A Special Note About Children.
Children are not eligible to use our services and we ask that minors (under the age of 18) do not submit any personal information to us. If you are a minor, you can use this service only in conjunction with your parents or guardians.
Information We Collect.
Our primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you with a smooth, efficient, and customized experience. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customize our service to make your experience easier.
In general, 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 use our services, we may require you to provide contact and identity information, billing information, shipping information and other personal information as indicated on the forms throughout our site. Where possible, we indicate which fields are required and which fields are optional. You always have the option to not provide information by choosing not to use a particular service or feature.
Under some circumstances we may require some additional financial information, such as, but not limited to: if you are registering using an email account at a free email service, or registering to sell on our site. We use your financial information, including credit card information to verify your name, address, and other information, as well as to bill you for your use of our services.
We automatically track certain information based upon your behavior on our site. We use this information to do internal research on our users' demographics, interests, and behavior to better understand and serve you and our community. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on our site or not), which URL you next go to (whether this URL is on our site or not), what browser you are using, and your IP address.
We use data collection devices such as "cookies" on certain pages of our site
to help analyze our web page flow, measure promotional effectiveness,
and promote trust and safety. "Cookies" are small files placed on your
hard drive that assist us in providing customized services. We offer certain
features that are only available through the use of a "cookie". We also
use cookies to allow you to enter your password less frequently during
a session. Cookies can also help us provide information that is targeted
to your interests. 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 in that case you may not be able to use certain features
on our site and you may be required to reenter your password more frequently
during a session.
Our Use of Your Information.
We use your information to facilitate the services you request. We use information in the file we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on the site, to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement. At times, we may look across multiple users to identify problems or resolve disputes, and in particular we may examine your information to identify users using multiple User IDs or aliases.
Our Disclosure of Your Information.
Due to the existing regulatory environment, we cannot ensure that all of your private communications and other personally identifiable 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 information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, or users may abuse or misuse your information that they collect from our site. Therefore, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personally identifiable information or private communications will always remain private.
As a matter of policy, we do not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party. However, the following describes some of the ways that your personally identifiable information may be disclosed.
Advertisers. We aggregate (gather up data across all user accounts) personally
identifiable information and disclose such information in a non-personally
identifiable manner to advertisers and other third parties for other marketing
and promotional purposes. However, in these situations, we do not disclose
to these entities any information that could be used to identify you personally.
Certain information, such as your name, email address, password, credit
card number, and bank account number, are not disclosed to marketing advertisers
ever. If you "right click" with your mouse on an ad on our site and select
properties, you can see the URL for the advertiser that serves that ad.
BlackImpressions Community. Throughout the site, you are identified by
your User ID. If you select your email address as your User ID you will
disclose your email address to other users and third parties. As a result,
other users and third parties might send you unsolicited email and be
able to personally identify all of your public activities on the site.
Although our pages are coded with robot exclusion headers, others may
illegally attempt to automatically collect your email address from our
site. We describe how to change your User ID below in Section 8. Even
if your User ID is not your email address, your User ID can be used to
identify you and your activities throughout the site. Other people can
see your bids, items that you have purchased in the past, your feedback
rating and associated comments, your postings on the site, and so on.
We also provide a number of ways to allow other users to find out more
about you and your site activities, such as our feature that allows users
to quickly see all of the items you are offering at the time. If you are
involved in a transaction, we have a feature that allows other users to
view your email address and obtain your contact information. Further,
we may send out notices to other community members regarding your actions
on our site.
Legal Requests. BlackImpressions cooperates with law enforcement inquiries,
as well as other third parties to enforce laws, such as: intellectual
property rights, fraud and other rights. We can (and you authorize us
to) disclose any information about you to law enforcement or other government
officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate,
in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringements,
or other activity that is illegal or may expose us or you to legal liability.
Further, we can (and you authorize us to) disclose your User ID, name,
street address, city, state, zip code, country, phone number, email, and
company name to BlackImpressions participants as we in our sole discretion
believe necessary or appropriate in connection with an investigation of
fraud, intellectual property infringement, piracy, or other unlawful activity.
Additionally, BlackImpressions reserves the right (and you authorize BlackImpressions)
to communicate any information about you (including, but not limited to
your policy violations, ended items, and item status) to other users,
law enforcement and VeRO members as we in our sole discretion determine
necessary or appropriate to maintain a level of trust and safety in our
community and to enforce our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and any posted
policies or rules applicable to services you use through our site.
Your Use of Other Users' Information.
In order to facilitate interaction among all BlackImpressions community members, our service allows you limited access other users' contact information. As a seller you have access to the User ID, email address and other contact information of the buyer or winning bidder(s), and as a buyer or winning bidder you have access to the User ID, email address and other contact information of the seller.
By entering into our User Agreement, you agree that, with respect to other users' personally identifiable information that you obtain through the site or through an BlackImpressions-related communication or BlackImpressions-facilitated transaction, BlackImpressions hereby grants to you a license to use such information only for: (a) BlackImpressions-related communications that are not unsolicited commercial messages, (b) using services offered through BlackImpressions (e.g. escrow, insurance, shipping and fraud complaints), and (c) any other purpose that such user expressly agrees to after adequate disclosure of the purpose(s). In all cases, you must give users an opportunity to remove themselves from your database and a chance to review what information you have collected about them. In addition, under no circumstances, except as defined in this Section, can you disclose personally identifiable information about another user to any third party without our consent and the consent of such other user after adequate disclosure. Note that law enforcement personnel, VeRO program participants, and other rights holders are given different rights with respect to information they access.
BlackImpressions and our users do not tolerate spam. Therefore, without
limiting the foregoing, you are not licensed to add an BlackImpressions
user, even a user who has purchased an item from you, to your mail list
(email or physical mail) without their express consent after adequate
disclosure. To report BlackImpressions related spam to BlackImpressions,
please contact us using our email.
We do not rent or sell these email addresses. We generally discard the email addresses some time after they have been used to send your email.
Control of Your Password.
You are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and password, including fees. Therefore we do not recommend that you disclose your BlackImpressions password to any third parties. If you choose to share your User ID and password or your information with third parties to provide you additional services, you are responsible for all actions taken with your User ID and password 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 personally identifiable 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 Section 8.
Accessing Personal Information.
We offer you the ability to automatically review and change the information
you submit to us by logging into the site and entering in the new information
yourself. Generally, we will not modify your information based on your
request because it is very difficult to authenticate your account manually.
You can change your user Id, email address, contact information, financial
information, shipping information and user preferences by going the preferences
and setup section in My
BlackImpressions. You must promptly update your
information if it changes. Once posted, you may not be able to change
or remove any public postings made on our site including our chat rooms
or other message areas or the feedback area.
Upon your request, we will deactivate your account, contact information, billing
information, shipping information, and financial information from our
active databases to prevent your information from being shared with other
users. To make this request, email privacy@BlackImpressions.com.
Such information will be deactivated as soon as reasonably possible based
on your account activity and in accordance with our deactivation policy
and applicable law.
We will retain in our files information you have requested to remove in some circumstances, such as to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement. Further, such prior information is never completely removed from our databases due to technical and legal constraints, including stored "back up" systems. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your personally identifiable information will be completely removed from our databases in response to your requests.
Other Information Collectors.
Except as otherwise expressly included in this Privacy Policy, this document only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. To the extent that you disclose your information to other parties, whether they are bidders, buyers or sellers on our site or other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the information you disclose to them. To the extent that we use third party advertisers, they adhere to their own privacy policies. Since BlackImpressions does not control the privacy policies of third parties, you are subject to the privacy policies of that third party. We encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others.
Security.
BlackImpressions uses industry standard practices to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information, including "firewalls" and Secure Socket Layers. BlackImpressions treats 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, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.
Conflict of Terms.
It is our goal to make our privacy practices easy to understand. We have created easy-to-read summaries, privacy principles, a privacy chart and, are working on privacy enhancing technology to help summarize our full privacy policy. If you have questions about any part of this summary or if you would like more detailed information, we encourage you to review our full privacy policy.
Notice.
We may amend this Privacy Policy at any time by posting the amend terms
on our site. All amended terms shall automatically be effective 30 days
after they are initially posted on our site. 
