| As part of the normal operation of our Metal Building Network services we collect and, in some cases, disclose personal information to carefully selected partners and third-party organizations. This Privacy Policy describes the information collected and what may happen to that information. The privacy practices of this notice apply to the METALBUILDING.NET website.
As described below, some personally identifiable information is disclosed to third parties and used by METALBUILDING.NET and carefully selected third parties. By using the METALBUILDING.NET website and thus accepting the User Agreement, you expressly consent to the use and disclosure of personally identifiable information. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and subject to the terms of the METALBUILDING.NET User Agreement.
A Special Note About Children. Children are not eligible to use our services and we ask that minors (under the age of 18) not submit any personal information to us. If the user is a minor, the user can use this service only in conjunction with parents or guardians.
Information Collected by METALBUILDING.NET. Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide a smooth, efficient, and customized experience while using the services. This allows METALBUILDING.NET to provide services and features that are most likely to meet the needs of the end-user, and to customize our service to make the experience easier and quicker. The email address will be used as the User ID. Under some circumstances, such as if you are registering for advertising, additional information is required, including billing address, credit-card number and credit card expiration date. METALBUILDING.NET uses this credit-card information to verify 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.
The Use of Cookies. METALBUILDING.NET may also offer certain features that are only available through the use of a cookie. Among many features, cookies allow you to enter your user information less frequently during a session. Cookies can also help us provide information targeted to your interests. Cookies are stored on your hard drive, not on our site. Most cookies are "session cookies," meaning that they are automatically deleted 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 user information more frequently during a session.
If you choose to post or leave feedback for other users, we will collect such information about you as you choose to disclose.
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 METALBUILDING.NET branding (a "Co-Brand Service Provider"), the Co-Brand Service Provider may provide personal information about you and possibly the transaction back to METALBUILDING.NET as is more fully detailed below.
Our Use of Your Information. We use personally identifiable information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to statistically analyze site usage, to improve our content and product offerings and to customize our site's content, layout, and services. We believe these uses allow us to improve our site and better tailor it to meet our users' needs. 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.
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.
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.
Our Disclosure of Your Information. Unfortunately, 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, or third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. 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 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 to the METALBUILDING.NET VeRO Program 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. 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 remain private. 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.
METALBUILDING.NET 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. Others may attempt to automatically collect your email address from our site. 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. 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 comments you may have posted to articles.
Co-Brand Service Providers. METALBUILDING.NET offers a number of third- party services from our site. 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. METALBUILDING.NET cooperates with law enforcement inquires and other third parties to enforce laws, intellectual property and other rights. Therefore, participants in the METALBUILDING.NET Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) program, intellectual property and other rights owners, and local, state, federal and international law enforcement can request and may receive your personally identifiable information.
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.
METALBUILDING.NET 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.
Your Use of Other Users' Information. In order to facilitate interaction among all METALBUILDING.NET community members, our service may allow you to access other users' contact information.
No Agency. You and METALBUILDING.NET are independent contractors, and no agency, partnership, joint venture, employee-employer or franchiser-franchisee relationship is intended or created by this Agreement.
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 METALBUILDING.NET-related communication or METALBUILDING.NET-facilitated transaction, METALBUILDING.NET hereby grants to you a license to use such information only for: (a) METALBUILDING.NET-related communications that are not unsolicited commercial messages, (b) using co-branded services offered through METALBUILDING.NET, 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. Note that law enforcement personnel, VeRO program participants, and other rights holders are given different rights with respect to information they access.
METALBUILDING.NET and our users do not tolerate spam. Therefore, without limiting the foregoing, you are not licensed to add an METALBUILDING.NET 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.
Other Information Collectors. Except as otherwise expressly discussed 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 system or other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the personal information you disclose to them. To the extent that we use third party advertisers, they adhere to their own privacy customs and policies. Since METALBUILDING.NET does not control the privacy policies of third parties, you are subject to the privacy customs and policies of that third party. We encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others.
Security. METALBUILDING.NET uses industry standard efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information, such as firewalls and Secure Socket Layers. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet. |