PRIVACY POLICY

Overview

Auto Auction Mall and its affiliates and subsidiaries (hereinafter, “AutoAuctionMall.com”, “AAM”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) take privacy and security seriously and we make all efforts to use your personal information properly.  We have put together this Privacy Policy to set out how we treat your personal information.

This Privacy Policy governs each website, mobile site, application, and/or other service, regardless of how distributed, transmitted, published, or broadcast (each, a “Site”) provided by AAM, its partners, affiliates and/or its subsidiaries that links to this Privacy Policy, which is binding on all those who access, visit and/or use the Site (collectively, “you” or “your”).

This Privacy Policy describes the information collected as part of the normal operation of the Site, process of collection of the information from 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 AutoAuctionMall.com’s practices so that you can make informed decisions.  

By accepting the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use Agreement, you expressly consent to our use and disclosure of your personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy is deemed incorporated into and subject to the terms of AAM’s Terms of Use Agreement.

Our primary purpose in collecting personal information is to provide you with a safe, smooth, efficient, and customized experience. This allows us to provide services and features that are most likely to meet your needs, and to customize our service to make your experience safer and easier. We only collect personal information about you that we consider necessary for achieving this purpose.

1. Information We Collect From You

A. General Account Registration – When you register for an account on AAM in order to purchase a vehicle or access any of our services, we ask for certain information.  As part of the account registration process we ask for your name, phone number and email address.  In addition, when creating the account, you will also be required to choose a password for accessing the created account.  We store the information you have provided in our database.

B. Registration for Events and Forms – We record your name, email, phone number and, if required to be provided, address that you submit when you (i) register for events, including webinars or seminars, (ii) subscribe to our newsletters or any other mailing list, (iii) provide your information in connection with coupons and promotions that we are running, (iv) participate in contests or respond to surveys, (v) submit a form to request one of our customer support representatives to contact you, (vi) speak to our customer support representative through live chat or (vii) when you contact AAM for any other purpose.

C. Payment Processing I –  Deposit – When you make a deposit with AAM for the purpose of purchasing a vehicle, we ask you to provide your name, contact information (including your address), and credit card information or other payment account information.  In connection with deposits made with AAM, when you submit your credit card information, we store the name and address of the cardholder, the expiry date, the type of credit card (i.e. Visa, MasterCard, etc.…) and the last four digits of the credit card number. We do not store the actual credit card number.  We wanted to also let you know that when you place a deposit payment on the Site, we: i) may request a copy of your driver’s license (or other form of government issued identification) and your credit card (covering the credit card number except for the last 4 digits) and ii) obtain your IP address.  This information is important to safeguard against fraudulent transactions by ensuring that the owner of the credit card is the one who is placing the deposit.  Merchant banks and payment service providers will also receive this information in order to process the deposit.  As mentioned above, we take privacy and security seriously and will not share this information with third parties other than with the merchant banks and payment service providers who are processing the transaction.

D. Payment Processing II – Purchase of Vehicle – When you purchase a vehicle from AAM, we collect the following information from you: i) your name, ii) contact information (including your address), and iii) government issued identification.  As a licensed car dealer, we need to collect this information in order to complete and provide you with the bill of sale and vehicle title documentation.

E. Assistance with the Shipping of your Vehicle – At the present time, AAM does not offer any form of shipping service for vehicles purchased from us.  If you request that we help you arrange shipping of the vehicle that you purchased we will require your address and, if different, shipping information (which should have already been provided to us when you purchased the vehicle from us). If the shipment is within the United States, we will, with your consent, provide your address/shipping information to a third-party site for the purposes of getting quotations on the shipping rate and, if such quote is acceptable to you, completing the shipment of the vehicle.  If the shipment is international and you ask us to use our shipping broker to deliver your vehicle, we will, with your consent, provide your contact information (including your name, phone number, email address, home address and, if different, shipping address) to the broker in order to complete the transportation.

F. Financing Pre-Approval – Through our Site you may begin a financing pre-approval application.  This is available to U.S. Residents only.  AAM does not pre-approve you for the financing nor provide the financing but only permits you to input certain information (detailed below) in connection with this which is then passed on to our third-party partners who provide the pre-approval and financing.  The actual pre-approval application and, following pre-approval should you decide to apply for the loan, are done on third party sites that have their own Privacy Policies which govern the use of the information you provide them.  Through our site, we only collect your name, home address, email address, date of birth, phone number, employment status and requested loan amount.  As mentioned, the actual detailed financing application is done on the third-party lender’s site.

G. Placing a Bid, Making an Offer, Using the Buy Now –  If you choose to make an offer, place a bid or buy a vehicle on our Site, we collect information about your offer, bids and buying behavior. That information can and will be used by our subsidiaries, affiliates and business partners.

H. Other Interaction with AAM – Information included in any submissions on our ‘Contact Us’ page or other form where you try to contact AAM in connection with general or specific enquiries or support.  We may also record, analyze and use your interactions with us, including email, telephone, and chat conversations with our sales and customer support professionals, for improving our interactions with you and other customers.

2. Information We Collect Automatically From You

A. Information from Browsers, Devices and Servers – When you visit our Site, whether as a registered or non-registered user, our servers collect information that web browsers, mobile devices and servers make available, such as your computer’s Internet Protocol, IP address, browser type, browser software version, language preference, time zone, referring URL (i.e. the webpage you were on before coming to our Site), date and time of access, the time spent on those pages and on our Site, operating system, mobile device manufacturer and mobile network information and other such related statistical information. We include these in our log files to understand more about visitors to our Sites.  In addition, we may use third part services that collect, monitor and analyze this type of information with the purpose of increasing our Site’s functionality and user friendliness, to better tailor it to your needs, and in some cases to detect suspicious activity.  These third-party service providers have their own privacy policies addressing how they use such information. 

B. Information from Cookies and Tracking Technologies – We use temporary and permanent cookies to identify users of our services and to enhance user experience. We also use cookies, beacons, tags, scripts, and other similar technologies to identify visitors, track website navigation, gather demographic information about visitors and users, understand email campaign effectiveness and for targeted visitor and user engagement by tracking your activities on our websites. We also use third party services to analyze the use of our Site for statistical purposes and to deliver specific functionality that we need to operate our business such as Google Analytics and others listed below.  Google analytics data is anonymized. We discuss cookies in more detail below.  We also use first-party Local Storage Objects (LSOs) such as HTML5 to store content information and preferences to provide certain features.

C. Information from Application Logs and Mobile Analytics – We collect information about your use of our products, services and, where applicable, mobile applications from application logs and in-house and third-party usage analytics tools and use it to understand how your business use and needs can improve our products. This information includes clicks, scrolls, features accessed, access time and frequency, errors generated, performance data, storage utilized, user settings and configurations, and devices used to access and their locations.

3. Information We Collect From Third Parties

A. Login using Federated Authentication Service Providers – You can log in to AAM using supported federated authentication service providers such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google. These services will authenticate your identity and give you the option to share certain personal information with us, such as your name and email address.

B. Referrals – If someone has referred any of our products or services to you through any of our referral programs, that person may have provided us your name, email address and other personal information. You may contact us at [email protected] to request that we remove your information from our database. If you provide us information about another person, or if another person gives us your information, we will only use that information for the specific reason for which it was provided to us.

C. Information from Social Media Sites and other Publicly Available Sources – When you interact or engage with us on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram through posts, comments, questions and other interactions, we may collect such publicly available information, including profile information, to allow us to connect with you, improve our products, or better understand user reactions and issues. Once this information is collected, it may remain with us even if you delete it from the social media sites. AAM may also add and update information about you, from other publicly available sources.

3a. Chatbot Communication

A. User Consent and Communication Recording – By using our chatbot, you acknowledge and agree that your interactions may be recorded, monitored, or stored for various purposes. Your consent is vital for these activities to occur.

B. Purpose of Recording – The recorded communications serve several purposes, including enhancing the chatbot’s performance, analyzing user interactions, and ensuring compliance with legal obligations.

C. Data Collection and Usage – We collect and process user data, including chat interactions, in accordance with applicable privacy laws. This data may include personally identifiable information (PII). Our handling of this data adheres to privacy regulations.

D. User Rights – You possess rights concerning your data and interactions. You can request access to your recorded conversations and ask for data deletion. Instructions for exercising these rights can be found in our Privacy Policy.

E. Security Measures – We maintain robust security measures to safeguard recorded communications and user data from unauthorized access, breaches, or misuse.

F. Third-Party Providers – If you’re using a chatbot provided by a third-party vendor, please note that user data may be shared with the vendor to facilitate the chatbot service. We handle such sharing in compliance with privacy laws.

G. Legal Compliance – We are committed to upholding relevant laws, including, without limitation, communication interception laws like California Penal Code 631. Your privacy and legal compliance are priorities for us.

H. User Responsibility – When using the chatbot, please refrain from sharing sensitive personal information or using the service for illegal or harmful purposes. Adhering to these guidelines ensures a safe and secure environment.

4. Purposes for Using Your Information

We mention various purposes for using your information above.  In addition to those purposes, we may use your information for the following purposes:

• To communicate with you (such as through email) about our products and services that you have signed up for, changes to this Privacy Policy, changes to the Terms of Use or other important notices;

• To keep you posted on new products and services, upcoming events, offers, promotions and other information that we think will be of interest to you to the extent you have given us your prior consent, or it is otherwise permitted under applicable law;

• To ask you to participate in surveys, or to solicit feedback on our products and services;

• To understand how users use our products and services, to monitor and prevent problems, and to improve our products and services;

• To provide customer support, troubleshoot issues, administer your inquiries and to analyze and improve our interactions with customers;

• To detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, to report spam, and to protect the rights and interests of AAM, AAM’s users, third parties and the public;

• We use third parties that we refer to as internal service providers to facilitate or outsource one or more aspects of our business, product and service operations that we provide to you (e.g., live chat, customer relationship management, search technology, bill collection, affiliate and rewards programs) and therefore we may provide some of your personal information directly to these internal service providers;

• To update, expand and analyze our records, identify new customers, and provide products and services that may be of interest to you;

• To analyze trends, administer our websites, and track visitor navigations on our websites to understand what visitors are looking for and to better help them;

• To identify problems with your account and resolve any disputes;

• To enforce our Terms of Use and to collect any fees or charges owed to us; and

• To monitor and improve marketing campaigns and make suggestions relevant to the user.

5. Legal Basis for Collecting and Using Your Information

If you are an individual from the European Economic Area (EEA), our legal basis for information collection and use depends on the personal information concerned and the context in which we collect it. Most of our information collection and processing activities are typically based on (i) contractual necessity, (ii) one or more legitimate interests of AAM or a third party that are not overridden by your data protection interests, or (iii) your consent. Sometimes, we may be legally required to collect your information, or may need your personal information to protect your vital interests or those of another person.

Where we rely on your consent as the legal basis, you have the right to withdraw your consent at any time, but this will not affect any processing that has already taken place.

Where we rely on legitimate interests as the legal basis and those legitimate interests are not specified above, we will clearly explain to you what those legitimate interests are at the time that we collect your information.

6. Information and Choice as to its Use

You may opt out of receiving newsletters and other non-essential messages by using the ‘unsubscribe’ function included in all such messages. However, you will continue to receive notices and essential transactional emails.

You can disable browser cookies before visiting our websites. However, if you do so, you may not be able to use certain features of the websites properly.

You can choose not to provide optional profile information. You can also delete or change your optional profile information. You can always choose not to fill in non-mandatory fields when you submit any form linked to our websites.

7. Sharing of Your Information

AAM and its affiliates and subsidiaries have access to the information covered in sections 1, 2 and 3. We do not sell, rent nor lease any of your personal information. We share your information only in the ways that are described in this Privacy Policy, and only with parties who adopt appropriate confidentiality and security measures.

Employees and independent contractors of all AAM group entities have access to the information covered in sections 1, 2 and 3 on a need-to-know basis. We require all employees and independent contractors of AAM, its affiliates and subsidiaries to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.

We may need to share your personal information and aggregated or de-identified information with third party service providers that we engage, such as marketing and advertising partners, shipping providers and companies (as mentioned above), live chat and customer relationship management application providers, event organizers, web analytics providers, merchant banks and payment processors. These service providers are authorized to use your personal information only as necessary to provide these services to us.

8. Your Rights to Information We Hold About You

If you are in the European Economic Area (EEA), you have the following rights with respect to information that AAM holds about you.

A. Right to access – You have the right to access (and obtain a copy of, if required) the categories of personal information that we hold about you, including:

1. the information’s source,
2. purpose of the processing,
3. the categories of personal information concerned,
4. where possible, the envisaged period for which the personal information will be stored or, if not possible, the criteria used to determine that period, and
5. the persons to whom the information is shared.

B. Right to rectification – You have the right to update the information we hold about you or to rectify any inaccuracies. Based on the purpose for which we use your information, you can instruct us to add supplemental information about you in our database.

C. Right to erasure – You have the right to request that we delete your personal information in certain circumstances, such as when it is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was originally collected.

D. Right to restriction of processing – You may also have the right to request to restrict the use of your information in certain circumstances, such as when you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.

E. Right to data portability – You have the right to transfer your information to a third party in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, in circumstances where the information is processed with your consent or by automated means.

F. Right to object – You have the right to object to the use of your information in certain circumstances, such as the disclosure of your personal information to a third party, other than to third parties who act as our agents to perform tasks on our behalf and under our instructions.  You also have the right to object to the use of your personal information for a purpose that is materially different from the purposes for which we originally collected such information, pursuant to this Privacy Policy, or you subsequently authorized such use. 

G. Right to complain – You have the right to complain to the appropriate supervisory authority if you have any grievance against the way we collect, use or share your information. This right may not be available to you if there is no supervisory authority dealing with data protection in your country.

9. Retention of Information

AAM retains your personal information for as long as it is required for the purposes stated in this Privacy Policy. Sometimes, we may retain your information for longer periods as permitted or required by law, such as to maintain suppression lists, prevent abuse, if required in connection with a legal claim or proceeding, to enforce our agreements, for tax, accounting, or to comply with other legal obligations.

10. Cookies

Like many websites, we use “cookies” to collect information.  A cookie is a small text file that is stored on your computer or other internet connected device in order to identify your browser, provide analytics, remember information about you such as your language preference or login information.  We use this information to do internal research on our users’ demographics, interests, and behavior to better understand, protect and serve you and our community.

We use two types of cookies:

First, we utilize persistent cookies to save your registration ID and login password for future logins to the Site and to track your compliance with our marketplace policies.

Second, we utilize session ID cookies to enable certain features of the Site, to better understand how you interact with the Site and to monitor aggregate usage by our users and web traffic routing on the Site.  

Unlike persistent cookies, session cookies are deleted from your computer when you log off from the Site and then close your browser. You can instruct your browser, by changing its options, to stop accepting cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit.

If you do not accept cookies, however, you may not be able to use all portions of the Site or all functionality of the Service. When you visit our website, our servers automatically record information that your browser sends whenever you visit a website. We use cookies to collect log data. 

We also use third party services to analyze the use of our site for statistical purposes and to deliver specific functionality that we need to operate as a business. Such services, and related cookies, are for the following tools:

Category	Purpose	Tools
Analytics	To measure website usage, so that we can understand trends and performance, and improve how we’re operating	Google Analytics, Google Optimize, WordPress Stats
Chat & customer support	To allow website visitors to easily communicate with our Support team	UserlikeGetBase
Content promotion & user engagement	To allow website visitors to subscribe to our premium content offerings	Vertical ResponseDrip
Tag management	To manage the implementation of services on our website	Google Tag Manager

11. Disclosure of Information to Law Enforcement

AutoAuctionMall.com fully cooperates with law enforcement inquiries, as well as other third parties to enforce laws, such as: intellectual property rights, fraud and other rights, to help protect you and the AutoAuctionMall.com from bad actors. Therefore, in response to lawful requests by law enforcement or other government officials relating to a criminal investigation or alleged illegal activity, we can disclose your name, city, state, telephone number, email address, UserID, fraud complaints, and offer and payment history without a subpoena. 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 or other government officials 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 report suspected illegal activity.

12. Enforcement of our Rights

Due to the existing regulatory environment, we cannot ensure that all of your private communications and other personal 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 personal information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances such as preventing fraud, investigating any suspected illegal activity, enforcing our agreements or policies or protecting the safety of our users.

13. Control of Your Password

You are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and password, including fees charged to your account. Therefore, we do not recommend that you disclose your AutoAuctionMall.com password to any third parties. If you choose to share your User ID and password or your personal information with third parties, you are responsible for all actions taken with your account 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 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 change your password as detailed in next Section. NOTE: WE WILL NOT COMMUNICATE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION OVER THE PHONE TO ANYONE OTHER THAN YOU WITHOUT YOUR WRITTEN SIGNED AND NOTARIZED REQUEST/PERMISSION TO DO SO. Please make sure that if you want anyone to access/use your account that individual obtains your written, signed and notarized permission and we have that document in our possession. Otherwise, we will not provide any information to that individual.

14. Children’s Personal Information

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was passed to give parents increased control over what information is collected from their children online and how such information is used.  Our products and services are not directed to individuals under 16. AAM does not knowingly collect personal information from children who are under 16 years of age. If we become aware that a child under 16 has provided us with personal information, we will take steps to delete such information. If you believe that a child under 16 years has provided personal information to us, please write to [email protected] with the details, and we will take the necessary steps to delete the information we hold about that child.

15. Your California Privacy Rights

The State of California requires us to post specific language related to our Privacy Policy for California residents.  By default, AAM does not share your personal information with any third parties other than as described in this Privacy Policy.  If you are a California resident, California Civil Code Section 1798.83 permits you to request in writing a list of the categories of personally identifiable information relating to third parties to which we have disclosed certain categories of personally identifiable information during the preceding year, for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes. To make such a request, please contact us at [email protected].

16. Location and International Transfers

We share your personal information and service data with AAM subsidiaries and affiliates. By accessing or using our products and services or otherwise providing personal information or service data to us, you consent to the processing, transfer, and storage of your personal information within the United States of America and other countries where AAM operates.

17. Do Not Track Requests

Some internet browsers have enabled ‘Do Not Track’ (DNT) features, which send out a signal (called the DNT signal) to the websites that you visit indicating that you don’t wish to be tracked. Currently, there is no standard that governs what websites can or should do when they receive these signals. For now, we do not take action in response to these signals.

18. External Links on Our Site

Some pages of our websites may contain links to websites that are not linked to this Privacy Policy. If you submit your personal information to any of these third-party sites, your personal information is governed by their privacy policies. As a safety measure, we recommend that you not share any personal information with these third parties unless you’ve checked their privacy policies and assured yourself of their privacy practices.

19. Transfer of Business

Although at present we do not intend to sell our business, in the event that we sell our business or get acquired or merged, we will ensure that the acquiring entity is legally bound to honor our commitments to you. We will notify you via email or through a prominent notice on our website of any change in ownership or in the uses of your personal information and service data.

20. Compliance

We make every effort to ensure that personal information you provide is used in conformity with this Privacy Policy. If you have any concerns about our adherence to this Privacy Policy or the manner in which your personal information is used, kindly write to us [email protected].

21. Security

Your information is stored on AutoAuctionMall.com’s servers which are located in the United States. We use procedural and technical safeguards to protect your personal information against loss or theft as well as unauthorized access and disclosure to protect your privacy, including “firewalls” and other means. We treat 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, you hereby agree that in the event of the security breach/theft of your information you release AutoAuctionMall.com and its affiliates, and their agents and officers will not be held liable by you. AutoAuctionMall.com and its affiliates, associated and business partners does NOT either expressly or impliedly guarantee or warrant in any way that the information that we collect is safe from any type of breach, theft, intentional, unintentional or negligent security failure that may result in disclosure of your information. Therefore, you hereby AGREE TO RELEASE AutoAuctionMall.com, its employees and officers, its affiliates, associates, business partners, subsidiaries from any and all liability arising from those aforementioned events. Additionally, you hereby AGREE NOT TO CLAIM any and all damages stemming from aforementioned events, including, but not limited to consequential, punitive, direct or indirect.

22. Changes to this Privacy Policy

From time to time, we may update this policy. If the updates have minor consequences, they will take effect immediately when we post the revised Privacy Policy on our Site. If there are substantial changes to the Privacy Policy, it will be effective 30 days after we initially posted the Privacy Policy on our Site and sent you an update email.

Until the new policy takes effect, if it materially reduces the protection of your privacy right under the then-existing policy you can choose not to accept it and terminate your use of our Site and services and stop purchasing products from our Site.  Continuing to use our Site, purchase our products and use our services after the new policy takes effect means that you agree to the new policy. Note that if we need to adapt the policy to legal requirements, the new policy will become effective immediately or as required by law.

23. Incorporation to the Terms of Use

This policy is an integral part of our Terms of Use and, as applicable, any other agreement entered into between you (or the entity that you are acting on its behalf) and us.  Therefore, this Privacy Policy is hereby incorporated into the Terms of Use and any such agreement.