SoutheastTexas.com is committed to protecting your privacy.
Community Internet web sites exist to allow for and promote interaction. In that interaction, users may provide information either anonymously or purposely about themselves, either statistically or personally. SoutheastTexas.com is such a site.
Visits to are monitored for the accumulation of statistical information, including, but not limited to, the number of visits to the site, the pages people visit, from which domains the visitors come from and the browsers people use to visit the site. Such information is important to allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of the services it is providing, to monitor its own performance and to make it easier for other visitors to use the site.
What Is Covered Under This Privacy Policy?
All personal information you provide directly to us covered under this privacy policy. This may include, but not be limited to, your name, address, date of birth, phone number, email address, credit card and other financial information, and other personally identifying information.
SoutheastTexas.com has its own, proprietary email notification system in order to protect your privacy. It is our policy to disallow all email addresses and Instant Messengers from being posted directly in the body of your ad or profile. If you voluntarily disclose personal information to the public, that information can be collected and used by others. In short, if you post personal information online that is accessible to the public, you may receive unsolicited messages from other parties in return. SoutheastTexas.com is not responsible for the disclosure of your information under these circumstances and such disclosure is not covered under this privacy policy.
When credit cards are involved, the information is encrypted through secure server software (SSL - Secured Socket Layer). We use industry recommended standards and make diligent attempts to protect all data located on our servers against unauthorized access. However, SoutheastTexas.com (like any other company) cannot and does not guarantee in any way absolute protection from unauthorized access or theft of such data.
Postings by users on any web log, blog, bulletin board, or chat room are not protected under this privacy policy and not considered confidential information or confidential communication. SoutheastTexas.com shall have the right , but not the obligation, to monitor the content of its web logs, blogs, bulletin boards and chat rooms to determine compliance with policies and terms of use and any other operating rules established for SoutheastTexas.com. SoutheastTexas.com shall have the right in its sole discretion, and without prior notice, to edit, refuse to post, or remove any materials submitted to or posted to its bulletin boards, forums, or chat rooms.
Additionally, advertisers and vendors hosted on our site, or who link to our site, may collect information about you if you click on their ads, visit their web sites, or make a purchase from them. Information collected by vendors or advertisers hosted on our site, or who link to our site, is not covered under this privacy policy.
Finally, you are solely responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your passwords and/or any account information. Please be careful and responsible whenever you're online.
What kind of personal information does SoutheastTexas.com collect?
Some personal information is gathered when you register on our site for contests, promotions, chats, classifieds, jobs, auctions, access to community sites or when you register for any other reason. During registration, SoutheastTexas.com may require you to provide your name, date of birth, gender, zip code, country of residence and email address. Additionally, SoutheastTexas.com will ask you to voluntarily provide other information about yourself. The more information you volunteer, the better able we are to understand who our users are and the better able we are to improve and customize our site for you. Once you register on our site for any reason, you no longer are anonymous to SoutheastTexas.com.
In addition to information obtained through registration, SoutheastTexas.com obtains personal information about you when you make a purchase on our site. That information may include, but not be limited to, your name, address, email address and what you have purchased.
From time to time, SoutheastTexas.com will conduct surveys on its site for research purposes. When you participate in a survey, the information you provide about yourself and the responses to the questions will be collected by SoutheastTexas.com.
If you contact SoutheastTexas.com, we may keep a record of your identity and your correspondence.
SoutheastTexas.com also tracks and collects your computer's IP address to help with system administration and to compile information about traffic patterns on the site. IP addresses also may appear in outgoing SoutheastTexas.com web mail message headers. Your computer IP address identifies your computer and the network or Internet service provider to which your computer is connected.
How SoutheastTexas.com uses Cookies
A cookie is a small amount of data that is transferred from a web server through your browser and stored on the hard drive of your computer. The data in a cookie vary, depending on the reasons for the cookie. For example, if you have a special user name and password to log into a part of the SoutheastTexas.com site, the cookie may contain your user name and password so that when you log on, the web server recognizes you. SoutheastTexas.com may use cookies to gather general information about its audience and store, measure traffic patterns on the site, and track information about you and the way you use the site. As SoutheastTexas.com improves its service and offers its users more ability to customize their experience and the content they view, cookies may be used to assist in that personalization process.
Advertisers on SoutheastTexas.com may also use their own cookies.
You do not have to permit the use of cookies. You can, through the options in your web browser, choose to accept all cookies, choose to reject all cookies or choose to receive notification when a cookie is being delivered so that you can make a decision whether to accept each cookie on a case-by-case basis. If you refuse all cookies, or refuse particular cookies, you will not be able to use some of the features of SoutheastTexas.com.
How is personal information used by SoutheastTexas.com?
Personal information collected from you at SoutheastTexas.com, as well as information about traffic patterns and user behavior on the site, is used primarily for these purposes:
1. To conduct internal research. We constantly are assessing who is using our site and how they are using it. This assists us in making decisions about how to improve the site and to better serve our users. Research data are aggregated and do not include data about specific individuals. We may share aggregated research (but not individual user information) with our advertisers or business partners. Additionally, SoutheastTexas.com may, at some time, use your personal information to contact you and ask if you would be willing to participate in a focus group, survey, or some other type of research effort.
2. To customize or personalize your experience at SoutheastTexas.com. As SoutheastTexas.com improves its service, it will offer users more opportunities to customize content and other aspects of the site. Personal information provided by you will be used to assist in the customization process.
3. To tailor advertising efforts. Most of the information and services available to you at SoutheastTexas.com are free. In order to continue providing services free of charge, SoutheastTexas.com sells advertising. Advertisers prefer to target their efforts toward to audiences who more likely will be interested in their product. Your personal information helps us tell advertisers in general terms how many people are using our site and the demographic attributes of the people using different parts of our site. This helps the advertisers and SoutheastTexas.com make a better decision about where to most effectively place advertising on the site. We never provide information about individual users to advertisers. However, if you choose to make a purchase from an advertiser on our site, that advertiser may collect personal information about you during the purchase process.
Does SoutheastTexas.com share personal information with other entities?
SoutheastTexas.com will strive to maintain the confidentiality of all personal user information and communications which are transmitted directly to SoutheastTexas.com. However, SoutheastTexas.com reserves the right to disclose any of your personal information under special circumstances. These circumstances include:
1. When we believe in good faith that the law requires such disclosure.
2. When disclosing such information is necessary to identify, contact or initiate legal action against someone violating SoutheastTexas.com's Terms of Use, or someone who is causing injury to or interference with SoutheastTexas.com's rights or property, other SoutheastTexas.com users, or anyone else who can be harmed by such activities.
3. When we must disclose such information for administrative and other purposes necessary to maintain and improve our product and services.
4. When asked to cooperate with any law enforcement agency once such agency has provided us with proper identification and is acting in accordance with applicable local, county, state and/or federal laws.
When you provide personal information on SoutheastTexas.com, it is being used by SoutheastTexas.com alone, unless specifically stated otherwise. In some cases, we may be providing a service to you or a promotion that is being made available with the assistance of another company. If that is the case, there may be instances when we must share your information with our partner company to facilitate the co-branded service or promotion. If your information is to be shared with a partner company, you will be notified prior to the transfer of that information to the partner company and you will be given the option of not permitting the transfer of your information to that partner company.
When SoutheastTexas.com conducts research about the use of its site, it may hire a professional research firm to assist in that process. Information about you may be shared with that research firm and that firm may contact you to ask your opinions about SoutheastTexas.com or to see if you are interested in participating in a research activity for SoutheastTexas.com, such as a focus group or survey. The research firm will be bound by its contract with SoutheastTexas.com to use your information strictly for SoutheastTexas.com research purposes, to keep your information confidential, and to adequately secure or destroy its records of your information when the research is complete so that information cannot be obtained by others.
Once again, please be aware that advertisers and vendors hosted on our site, or who link to our site, may collect information about you through their own cookies if you click on their ads or if you make a purchase from them. This includes the purchase of classified or personal advertisements. Information collected by vendors or advertisers on our site, or who link to our site, is not covered under this privacy policy.
Various web sites collect user information and create lists and/or databases of this user information. These lists or databases are sometimes sold to third parties under contractual agreements that place limits on how the purchasing parties can reuse the information. Currently, SoutheastTexas.com does not sell information about its users to third parties for any reason. If SoutheastTexas.com chooses to do so in the future, it will notify users of SoutheastTexas.com of its intentions and give users the option to exclude their information from any such lists or databases sold to third parties.
Southeasttexas.com is a strong advocate of email and personal information privacy. As such, all email addresses and personal information posted on Southeasttexas.com will be protected. Any unauthorized use of email or personal information by any parties not affiliated with Southeasttexas.com will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. This includes, but is not limited to, the unauthorized solicitation via email or phone with personal information obtained from any of the free ads placed on Southeasttexas.com. Any party or parties involved in such abuse will also be billed $100 (one hundred dollars) per email or phone number per usage or attempted usage.
Contacting SoutheastTexas.com
If you have any questions about our privacy policy or the privacy practices of this site, please contact us at
[email protected]. We will be happy to answer your question.
