This policy outlines how Vacations for a Cause (VFAC) uses and protects your personal information. 

This Privacy Policy describes how we handle your personal information for our services on the VFAC website, tools, applications, and services. It applies generally to the VacationsForACause.org website and content and other related websites, if any. 

By accepting the Terms of Use Agreement in registration, you expressly consent to our collection, storage, use and disclosure of your personal information as described in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy is effective upon acceptance for new users and is otherwise effective as of March 1, 2012.

Data Collection

You can browse our site without telling us who you are or revealing any personal information about yourself. Once you give us your personal information, you are not anonymous to us. If you choose to provide us with personal information, you consent to the transfer and storage of that information on our servers located in the United States.

We may collect and store the following personal information:

  • email address, phone number, physical contact information, and (depending on the service used) sometimes financial information, such as credit card or bank account numbers;
  • transactional information based on your activities on the site (such as bidding, buying or selling vacation vouchers that relate to your account);
  • shipping, billing and other information you provide to purchase or ship an item;
  • community discussions, chats, dispute resolution, correspondence through our sites, and correspondence sent to us;
  • other information from your interaction with our sites, services, content and advertising, including device ID, computer and connection information, statistics on page views, traffic to and from the sites, ad data, IP address and standard web log information;
  • additional information we ask you to submit to authenticate yourself or if we believe you are violating site policies (for example, we may ask you to send us an ID or bill to verify your address, or to answer additional questions online to help verify your identity or ownership of an item you list);
  • information from other companies, such as demographic and navigation data; and
  • other supplemental information from third parties (for example, if you incur a debt to VFAC, we will generally conduct a credit check by obtaining additional information about you from a credit bureau, as permitted by law).

Marketing

We don’t sell or rent your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent. 

Use of Information

Our primary purpose in collecting personal information is to facilitate the auction process and provide you with a safe, smooth, efficient, and customized experience. You agree that we may use your personal information to:

  • provide the services and customer support you request;
  • resolve disputes, collect fees (where applicable), and troubleshoot problems;
  • prevent, detect, and investigate potentially prohibited or illegal activities, and enforce our User Agreement;
  • customize, measure and improve our services, content and advertising;
  • tell you about our services and those of our corporate family, deliver targeted marketing, service updates, and promotional offers based on your communication preferences; and
  • compare information for accuracy, and verify it with third parties;

Disclosure of Your Information

We may disclose personal information to respond to legal requirements, enforce our policies, respond to claims that a listing or other content violates the rights of others, or protect anyone’s rights, property, or safety. Such information will be disclosed in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.

We may also share your personal information with:

  • Members of the VFAC Inc. corporate family— such as PayPal — to provide joint content and services (like registration, transactions and customer support), to help detect and prevent potentially illegal acts and violations of our policies, and to guide decisions about their products, services and communications. Members of our corporate family will use this information to send you marketing communications, if any, only if you’ve requested their services.
  • Service providers under contract who help with our business operations (such as fraud investigations, bill collection, affiliate and rewards programs and co-branded credit cards).
  • Other third parties to whom you explicitly ask us to send your information (or about whom you are otherwise explicitly notified and consent to when using a specific service).
  • Law enforcement, governmental agencies, or authorized third-parties, in response to a verified request relating to a criminal investigation or alleged illegal activity or any other activity that may expose us, you, or any other VFAC user to legal liability. In such events, we will disclose information relevant to the investigation, such as name, city, state, ZIP code, telephone number, email address, User ID history, IP address, fraud complaints, bidding and listing history, and anything else we may deem relevant to the investigation.
  • Other business entities, should we plan to merge with or be acquired by that business entity. (Should such a combination occur, we will require that the new combined entity follow this Privacy Policy with respect to your personal information. If your personal information will be used contrary to this policy, you will receive prior notice.)
  • Like other Internet sites, VFAC uses IP addresses to collect aggregate information about numbers of visitors and site usage.  An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer by your Internet service provider whenever you access the Internet. This number may be the same each time you access the Internet or it may change. The address is logged on our server when your computer requests information from VFAC. However, to allow users to access our site anonymously, your IP address is not linked with personal information about you. However, VFAC reserves the right, in rare instances, to use IP addresses to identify individuals who threaten our site, service or users.
  • In order to fulfill our role effectively, as facilitator of online fundraising auctions, VFAC must be able to provide personal information of users to the organization holding the auction. Specifically, VFAC discloses the following information: (1) name, email and mailing address (and/or other contact information) of all donors, (2) name and email of all “interested parties” as well as individuals who place watches on vacation vouchers, and (3) name, email, mailing address (and/or other contact information) or all high bidders and second-highest bidders (in case the high bidder is ineligible).
  • When a user registers and participates in an auction that user agrees to receive communications and other information regarding VFAC.
  • As a general matter, VFAC may contact registered users to an auction with promotions or special offers related to products or services bid on by those users. Users may unsubscribe from receiving such information at any time.

Without limiting the above, in an effort to respect your privacy and our ability to keep the community free from bad actors, we will not otherwise disclose your personal information to law enforcement, other government officials, or other third parties without a subpoena, court order or substantially similar legal procedure, except when we believe in good faith that the disclosure of information is necessary to prevent imminent physical harm or financial loss or to report suspected illegal activity.

Information You Share on VFAC

Your User ID is displayed throughout VFAC (and so available to the public), and is connected to all of your VFAC activity. Other people can see your bids, purchases, vacations for sale, charity profiles, feedback, ratings and associated comments. Notices sent to other community members about suspicious activity and policy violations on our sites refer to User IDs and specific items. So if you associate your name with your User ID, the people to whom you have revealed your name will be able to personally identify your VFAC activities.

If you access our site from a shared computer or a computer in an internet café, for example, certain information about you, such as your User ID, activity or reminders from VFAC, may also be visible to other individuals who use the computer after you.

Using Information from VFAC

VFAC enables you to share personal and financial information to complete transactions and collect payments. We encourage you to disclose your privacy practices and respect the privacy of other users. We cannot guarantee the privacy or security of your information and therefore we encourage you to evaluate the privacy and security policies of your trading partner before entering into a transaction and choosing to share your information. To help protect your privacy, we allow only limited access to other users’ contact, shipping and financial information to facilitate your transactions and collect payments. When users are involved in a transaction, they may have access to each other’s name, User ID, email address and other contact and shipping information. In all cases, you must give other users a chance to remove themselves from your database and a chance to review what information you have collected about them. 

You agree to use user information only for:

VFAC transaction-related purposes that are not unsolicited commercial messages;

using services offered through VFAC (such as escrow, shipping, and fraud complaints),         or

other purposes that a user expressly chooses. 

Cookies

We use “cookies” (small files placed on your hard drive) on certain of our pages to help analyze our web page flow; customize our services, content and advertising; measure promotional effectiveness, and promote trust and safety. For more information about why we use cookies.

A few important things you should know about cookies are that:

  • We offer certain features that are available only through the use of cookies.
  • We use cookies to help identify you and maintain your signed-in status.
  • 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 doing so may interfere with your use of some of our sites or services.
  • You may encounter cookies from third parties on certain pages of the sites that we do not control. (For example, if you view a web page created by another user, there may be a cookie placed by that web page.)

No Spam, Spyware or Spoofing

VFAC does not tolerate spam. Make sure to set your VFAC communication preferences so we communicate to you as you prefer. You are not licensed to add other VFAC users, even a user who has purchased an item from you, to your mailing list (email or physical mail) without their express consent. To report VFAC-related spam or spoof emails to VFAC, please forward the email to info@vacationsforacause.org. You may not use our communication tools to send spam or otherwise send content that would violate our User Agreement. We automatically scan and may manually filter messages to check for spam, viruses, phishing attacks and other malicious activity or illegal or prohibited content, but we do not permanently store messages sent through these tools. If you send an email to an email address that is not registered in our community we do not permanently store that email or use that email address for any marketing purpose. We do not rent or sell these email addresses.

Account Protection

Your password is the key to your account. Use unique numbers, letters and special characters, and do not disclose your VFAC password to anyone. If you do share your password or your personal information with others, remember that you are responsible for all actions taken in the name of your account. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personal 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 notify VFAC and change your password.

Access, Review and Modify Your Personal Information

You can access, review and modify most of your personal information by signing on to vacationsforacause.org. Generally, we will not manually modify your personal information. You must promptly update your personal information if it changes or is inaccurate. Once you make a public posting, you may not be able to change or remove it. Upon your request, we will close your account and remove your personal information from view as soon as reasonably possible, based on your account activity and in accordance with applicable law. We do retain personal information from closed accounts to comply with law, prevent fraud, collect any fees owed, resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our VFAC Terms of Use and other agreements with our website users, and take other actions otherwise permitted by law.

Data Security

Your information is stored on our servers located in the United States. We treat data as an asset that must be protected and use lots of tools (encryption, passwords, physical security, etc.) to protect your personal information against unauthorized access and disclosure. However, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, and other users may abuse or misuse your personal information that they collect from the site. Therefore, although we work very hard to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information or private communications will always remain private.

Third Parties

Except as otherwise expressly included in this Privacy Policy, this document addresses only the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. If you disclose your information to others, whether they are bidders, buyers or sellers (donors) on our sites or other sites throughout the internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the information you disclose to them. VFAC does not control the privacy policies of third parties, and you are subject to the privacy policies of those third parties where applicable. We encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others.

Children

We ask that only individuals who are over the age of 18 register on our site. If we learn that we inadvertently have collected identifying personal information from an individual under the age of 18, we will promptly delete that information from our system.

General

We may amend this Privacy Policy at any time by posting the amended terms on this site. All amended terms automatically take effect after they are initially posted on the site. If your questions are not answered online, you may write to us at: VFAC Inc. Attn: Privacy Practices, 14622 Ventura Blvd. Suite 729, Sherman Oaks, CA  91403