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 AZ Surplus's practices so that you can make an informed decision. The privacy practices of this notice apply to the AZ Surplus website and apply generally to our subsidiaries or joint venture partners websites (collectively the "Site"). Generally 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 our global AZ Surplus 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 AZ Surplus User Agreement.
Our primary goal in collecting personal information from you is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience while using our services. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customize our service to make your experience easier and quicker. To fully use our services, you will need to register using our online registration form, where you will be required to provide us with your contact information and other personal information as described in our privacy appendix. You may provide us with a User ID; if you don't, we will use your email address as your User ID. Under some circumstances, such as if you are registering using an email account at a free email service, we require some additional information, including billing address, credit card number and credit card expiration date. We use this credit card information to verify your name, address, and other information.
We automatically track certain information about you 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 our users. This information is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis. 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.
In addition, we use cookies on certain pages of our site. We may also offer certain features that are only available through the use of a cookie. Among other reasons why we use cookies, cookies allow you to enter your password less frequently during a session. Cookies can also help us provide information which is targeted to your interests.
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, we collect some additional information, including billing address, credit card number and credit card expiration date and tracking information from checks or money orders.
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 use a service provided by a company providing a service co-branded with AZ Surplus branding (a "Co-Brand Service Provider"), the Co-Brand Service Provider may provide personal information about you and possibly the transaction back to AZ Surplus as is more fully detailed in Section 4 below.
We may also use your information to deliver information to you that, in some cases, are targeted to your interests, such as targeted banners, new services and promotions. By accepting the User Agreement you expressly agree to receive this information. You can remove yourself from receiving some of this information by changing the appropriate option on the preferences page.
We use your email address, your mailing address, and phone number to contact you regarding administrative notices, new product offerings, and communications relevant to your use of the Site. If you do not wish to receive these communications.
If you choose to conduct an auction on our site or open a credit account, we use your address and billing information to bill you and provide associated support.
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 on rare occasions we may evaluate your information to look for users using multiple User IDs or aliases.
As a general proposition, we do not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party. The following describes some of the ways that your personally identifiable information may be disclosed.
Advertisers. We do aggregate personally identifiable information and disclose such information in aggregate to advertisers and for other marketing and promotional purposes. However, in these situations, we do not disclose to these entities any information that could be used to personally identify you. Certain information, such as your password, credit card number, and bank account number, are not disclosed to marketing advertisers in aggregate at all.
AZ Surplus Community. Throughout the Site, you are identified by your User ID. Unless you select a unique User ID, our system automatically sets your User ID as your email address. In this situation, where you are identified on the Site by your User ID, you 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 activities on the Site. Other people can see your bids, items that you have won in the past, your feedback rating and associated comments, your postings on the Site, and so on. We also provide others a number of ways to allow other users to find more out about you and your site activities, such as our feature that allows users to quickly see all of the auctions you are offering at the time.
Co-Brand Service Providers. AZ Surplus offers a number of third party services from our site (e.g., escrow, authentication, personal shopper). If you choose to use these optional services, we will, by necessity, provide some of your personally identifiable information to the Co-Brand Service Provider offering such services. Before we provide your information to the Co-Brand Service Provider, we will let you see what data is about to be sent to them. You can, of course, avoid having us make such disclosures by choosing not to use these services. Because we do not control the privacy practices of these third parties, you should evaluate their practices before deciding to use their services.
Legal Requests. AZ Surplus cooperates with law enforcement inquires and other third parties to enforce laws, intellectual property and other rights.
Suppliers and Other Service Providers. We may use third party Suppliers and Service Providers to facilitate our services. For example, we may outsource the operations of one or more aspects of our site to a Supplier or Service Provider who performs services according to our requirements. In some instances, the Service Provider may collect information directly from you (such as the situation where we ask a Service Provider to conduct a survey for us). In these cases, you will be notified of the involvement of the Supplier or Service Provider, and all information disclosures you make will be strictly optional. In all cases, we restrict how these Suppliers and Other Service Providers may access, use and disclose your information. In general, we do not permit these Suppliers and Other Service Providers to sell your information to third parties.
AZ Surplus Subsidiaries and Joint Ventures. We will share much of our data, including personally identifiable information about you, with our subsidiaries and Joint Ventures that are committed to serving your person-to-person trading needs throughout the world. To the extent that these entities are getting access to your information, they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information they obtain from their other users. We usually require our subsidiaries and joint ventures to follow privacy practices no less protective of all users than our practices described in this document.
By entering into our User Agreement, you agree that, with respect to other user's personally identifiable information that you obtain through the Site or through an AZ Surplus-related communication or AZ Surplus-facilitated transaction, AZ Surplus hereby grants to you a license to use such information only for: (a) AZ Surplus-related communications that are not unsolicited commercial messages, (b) using co-branded services offered through AZ Surplus (e.g. escrow, insurance, shipping and fraud complaints), and (c) any other purpose that such user expressly opts into 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.
AZ Surplus and our users do not tolerate spam. Therefore, without limiting the foregoing, you are not licensed to add an AZ Surplus user—even a user who has purchased an auction item from you-to your mail list (email or physical mail) without their express consent after adequate disclosure.
Upon your request, we will remove your credit card number and credit card expiration date from our databases. Such information will be removed after one billing cycle of your last sale on AZ Surplus unless your account is in dispute, in which case your information will be kept on file until the dispute is resolved. However, if you have a free email service account or are otherwise required to provide a credit card for other reasons, you may not request to remove your credit card from file unless you wish to terminate your account or place a different credit card on file.
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 constraints and the fact that we back up our 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.
