EscapeHomes Privacy Policy

(Effective Date: August 17, 2004)

We at EscapeHomes understand that your privacy is important to you, and we are committed to respecting your trust and information.  This privacy policy discloses our information collection and disclosure practices for our Web site, located at www.escapehomes.com (the "Site").  By accessing our Site, you consent to the collection and use of information as described herein.  We reserve the right to change this privacy policy at any time.  If we make any material changes to our privacy policy, we will post a new statement on our Site and update the effective date set forth above. Therefore, we encourage you to check the date of our privacy policy whenever you visit this Site to see if it has been updated since your last visit.

Information We Collect

Personally Identifying Information

You can visit our Site and access many portions of the Site and the information that we make available to all users, without providing information about yourself.  We do not require you to register or provide personally identifying information to us in order to view our Site.

In order to access various services that we provide on our Site, there are occasions, Including registration, when we will ask you to provide personally identifying information to us, such as your name, address, phone number, email address, demographic information, or desired property characteristics.  We do this to better understand and respond to your needs and to enable us to provide you with services that may be valuable to you. 

For example, our Site allows users to locate and evaluate proposals from independent third party real estate professionals.  When registering and submitting a request for more information from an EscapeHomes partner about a property or service that you see on our Site, you will be asked to provide personally identifying information about yourself that can be forwarded to those requested partners.  We may also request e-mail address or contact information from you when you request to receive various newsletters or emails that we may offer.

In addition, when accessing various customer service features on our Site, for example, when sending messages to us with information about your property requests, you may choose to provide additional information to us regarding your property or service interests and needs.

Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of information or files that are stored on a user's computer by the Web server through a user's browser for record keeping purposes.  A cookie itself is not designed or intended to read any information from your computer (other than the contents of the cookie); rather, it is an identifier used by the Web site that originally placed it your hard drive.  The actual contents of the cookie information can be retrieved by the same site's Web server in order to personalize, monitor, or regulate the use of the site.

We use cookies for various reasons: we may use cookies to store some history about the parts of our Site that you have visited to help you navigate our site more easily or to alert you to related pages on our Site that may be of interest you.  We do not use cookies to obtain information on other Web sites that you may visit.  Users have the option, within their Internet browsers, to disable cookies and continue to access our Site, although some portions of the Site or functions of our services may not be accessible without the use of cookies.

Web Beacons/Pixel Tags

A Web beacon or pixel tag, 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 may use Web beacons 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 beacons is to provide an independent accounting of how many people have visited a particular Web site. Web beacons are also used to gather statistics about Web browser usage at different places on the Internet.

We may use Web beacons on our Site or in our email messages.  Our Web beacons allow us to count users who have visited our web pages, and to compile aggregated statistics about site usage.  Our Web beacons collect only a limited set of information, including a cookie number, time and date of a page view, and a description of the page on which the pixel tag resides.  We may also permit third parties to place them on our Site to monitor the effectiveness of advertising or for other lawful purposes.

Use and Disclosure of Information

Internal Use of Personally Identifying Information

We use personally identifying information internally to serve our users and to enhance and extend our relationship with our users.  For example, by understanding how you use our Site from your computer, we are able to customize and personalize your experience.  More specifically, we use personal information to complete transactions you have requested, to anticipate and resolve problems with our Site, to respond to customer support inquiries, and to send you periodic emails or newsletters (provided you register to receive our emails and newsletters). 

Disclosure of Personally Identifying Information to Third Parties

Except as disclosed in this policy, we do not disclose, sell, rent, loan, trade or lease any personally identifying information collected at our Site to any third party.  We disclose personally identifying information when we have your consent to do so, as necessary to complete a transaction you have requested, for marketing purposes (unless you have chosen not to receive such communications, in certain business transactions), when required by law, or when permitted to protect our rights or property.  If we make changes to our disclosure policies for purposes other than as described herein, we will first obtain your consent.

We will disclose personal information with your consent, which we obtain through your registration at our Site, or in writing, verbally, through online means or as part of a separate agreement.  Our Site allows users to locate and evaluate proposals from independent third party real estate professionals. When submitting a request, you supply us with personally identifying information about yourself and the property or property-type of interest.  We provide this information to those third parties who are members of our real estate or travel network  for the purposes of contacting you and providing services, as requested when visiting our Site.  You also agree to have the information you supply to us to forwarded to real estate professionals referred to contact you by EscapeHomes.  Our real estate or travel partners include but are not limited to: developers, mortgage brokers, title companies, insurance vendors, travel agencies, moving companies, and timeshare resellers.

By registering at our Site, you also give consent for us to contact you via email, fax, telephone, and other methods of contact as provided  to enable us to provide our services to you.  In addition, by registering on our Site, you also consent to receive emails, and other methods of contact as provided, from third parties as a part of the services that you request, including but not limited to, contact from real estate agents as part of an information or proposal request that you submit on our Site.  EscapeHomes offers participation in a network of real estate professionals who are not employed by EscapeHomes.  We do not regulate how these third parties use your information and are not responsible for removing your information from any third party lists. Please contact the third party service providers directly to be removed from any of their contact lists.  

If you choose to send additional information to us as part of a customer service request, for example, in a message containing information about your property requests, we may use this information to identify you as a customer and to determine how to respond to your request.  We will use this information as necessary in order to best to resolve the matter identified in your request.

Protection of EscapeHomes and Others

We may release personally identifying information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law (e.g., 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 or our users' rights, property or safety; or to protect our users from fraudulent, abusive, or unlawful use of, our Site; 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.

Business Transfers

In addition, information about our users, including personally identifying information, may be disclosed as part of any merger, acquisition, debt financing, sale of company assets, as well as in the event of an insolvency, bankruptcy or receivership in which personally identifiable information could be transferred to third parties as one of the business assets of the company.

Other Provisions

Third Party Links

Please be aware that we may provide links to third party Web sites from our Site as a service to our customers and we are not responsible for the content or information collection practices of those sites.  We have no ability to control the privacy and data collection practices of these sites and the privacy policies of such sites may differ from those of this privacy policy. Please review the privacy policies of any linked sites you visit.   

Security

We use reasonable security measures to store and maintain personally identifying information, to protect it from loss, misuse, alternation or destruction by any unauthorized party while it is under our control.  Although we make good faith efforts to store the information collected through our Site in a secure operating environment that is not available to the public, we cannot guarantee complete security.  Further, while we make every effort to ensure the integrity and security of our network and systems, we cannot guarantee that our security measures will prevent third-party "hackers" from illegally obtaining this information.

Choice/Opt-Out

You may opt-out of receiving communications from us in the future by emailing your request to unsubscribe@escapehomes.com.

Children

We do not intend, and our Site is not designed, to collect personally identifying information from children under the age of 13. If you are under 13 years old, you should not register for our services or otherwise provide information on our Site.

Access to Your Information

EscapeHomes provides users the following options for changing and modifying information previously provided:  logging into your EscapeHomes account, and selecting "My Account Information."

Questions and Concerns

EscapeHomes welcomes your comments and questions.  If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this Site, or your dealings with this Site, please contact us.