Privacy is very important to us. Our privacy practices are held to high standards by outside organizations such as TRUSTe. For more information on TRUSTe, please go to www.truste.org. As part of the normal operation of our services we collect and, in some cases, disclose information about you. This Privacy Policy describes the information we collect about you and what may happen to that information. Although this policy may seem long, we have prepared a detailed policy because we believe you should know as much as possible about Bimmerparts.com practices so that you can make informed decisions. The privacy practices of this statement apply to the Bimmerparts.com website and apply generally to our subsidiaries or joint venture partners websites (collectively the "Site") whose specific privacy policies are available from our other pages. All of our subsidiaries and joint venture partners operate under similar privacy practices as described in this Privacy Policy and, subject to the requirements of applicable law, we strive to provide a consistent set of privacy practices throughout the global Bimmerparts.com trading community. As described below, some of your personally identifiable information is disclosed to third parties and used by us and third parties. By accepting the User Agreement, you expressly consent to our use and disclosure of your personally identifiable information. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and subject to the terms of the Bimmerparts.com.
Table of Contents
A Special Note about Children.
Children are not eligible to use our services and we ask that minors (under the age of 18) do not submit any personal information to us. If you are a minor, you can use this service only in conjunction with your parents or guardians.
Information We Collect.
Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customize our service to make your experience easier.
Under some circumstances we may require some additional financial information, such as, but not limited to: if you are registering using an email account at a free email service, or registering to sell on our site. We use your financial information, including credit card information to verify your name, address, and other information, as well as to bill you for your use of our services.
We automatically track certain information based upon your behavior on our site. We use this information to do internal research on our users' demographics, interests, and behavior to better understand and serve you and our community. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on our site or not), which URL you next go to (whether this URL is on our site or not), what browser you are using, and your IP address.
We use data collection devices such as "cookies" on certain pages of our site. "Cookies" are small files placed on your hard drive that assist us in providing customized services. We also offer certain features that are only available through the use of a "cookie". We also use cookies to allow you to enter your password less frequently during a session. Cookies can also help us provide information which is targeted to your interests. Most cookies are "session cookies," meaning that they are automatically deleted from your hard drive at the end of a session. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, although in that case you may not be able to use certain features on our site and you may be required to reenter your password more frequently during a session.
Additionally, you may encounter "cookies" or other similar devices on certain pages of our site that are placed by third parties. For example, if you view a web page created by a user, there may be a "cookie" placed within that web page. We do not control the use of cookies by third parties.
If you choose to bid, buy or sell on our site, we collect information about your bidding, buying and selling behavior. We also collect other users' comments about you in our feedback area.
If you establish a credit account with us to pay the fees we charge, we collect some additional information, including a billing address, a credit card number and a credit card expiration date and tracking information from checks or money orders.
If you choose to post messages in our Cafes, chat rooms or other message areas or leave feedback for other users, we will collect that information you provide to us.
If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails or letters, or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities or postings on the Site, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.
If you register for Bimmerparts.com on another web site or use a web site providing a service for Distributor Demo or a web site that helps facilitate your activity on Bimmerparts.com, that web site may provide personal information about you and your transactions back to Bimmerparts.com.
For a chart showing what information we collect from or about you, and who has access to that information, please see the Appendix.
Our Use of Your Information.
We use information in the file we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on the Site, to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement. At times, we may look across multiple users to identify problems or resolve disputes, and in particular we may examine your information to identify users using multiple User IDs or aliases.
If you choose to list an item for sale on our site or open a credit account, we use your address and billing information to bill you and provide associated support.
You agree that we may use personally identifiable information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyze site usage, improve our content and product offerings, and customize our site's content, layout, and services. These uses improve our site and better tailor it to meet your needs.
You agree that we may use your information to contact you and deliver information to you that, in some cases, are targeted to your interests, such as targeted banner advertisements, administrative notices, product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of the Site. By accepting the User Agreement and Privacy Policy, you expressly agree to receive this information. If you do not wish to receive these communications, we encourage you to opt out of the receipt of certain communications on the notification page. You may make changes to your notification preferences at any time.
Our Disclosure of Your Information.
Due to the existing regulatory environment, we 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), we may be forced to disclose information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, or users may abuse or misuse your information that they collect from our Site. Therefore, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personally identifiable information or private communications will always remain private.
As a matter of policy, we do not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party. However, the following describes some of the ways that your personally identifiable information may be disclosed.
Bimmerparts.com Community. Throughout the Site, you are identified by your User ID. If you select your email address as your User ID you will disclose your email address to other users and third parties. As a result, other users and third parties might send you unsolicited email and be able to personally identify all of your public activities on the Site. Although our pages are coded with robot exclusion headers, others may illegally attempt to automatically collect your email address from our site. We describe how to change your User ID below in Section 8. Even if your User ID is not your email address, your User ID can be used to identify you and your activities throughout the Site. Other people can see your bids, items that you have purchased in the past, your feedback rating and associated comments, your postings on the Site, and so on. We also provide a number of ways to allow other users to find out more about you and your site activities, such as our feature that allows users to quickly see all of the items you are offering at the time. If you are involved in a transaction, we have a feature that allows other users to view your email address and obtain your contact information.
External Service Providers. There are a number of services offered by external service providers that help you use our Site (e.g., co-branded sites, listing agents, escrow, authentication, mediation). If you choose to use these optional services, disclose information to the external service providers, and/or grant them permission to collect information about you, then their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy. We may, for your convenience, provide some of your personally identifiable information to the external service provider offering such services. However, before we disclose your personally identifiable information to an external service provider, you will see what data is about to be sent and have the ability to approve the disclosure. To prevent our disclosure of your personally identifiable information to an external service provider, you can decline such disclosures or simply not use their services. Because we do not control the privacy practices of these third parties, you should evaluate their practices before deciding to use their services. Users who register on a Bimmerparts.com or The Network co-branded web site; permission to pass your email address back to that co-branded web site and affiliated web sites. The use of such information by the co-brand and affiliated web sites is limited by their applicable privacy policies.
Internal Service Providers. We may use internal service providers to facilitate our services (e.g., search, discussion boards, and surveys) and therefore we may provide some of your personally identifiable information directly to them. In some instances, the internal service provider may collect information directly from you (such as the situation where we ask an internal service provider to conduct a survey for us). In these cases, you will be notified of the involvement of the internal service provider, and all information disclosures you make will be strictly optional. In all cases, these internal service providers' use of information we supply them is restricted by confidentiality agreements. If you provide additional information to an internal service provider directly, then their use of your information is governed by their applicable privacy policy.
Other Corporate Entities. We share much of our data, including personally identifiable information about you, with our subsidiaries and joint ventures that are committed to serving your online trading needs and related services, throughout the world. To the extent that these entities have access to your information, they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information they obtain from their other users. Our subsidiaries and joint ventures follow privacy practices no less protective of all users than our practices described in this document, to the extent allowed by applicable law. It is possible that Bimmerparts.com, its subsidiaries, its joint ventures, or any combination of such, could merge with or be acquired by another business entity. Should such a combination occur, you should expect that Bimmerparts.com would share some or all of your information in order to continue to provide the service.
Legal Requests. Bimmerparts.com cooperates with law enforcement inquiries, as well as other third parties to enforce laws, such as: intellectual property rights, fraud and other rights. We can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you to law enforcement or other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate, in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringements, or other activity that is illegal or may expose us or you to legal liability. Further, we can (and you authorize us to) disclose your User ID, name, street address, city, state, zip code, country, phone number, email, and company name to Bimmerparts.com participants as we in our sole discretion believe necessary or appropriate in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringement, piracy, or other unlawful activity.
Your Use of Other Users' Information.
In order to facilitate interaction among all ?Member Company? community members, our service allows you limited access other users' contact information. As a seller you have access to the User ID, email address and other contact information of the buyer or winning bidder(s), and as a buyer or winning bidder you have access to the User ID, email address and other contact information of the seller.
By entering into our User Agreement, you agree that, with respect to other users' personally identifiable information that you obtain through the Site or through a Bimmerparts.com -related communication or Bimmerparts.com and -facilitated transaction, Bimmerparts.com and hereby grants to you a license to use such information only for: (a) Bimmerparts.com -related communications that are not unsolicited commercial messages, (b) using services offered through Bimmerparts.com and The Network (e.g. escrow, insurance, shipping and fraud complaints), and (c) any other purpose that such user expressly agrees to after adequate disclosure of the purpose(s). In all cases, you must give users an opportunity to remove themselves from your database and a chance to review what information you have collected about them. In addition, under no circumstances, except as defined in this Section, can you disclose personally identifiable information about another user to any third party without our consent and the consent of such other user after adequate disclosure. Note that law enforcement personnel, program participants, and other rights holders are given different rights with respect to information they access.
Bimmerparts.com and The Network and our users do not tolerate spam. Therefore, without limiting the foregoing, you are not licensed to add a Bimmerparts.com and/or The Network user, even a user who has purchased an item from you, to your mail list (email or physical mail) without their express consent after adequate disclosure. To report Bimmerparts.com related spam to Bimmerparts.com, please send an email to cmuzyy@aol.com.
Use of Email Tools.
You may not use the Email this to a Friend service or other email forwarding services that we offer to send spam or otherwise send content that would violate our User Agreement. We do not permanently store the email messages or the email addresses.
If you send an email using the Email this to a Friend service to an email address that is not registered in our community, we do not use that email addresses for any purpose other than to send your email. We do not rent or sell these email addresses. We generally discard the email addresses thesometime after they have been used to send your email.
Control of Your Password
You are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and password, including fees. Therefore we do not recommend that you disclose your Bimmerparts.com password to any third parties. If you choose to share your User ID and password or your information with third parties to provide you additional services, you are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and password and therefore you should review that third party's privacy policy. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personally identifiable information and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password has been compromised for any reason, you should immediately change your password as detailed in Section 8.
Reviewing and Changing Your Personally Identifiable Information.
Following registration, you can review and change the information you submitted during registration including:
Your User ID and email address. If you change your User ID we keep track of your old User ID(s) and your new User ID. Your registration information such as: name, company, address, city, state, zip code, country, primary phone number, secondary phone number, fax number and gender. Your password. Your credit card number and expiration date, and other financial information. You must promptly update your information if it changes. Once posted, you cannot change or remove any public postings made in our chat rooms or other message areas or the feedback area.
Upon your request, we will deactivate your account, contact information, and financial information from our active databases. To make this request, email cmuzyy@aol.com. Such information will be deactivated as soon as reasonably possible in accordance with our deactivation policy and applicable law.
We will retain in our files information you have requested to remove in some circumstances, such as to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement. Further, such prior information is never completely removed from our databases due to technical and legal constraints, including stored "back up" systems. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your personally identifiable information will be completely removed from our databases in response to your requests.
Other Information Collectors.
Except as otherwise expressly included in this Privacy Policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. To the extent that you disclose your information to other parties, whether they are bidders, buyers or sellers on our Site or other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the information you disclose to them. To the extent that we use third party advertisers, they adhere to their own privacy policies. Since Bimmerparts.com does not control the privacy policies of third parties, you are subject to the privacy policies of that third party. We encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others.
Security.
Bimmerparts.com and or The Network use industry standard practices to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information, including "firewalls" and Secure Socket Layers. Bimmerparts.com and and or The Network treats data as an asset that must be protected against loss and unauthorized access. We employ many different security techniques to protect such data from unauthorized access by users inside and outside the company. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.
Notice.
We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time based on your comments and our need to accurately reflect our data collection and disclosure practices. All changes to this policy are effective after we provide you with at least thirty (30) days' notice of the changes by posting the changes on the announcements board and sending email to users who select such notification preference. We provide you with a thirty (30) day notice to allow you the opportunity to notify Bimmerparts.com if you do not agree to such changes as described in Section 8.
Products.
We carry the following. BMW Parts, Mercedes Parts, Volvo Parts, Audi Parts, GM Parts, Ford Parts, Honda Parts, Jaguar Parts, Lexus Parts, Nissan Parts, Porsche Parts, Saab Parts, Volkswagen Parts, performance parts, and accessories for all foreign, domestic, and import vehicles.
