about you and use it for the purposes described in this Privacy Statement, and we may deliver targeted marketing and product information back to you based on your usage data.
Third party data. We may receive your personal information from third party suppliers or partners. If you connect with Mortgage Metrix accounts on third party social networking sites, we may receive information about your social networking accounts, for example, your name, user name or display name, public profile, and email address. We may combine information you provide with data we collect automatically and with data we receive from third parties.
Images, video and recordings. Pictures, videos or audio recordings may be collected by Mortgage Metrix. For example, if you attend a Mortgage Metrix event, your image may be captured in a photo or video. If you call Mortgage Metrix customer support, your call may be recorded.
If you decline to provide your personal information or ask us to delete it, we may be unable to continue to provide or support our products or services.
Ways We Use Personal Information
We use the personal information we collect for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy, as covered in any agreement that incorporates this Policy, or as disclosed to you in connection with our websites. For example, we will use your information to:
- Provide and deliver products or services, including software updates;
- Operate and improve our operations, systems, products, and services;
- Understand you and your preferences to enhance your experience;
- Respond to your comments and questions and provide customer service;
- Provide service and support, such as sending confirmations, invoices, technical notices, updates, security alerts, and administrative messages and providing customer support and troubleshooting;
- Communicate with you and your referrals about promotions, upcoming events, and news about products and services offered by Mortgage Metrix and our selected partners;
- Link or combine information about you with other personal information we get from third parties, to help understand your needs and provide you with better and more personalized service;
- Enforce our terms and conditions or protect our business, partners, or users;
- Protect against, investigate, and deter fraudulent, unauthorized, or illegal activity; and
- Keep our products, facilities, and services secure.
Reasons for Using Your Information
When we process your personal information we will only do so where at least one of the following applies:
- We need to use your personal information to perform our responsibilities under our contract with you and to provide you with tools and services.
- We have a legitimate reason to collect and use your personal information. For example, it is in our legitimate interests to use usage data including your personal information to improve our products and services; to tell you about changes to this Privacy Policy and other policies; to tell you about new products, services and events or changes to our products, services or websites; for business reasons (for example to develop and expand our business); and to tell you about offers or promotions we are running.
- You have given consent to use your personal information. You may withdraw consent by opting out where we give you the opportunity to do so, or by contacting us using the contact details below.
- If it is necessary for us to use your personal information in order to comply with a legal obligation.
- You have chosen to make the information public. You should not share any personal information which you wish to keep confidential or private.
Sharing of Personal Information
Mortgage Metrix works to keep your personal information confidential and secure. In some circumstances Mortgage Metrix may share your information with third parties, for example:
- We may share your personal information when we have your permission, including when you choose to post to our user forums;
- We provide personal information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with Mortgage Metrix, or on behalf of your employer, to provide us with services. For example, we share contact information with our training and certification partners, our service partners, our data storage, customer support and marketing vendors, and with our software providers. These companies may use your personal information to perform services and to help Mortgage Metrix communicate with you, including making offers from Mortgage Metrix and our partners. Mortgage Metrix maintains contracts with these companies restricting their access, use and disclosure of personal information in compliance with this Privacy Statement and any legal obligations;
- If you connect to your third party accounts through our products, we will use that information to authenticate you, enumerate the data sources available to you, download any data you request us to, and download and refresh authentication tokens or persist authentication information such as user names and passwords as necessary to continue to connect to these data;
- We may share your contact and transactional information with our current or future affiliates, which may include parent and subsidiary companies, joint ventures, or other companies under common control, in which case we will require our affiliates to honor this Privacy Statement;
- We will disclose your personal information to comply with legal requirements, such as in response to a court order or a subpoena. We also may disclose your personal information in response to a law enforcement agency’s request, or where we believe it is necessary to investigate, verify, prevent, enforce compliance with, or take action regarding illegal or suspected illegal activities; suspected fraud; situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person; protection of the rights and property of Mortgage Metrix, our agents, customers, or others; violations or suspected violations of our agreements and policies; or as otherwise required or permitted by law or consistent with legal requirements;
- We transfer or disclose your personal information for corporate reasons. For example, to third parties in connection with or during negotiation of any merger, financing, acquisition, bankruptcy or similar transaction. We may also share personal information with our auditors, attorneys or other advisors in the connection with corporate functions; and
- Finally, we reserve the right to also share aggregated, anonymized or statistical information about you, including demographics data, with others for a variety of purposes, for example, for improving products and services for Mortgage Metrix and others.
We may facilitate third party services or ways to share data through third parties, including social media platforms, websites, applications, and services through plug-ins, widgets, buttons, and other third party features on and connected with our websites, communications or products. Third parties whose services you use in connection with Mortgage Metrix, such as third parties whose websites we link to, may have information practices that are different from ours. This Privacy Policy does not apply to the activities of third parties when they are collecting or using data for their own purpose or on behalf of others. We are not responsible for the activities of these third parties. We encourage you to review their privacy policies to understand how they use your information.
Storage and Security of Your Personal Information
We have reasonable and appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures in place to help safeguard your personal information. However, you should know that no company, including Mortgage Metrix, can fully eliminate security risks associated with personal information. To help protect yourself, use a strong password, do not use the same passwords to access your Mortgage Metrix accounts that you use with other accounts or services, and protect your user names and passwords to help prevent others from accessing your accounts and services.
Information collected by Mortgage Metrix or on our behalf may be stored on your computers, on your mobile devices, or on our servers, and may be transferred to, accessed from, or stored and processed in the United States. We will protect all personal information we obtain in accordance with this Privacy Policy and take reasonable steps to ensure that it is treated lawfully.
In certain circumstances we may retain your personal information after you have closed your account or are no longer actively engaged with Mortgage Metrix. For example:
- We may retain your personal information in order to protect our legal rights, or those of third parties, or to comply with the law;
- We may retain personal information about how you have used our products and services in order to improve and develop our business;
- If you purchase products or services from us, we may retain your personal information for as long as we need to in order to provide you with customer service, or for compliance purposes, for example, in order to comply with our record keeping requirements;
- Mortgage Metrix may also use and share aggregated, non-personally identifiable data for research, external training and marketing purposes.
Controlling your Personal Information
Our marketing emails permit you to opt-out of receiving further marketing emails. You may also contact us at customerservice@mortgagemetrix.com at any time to let us know that you no longer wish to receive marketing emails. If you opt out but are a current customer, we will still send you transactional emails. Transactional emails are necessary communications about your accounts and our business dealings with you, such as renewals and updates, and, as allowed by applicable law, requests for your participation in surveys.
When you use our websites, you can choose to set your browser to remove cookies and to reject cookies from our servers. If you choose to remove or reject cookies, this could affect certain features or services of our websites. For information about how to remove or manage cookies please read our cookie policy.
You have certain rights in your personal information, subject to local data protection laws.
California Privacy Notice
This California Privacy Notice (“Notice”) is for California residents and supplements our Privacy Policy. It explains how we collect, use, and share your Personal Information and how to exercise your rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”).
When we say “Personal Information” in this Notice, we mean information that identifies, relates to, describes, is reasonably capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly, with you. Personal Information does not include information that is aggregated or information that cannot be reasonably linked to you.
How we collect, use, and share Personal Information
To provide the products or features offered by Mortgage Metrix (“Products”), we must process information about you, including Personal Information, whether or not you are registered or logged in. Subject to the limitations we describe in our Privacy Policy, we may share your Personal Information for business purposes with strict restrictions on how our partners can use and disclose the data we provide, at your direction, or in ways otherwise in accordance with the CCPA. We don’t sell any of your Personal Information, and we never will.
Under the CCPA, you have the following rights:
- The right to notice about our collection and processing of your personal information;
- The right to request specific pieces of your personal information that we process;
- The right to opt out of having us sell your personal information;
- The right to receive equal services and prices regardless of whether you exercise any of your other rights.
If you need help or wish to exercise any of the above rights or have questions about them, please submit your request here. Alternatively, you may dial 1 (714) 519-6233. We will consider all such requests and provide our response as soon as we can.
Please note, however, that personal information may be exempt from such requests in certain circumstances, which may include circumstances where we need to keep processing your personal information for our legitimate interests or to comply with a legal obligation. We must confirm your identity before providing you with any personal information or deleting any personal information.
Under the CCPA, you may exercise these rights yourself or you may designate an authorized agent to make these requests on your behalf. We may request that your authorized agent have written permission from you to make requests on your behalf and may need to verify your authorized agent’s identity.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Our websites use various software technologies including cookies, web beacons and pixel tags. Cookies are small text files that we and others may place in visitors’ computer browsers to store their preferences. We use web beacons or pixel tags – small pieces of code placed on a web page or within the body of an email – to monitor the behavior and collect data about the visitors viewing a web page or viewing or opening an email. Web beacons can be used to count the users who visit a web page or to deliver a cookie to the browser of a visitor viewing that page, and we use them from time to time for this and advertising purposes.
We partner with third parties, including analytics companies, advertisers, and ad networks, who may place cookies on your browser when you visit our websites, may send their own cookies to your cookie file, and may use those cookies to track and collect information about you and your online activities over time and across different websites, devices, and applications and to provide targeted advertising based on your interests and previous browsing history.
Third party ad networks may automatically collect information about your visits to our websites and other websites, such as your IP address, your Internet service provider, and the browser you use to visit our websites. They do this using cookies, web beacons or other technologies. You can learn more about practices of many of these third parties by visiting the Digital Advertising Alliance (http://www.aboutads.info/choices). This Privacy Statement does not apply to, and we are not responsible for, cookies or web beacons and other technologies in third party advertising. We encourage you to check the privacy policies of third party advertisers and/or ad services to learn about their use of cookies, web beacons and other technology. For more information about the cookies and related technologies used on our websites, please refer to our Cookie Policy (www.mortgagemetrix.com/cookies).
Like most companies with an online presence, we share some of the personal information gathered by cookies and similar technologies with our cookie vendors to make sure we deliver the best information to you. That sharing may be considered a “sale” under the California Consumer Privacy Act, which defines “selling” and “sale” broadly. If you want to opt out of advertising cookies, or other cookies that are not necessary for the performance of the website, you may do so by clicking the “Do Not Sell My Personal Information” link at the bottom of the page you are visiting and adjusting your preference for that web domain.
How do we protect your information?
- We only provide articles and information.
- We never ask for credit card numbers.
- We use regular Malware Scanning.
Any personal information provided to us by you is contained behind secured networks and is only accessible by a limited number of persons who have special access rights to such systems, and are required to keep the information confidential. In addition, all sensitive/credit information you supply is encrypted via the latest industry standard end-to-end encryption technology.
We implement a variety of security measures when a user enters, submits, or accesses their information to maintain the safety of your personal information.
Do we use ‘cookies’?
Yes. Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer’s hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the site’s or service provider’s systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information. For instance, we use cookies to help us identify an affiliate, if any, that referred you to our website. We also use cookies to help us compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future.
We use cookies to:
- Keep track of advertisements.
- Compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interactions to offer better site experiences and tools in the future. We may also use trusted third-party services that track this information on our behalf.
You can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent, or you can choose to turn off all cookies. You do this through your browser settings. Since browser is a little different, look at your browser’s Help Menu to learn the correct way to modify your cookies.
If you turn cookies off, some features will be disabled. This should not affect your experience on our site.
Third-party disclosure
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your Personally Identifiable Information. This does not include website hosting partners and other parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or serving our users, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release information when its release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others’ rights, property or safety.
Third-party links
Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third-party products or services on our website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.
Google’s advertising requirements can be summed up by Google’s Advertising Principles. They are put in place to provide a positive experience for users. https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/1316548?hl=en
We use Google Analytics on our website.
Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to provide analytical data regarding the usage of our site.
Opting out:
Users can set preferences for how Google advertises to you using the Google Ad Settings page. Alternatively, you can opt out by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative Opt Out page or by using the Google Analytics Opt Out Browser add on.
California Online Privacy Protection Act
CalOPPA is the first state law in the nation to require commercial websites and online services to post a privacy policy. The law’s reach stretches well beyond California to require any person or company in the United States (and conceivably the world) that operates websites collecting Personally Identifiable Information from California consumers to post a conspicuous privacy policy on its website stating exactly the information being collected and those individuals or companies with whom it is being shared.
See more at: http://consumercal.org/california-online-privacy-protection-act-caloppa/#sthash.0FdRbT51.dpuf
According to CalOPPA, we agree to the following:
- Users can visit our site anonymously.
- Once this privacy policy is created, we will add a link to it on our home page or as a minimum, on the first significant page after entering our website.
- Our Privacy Policy link includes the word ‘Privacy’ and can easily be found on the page specified above.
- You will be notified of any Privacy Policy changes on our Privacy Policy Page
COPPA (Children Online Privacy Protection Act)
When it comes to the collection of personal information from children under the age of 13 years old, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) puts parents in control. The Federal Trade Commission, United States’ consumer protection agency, enforces the COPPA Rule, which spells out what operators of websites and online services must do to protect children’s privacy and safety online.
We do not specifically market to children under the age of 13 years old.
Fair Information Practices
The Fair Information Practices Principles form the backbone of privacy law in the United States and the concepts they include have played a significant role in the development of data protection laws around the globe. Understanding the Fair Information Practice Principles and how they should be implemented is critical to comply with the various privacy laws that protect personal information.
In order to be in line with Fair Information Practices we will take the following responsive action, should a data breach occur, we will notify you via email within 7 business days of discovery of breach
We also agree to the Individual Redress Principle which requires that individuals have the right to legally pursue enforceable rights against data collectors and processors who fail to adhere to the law. This principle requires not only that individuals have enforceable rights against data users, but also that individuals have recourse to courts or government agencies to investigate and/or prosecute non-compliance by data processors.
CAN SPAM Act
The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have emails stopped from being sent to them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.
We collect your email address in order to:
• Process contact requests and applications for service and to send information and updates pertaining thereto.
To be in accordance with CANSPAM, we agree to the following:
- Not use false or misleading subjects or email addresses.
- Identify the message as an advertisement in some reasonable way.
- Include the physical address of our business or site headquarters.
- Monitor third-party email marketing services for compliance, if one is used.
- Honor opt-out/unsubscribe requests quickly.
- Allow users to unsubscribe by using the link at the bottom of each email.
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from receiving future emails, you can follow the instructions at the bottom of each email and we will promptly remove you from ALL correspondence.
Contacting Us
If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy, you may contact us using the information below.
Mortgage Metrix
541 East Chapman Avenue, Suite B, Orange,CA 92866
714-519-6233