Privacy

Policygenius Privacy Policy

Updates go into effect on July 20, 2018

Our website www.policygenius.com (the “Site”) is owned and operated by Policygenius Inc. (“Policygenius,” “we,” “us,” and/or “our” as used in this Policy), which provides online insurance brokerage, insurance coverage quotes and estimates, and related services (the “Services”). This privacy policy (“Privacy Policy”) describes how we collect and use information from you when you use our Site or our Services, as well as how we secure it. By agreeing to our Terms of Service, you have consented to the data handling practices described in this Privacy Policy. Capitalized terms that are used in this Privacy Policy but not defined here shall have the meanings ascribed to them in the Terms of Use.

This Privacy Policy is effective as of the date specified above. We may change this Privacy Policy at any time, and we will notify you of any material changes by posting a message on our home page. Your continued use of the Site or Services after any such chance will constitute your acceptance of any modified Privacy Policy.

What We Collect and How We Use It

You can use the Site by just browsing without logging in (as a “Visitor”) or by creating and maintaining an account to apply for and/or purchase one or more insurance policies through us (as a “Member”). Each of Visitors and Members may be referred to in this Privacy Policy by the terms “you” or “your.” Our Services are only available to Members.

Site Visitors

From Visitors, whether or not they are, or become, Members, we collect: Information about the technical mechanisms you used to access the Site, such as your browser and operating system type, the link that brought you to our Site, data points that help our analytics function and which tell us what brought you to a particular spot on our Site, and Your IP address, which is automatically anonymized when used by our third party analytics services.

Collectively, this is “Usage Information.”

We use Usage Information to inspect, analyze, and improve our Site and ensure it functions well with the technology used by our Visitors. In addition to analytics about the demographics of our Site Visitors, we use IP Addresses for Visitors not to individually identify you, but to confirm we can deliver the Site and Services to you based on local legal rules.

Insurance Checkup and Application

When you use the Site for an “Insurance Checkup,” you can choose to supply additional information about yourself to us, including your first name, last name, and email address. In order to receive results for our Personal Insurance Checkup, you will be required to provide us with additional personal information which includes, but is not limited to: your email address, zip code, marital status, employment status, risk tolerance, living situation details, property and vehicle ownership, family information such as number of children and number of pets, whether you are a homeowner or a renter, your income, amounts of your savings and debts, and general details about your current insurance coverage (collectively, “Checkup Information”) - we use each of these data points to return results to you that assess your current coverage and provide recommendations about how to improve your current coverage.

This is never required to visit the Site, but we do use this information to perform an analysis of your insurance needs.

Applying for Insurance

To get an insurance quote, in addition to the Checkup Information described above, you may need to supply your date of birth, gender, occupation, address, smoking status, height and weight, certain family history, certain health history, certain driving history, and your citizenship status (collectively, “Quote Information”). We use this information to calculate the price estimates for coverage you request.

To apply for an insurance policy, you will need to become a Member and also submit your social security number, phone number and address in addition to Quote Information (collectively, “Application Information”).

If and when you become a Member, you will create an account password. This is referred to in this Privacy Policy, together with your Application and/or Quote Information, as “Account Information.”

Cookies and Web Beacons

Our Site and Services, especially free services like our Insurance Checkup and insurance quoting, are possible in part because we enable advertising by third parties on the Site. To do so, we use cookies and web beacon technologies for both Visitors and Members.

Cookies are a small piece of software or text placed on your computer when you visit a website. They are used to store information on web browsers, to store and receive identifiers and other information on computers, phones, and other devices. They may include data we store on your web browser or device, identifiers associated with your device, and other software. In this Privacy Policy, we refer to all of these technologies that store or reference data on your own device as “cookies.”

If you use the Services and create an account, we also use a cookie to recognize you on return visits and expedite the login process. You can remove cookies through your browser preferences menu, though the exact method varies depending on the type of browser you use – but note that you won’t be able to log into our Service if your cookies are completely disabled. If you visit from a mobile device, we may reference your device identifier or other information about where your visit originated. The various cookies used on our site last for ninety or more days.

We use cookies to:

• Verify your account and determine when you’re logged in so we can make it easier for you to access the Service and show you the appropriate experience and features;
• Show ads and to make recommendations for businesses and other organizations to people who may be interested in the products, services or causes they promote;
• Measure the performance of ad campaigns for us and for businesses that advertise with or through our Site, including through retargeting campaigns;
• Serve and measure ads across different browsers and devices used by the same person; and
• Conduct web analytics on usage of our Site and Services.

You can opt-out of certain of cookies and tracking technologies by visiting the Digital Advertising Alliance Opt-out here. Note that this opt-out only applies to certain cookies and tracking technologies we use.

Web beacons (also sometimes called “clear GIFs”) are small files stored and/or served on a website on in an email which collect, track, or transmit a data point back to us or to a third party. For example, we use a web beacon to assess whether an email message has been opened.

We use web beacons to facilitate advertising and functionality on our Site, as well, including without limitation to:

• Associate our users with the reports they provide about satisfaction with our Site and Services;
• Administer and monitor email campaigns;
• Analyze the portions of our Site that are used most often by our Visitors, as well as how Visitors interact with our site;
• Perform A/B testing on our Site;
• Optimize interaction with our data stores;
• Improve the functionality and usefulness of our support and support chat functions;
• Analyze the efficacy of our own advertising campaigns;
• Customize the content displayed to your on our site;
• Organize and administer other web beacons and cookies on our site;
• Conduct web analytics on usage of our Site and Services; and
• Enable, improve, and effect targeted and re-targeted advertising for our advertising partners on both our Site and their third party sites such as Facebook.

In some cases, the above web beacons functions may be performed by custom HTML in our Site’s code.

We may use cookies and/or web beacons to track if and when a user abandons a purchase before it is complete and attempt to re-engage that user for the same or a similar purchase, as well as making offers for related purchases to that user.

We do not currently have the ability to recognize Do Not Track signals.

Financial Information

If you submit a credit card payment through our Services, for example to purchase insurance coverage, we will transmit your payment details, including without limitation your credit card number, to the payee through an encrypted transmission. We do not store credit card information on our own servers or associate it with your other Account Information for any purpose other than completing your purchase.

If you purchase temporary insurance coverage through us, you will be required to provide bank account information to pay for and enable that coverage. That bank information is stored on our servers in encrypted form, and will be accessed and used to complete your purchase and maintain your temporary coverage. We will delete this bank account information within 30 days of the conclusion of your temporary coverage, once all payments have been completed.

Other Uses of Personal Information on our Site and Services

In addition to the above, we may use your personally-identifiable information to:

• Otherwise provide, improve, maintain, or optimize the Services;
• Help underwrite and provide accurate insurance premium rate quotes;
• Provide insurers with the required information for applications;
• Provide or offer other financial and consumer products and services from partners with whom we have entered into a joint marketing agreement;
• Provide, maintain and improve customer service;
• Tailor your experience with the Services to your interests;
• Develop and improve the Site and the Services;
• Respond to your inquiries;
• Communicate with you regarding the insurance products that you purchased through the Site as well as other products and services that may be of interest to you; and
• In addition, we may aggregate your Information with our other users’ Information and use that information for benchmarking and analysis purposes.

How We Share Your Information

We share your information with third parties only as described in this Privacy Policy. Specifically, in addition to the usages described above, we share:

Quote Information and Application Information with insurance carriers to obtain quotes and submit and process insurance applications.

Information we collect, generally

• With certain third party vendors that help us administer the Site and/or Services (and who has agreed to keep personal information they receive confidential and use it only or the purpose of providing their piece of our Services), including by:
• Storing and hosting our content or your data;
• Performing analytics on our Site and Services; and
• Providing operations and marketing assistance to us.
• With corporate Affiliates including any of our parent companies, subsidiaries, joint ventures, or other companies under common control with us.
• With counterparties in the course of a corporate sale, merger, reorganization, sale of assets, dissolution, or similar event, some or all of the Information may be part of the transferred assets.
• To the extent permitted by law, when required by law, in connection with a court order, or other government or law enforcement authority or regulatory agency, or whenever we believe that disclosing such information is necessary or advisable, for example, to protect the rights, property, or safety of us or others.

How We Secure Your Information

We secure information stored in our data stores using encryption at rest, and use additional encryption mechanisms to secure certain sensitive fields on our database. Our Site uses HTTPS and SSL protocols, and transmissions from the Site to our servers use TLS encryption standard or better. Vendors who receive personally-identifiable information from us are contractually obligated to impose no less than reasonable security measures on their storage infrastructure, and in any case no lesser measures than they use for their own data.

While we take commercially reasonable steps to protect your Personal Information from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction, we cannot guarantee perfect security - no internet-based Service can. No security system is impenetrable. Despite our security measures, we cannot guarantee the security of our databases, nor can we guarantee that the information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to and from us over the Internet.

California Residents

Under California Civil Code Section 1798.83, California residents who have established business relationships with us may choose to opt out of our sharing their Personal Information with third parties for direct marketing purposes. If you are a California resident and (1) you wish to opt out; or (2) you wish to request certain information regarding our disclosure of your Personal Information to third parties for the direct marketing purposes, please send an e-mail to privacy@policygenius.com.

Visitors from outside the U.S.

If you are visiting the Site or any of the Services from a location outside of the U.S., your connection will be through and to servers located in the U.S. All Personal Information you provide to us will be maintained in web servers and/or internal systems located within the U.S. By providing us with any Personal Information through the Site or any of the Services, you consent to transfer of such Personal Information to the U.S.

By default, we disable the submissions of personal information to our Site from Visitors using European Union IP Addresses, regardless of whether the user is an EU citizen or using a VPN device. If you need access to your account and are using an EU IP Address, please email privacy@policygenius.com with (i) a description of the access and/or help you need, and (ii) an express consent to use any personal information in our possession to respond to your request.

Children

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. If you are under 13, please do not give us any personal information and do not use the Site. If you have reason to believe that a child under the age of 13 has provided personal information to us, please contact us immediately, and we will delete that information from our databases.

External sites

The Site may contain links to third-party websites, including, without limitation, the websites of the insurance carriers offering the third-party insurance products made available to you through the Services (“External Sites”), but we do not endorse and we are not responsible for the content of any linked External Sites or for the privacy practices of the third parties that own and operate such sites. Before using any External Site, please refer to the terms of use and privacy policies of the External Sites for more information, as those terms and policies govern your use of such External Sites.

How to Opt-Out

If you wish to opt-out of the use of your personal information by our Services, we are happy to assist you. Please email us at privacy@policygenius.com and let us know what you wish to opt-out of. Please be advised that certain uses and sharing of your information may be required to continue providing certain Services to you, and that you will not be entitled to any refund if your removal of personal information will make certain prepaid Services unavailable to you.

Questions or Concerns

If you have additional questions or would like more information regarding our information collection, use of disclosure practices, please feel free to contact us at privacy@policygenius.com.