4. Our Disclosure of Your Information
As a matter of policy, we do not sell or rent any of your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent. However, the following describes some of the ways that your personal information may be disclosed in the normal scope of business to provide our services.
Advertisers. We may aggregate (gather up data across all user accounts) personal information and disclose such information in a non-personally identifiable manner to advertisers and other third parties for their 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 and password are not disclosed to these third parties in a personally identifiable manner without your explicit consent.
Your User Name is displayed throughout the Site and is therefore available to the public. All of your activities on the Site will be identifiable to your User Name. Other people can see your posings, items that you have purchased in the past, your feedback rating and associated comments, your postings on the Site, and so on. Therefore, if you associate your name with your User Name, the people you have revealed your name to will be able to personally identify your ElementBars activities. Although our pages are reasonably protected, others may illegally attempt to automatically collect your email address from the Site. 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 features that allow other users to view your email address and obtain your contact and delivery information to help complete the transaction. Further, we may send out notices to you or other community members regarding suspicious activity or policy violations on the Site.
External Service Providers. There may be a number of separate services offered by third parties that we refer to as external service providers that may be complimentary to your use of the Site. If you choose to use these separate services, disclose information to the external service providers, and/or grant them permission to collect information about you, then their use of your information is governed by their privacy policy. We do not disclose your personal information to external service providers unless you provide your explicit consent. With your consent we may provide some of your personal information to the external service provider offering such services, for your convenience. To prevent our disclosure of your personal information to an external service provider, you can decline such consent or simply not use their services. Because we do not control the privacy practices of these third parties, you should evaluate their practices before deciding to use their services.
We may use third parties that we refer to as internal service providers to facilitate or outsource one or more aspects of the business, product and service operations that we provide to you (e.g., search technology, discussion boards, server space, affiliate and rewards programs, co-branded products and services) and therefore we may provide some of your personal information directly to these internal service providers. These internal service providers' are subject to confidentiality agreements with us and other legal restrictions that prohibit their use of the information we provide them for any other purpose except to facilitate the specific outsourced ElementBars related operation, unless you have explicitly agreed or given your prior permission to them for additional uses. In some instances, the internal service provider may collect information directly from you (such as for surveys or for a co-branded products and services). In these cases, you will be notified of the involvement of the internal service provider, and all additional information you provide them and their additional uses will be strictly up to you. If you provide additional information to an internal service provider directly, then their use of your personal information is governed by their applicable privacy policy.
ElementBars 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 ElementBars community from bad actors. Therefore, in response to a verified request by law enforcement or other government officials relating to a criminal investigation or alleged illegal activity, we can (and you authorize us to) disclose your name, city, state, telephone number, email address, User Name history, fraud complaints, and bidding and listing 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.
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, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, or users may abuse or misuse your personal information that they collect from the Site. Therefore, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information or private communications will always remain private.