AMERICAN HOMES ONLINE PRIVACY POLICY
(last updated March 1, 2020)
Personal Information Collection and Use
When on the American Homes Online Site(s), you may have the option of creating an account (e.g. when saving searches, signing up for alerts, following homes, sharing properties, contacting agents, etc.) and to subscribing to our premium service. When you sign up, we ask you to give us contact information (such as name and email address). We also may collect and store additional usage information such as where, what and when you are searching. We may use this information to contact you occasionally about the services on our site in which you have expressed interest, or to suggest American Homes Online tools and services to improve your home buying, selling or renting process.
If you purchase our premium service, we request certain personally identifiable information from you on our order form. You must provide contact information (such as name, email, and shipping address) and financial information (such as credit card number, expiration date, and billing address). We use this information for billing purposes and to fill your orders. If we have trouble processing an order, we will use this information to contact you.
We use the information we collect to:
• find the most relevant information by organizing the Web Site optimally
• find relevant residential real estate-related news and information via email (if you have registered your email address)
You can control whether you receive American Homes Online emails by following the instructions at the end of each email we send. You may also opt-out by sending an email to support@americanhomesonline.com.
We may also use the information you provide to allow us to contact you for administrative purposes; for example, to tell you about changes to our privacy policy. These emails generally are sent to all users in order for us to abide by notice or other requirements, or to inform you of important product or service information or changes.
We may use certain information that you provide in order to present you with advertising that you may find interesting. This benefits both of us. It benefits us because advertising helps pay the bills, and we can charge our advertisers more if they know that their ads will be seen by somebody more likely to find them useful. It benefits you because you see advertising that may actually be interesting to you, rather than annoying.
Disclosure of Personal Information
American Homes Online does not share, rent or sell personal information about you with other people or companies except as described in this privacy policy. For example, when you fill out a “contact the agent” form on a property listing page, or other “contact” form available on the Site, the information you submit will be passed on to the agent, or the other party you have requested to contact. We reserve the right to use in any manner and also to disclose any non-personal information that we collect, including but not limited to cookie and traffic data (see “Cookies and Tracking Technologies”). We do not combine personal information with any of the non-personal information gathered on our site.
We may release personal information when we believe that doing so is appropriate to comply with the law (for example, to respond to a lawful subpoena, warrant or court order); to enforce or apply our policies; to initiate, render, bill, and collect for amounts owed to us; to protect our rights or property; to protect our users from fraudulent, abusive, or unlawful use of, our site or services; or if we reasonably believe that an emergency involving immediate danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure of communications or justifies disclosure of records without delay.
We may use third party service providers to assist us with the administration of the Site or otherwise perform services on our behalf, including payment transaction processing and sending email. Such third parties may be supplied with or have access to your personal information solely to provide services to us or on our behalf.
We may use third-party ad servers (or ad networks) to deliver ads to you on our behalf. These third-party ad servers may collect and use non-personally identifiable information about your visits to our site in order to present advertisements that may be of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice or to opt out of having this information used by third-party ad servers to provide targeted ads, please visit http://www.networkadvertising.org/optout_nonppii.asp.
Information about our users and the Site is a business asset of American Homes Online. Consequently, information about our users, including personal information, will be disclosed as part of any merger or acquisition, creation of a separate business to provide the Site, our services or fulfill products, sale or pledge of company assets as well as in the event of an insolvency, bankruptcy or receivership in which personal information would be transferred as one of the business assets of the company.
Cookies and Tracking Technologies
We log your IP address in order to help diagnose problems with our server, administer our Web Site and track usage statistics. Your IP address may vary each time you visit, or it may be the same, depending on whether you access our site through an always-on type of Internet connection (for example, a cable modem or DSL), or through a dial-up connection (for example, through a dial-up AOL or Earth link connection). Either way, it would be extremely difficult for us to identify you through your IP address, and we make no attempt to do so. If you reached our site by clicking on a link or advertisement on another site, then we also log that information. This helps us maximize our Internet exposure, and it helps us understand our users’ interests. All of this information is collected and used only in the aggregate; that is, it is entered into our database, where we can use it to generate overall reports on our visitors, but not individual reports that identify you personally.
We also place a small text file known as a “cookie” on your computer’s hard drive. A cookie may contain information that allows us to track your path through our Web Site and to determine whether you have visited us before. Unless you register with us, however, a cookie contains no personally identifiable information that would allow us to identify you. Cookies cannot be used to read data off of your hard drive, and cannot retrieve information from any other cookies created by other Web Sites. We use cookies to help us understand how visitors use our site, and to help us to improve our site. You may refuse to accept a cookie from us by following the procedures specific to your Web browser. Although you may do so, you may find that your browser reacts strangely when visiting not only our Web Site, but other Web Sites as well. Since cookies don’t provide us with any information from which we can identify you, we suggest you allow us to place one on your computer.
We may use Web beacons on our site or other sites and may permit third parties to place them on our site to monitor the effectiveness of advertising or for other legitimate purposes. A Web beacon, also known as a “Web bug,” is a small, graphic image on a Web page, Web-based document or in an e-mail message that is designed to allow the Site owner or a third party to monitor who is visiting a site. Web beacons are often invisible to the user because they are typically very small (only 1-by-1 pixel) and the same color as the background of the Web page, document or e-mail message. Web beacons are represented as HTML IMG tags in the Web page; users can click on “view profiles” of the Web page to see whether the page is using a Web beacon. Web beacons collect the IP address of the computer that the Web beacon is sent to, the URL of the page the Web beacon comes from and the time it was viewed. Web beacons can also be linked to personal information. For example, advertising networks use Web bugs to add information to a personal profile of what sites a person is visiting and to determine what banner ads to display based on the profile. Another use of Web bugs is to provide an independent accounting of how many people have visited a particular Web Site. Web bugs are also used to gather statistics about Web browser usage at different places on the Internet. To “opt-out,” please visit http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/index.aspx.
Security
We use commercially reasonable security measures to protect the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. However, we cannot guarantee the protection of information against interception, misappropriation, misuse, or alteration or that your information may be not be disclosed or accessed by accidental circumstances or by the unauthorized acts of others. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number and/or social security number) on our registration or order forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). You should be aware that we have no control over the security of other sites on the Internet you might visit, interact with, or from which you buy products or services.
Share/Send-To-A-Friend
If you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for your friend’s name and email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the Site. American Homes Online stores this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email. Your friend may contact us at support@americanhomesonline.com to request that we remove this information from our database.
Links to Other Sites
This Web Site contains links to other sites that are not owned or controlled by American Homes Online. Please be aware that we, American Homes Online
