Home Junction, Inc. (“Home Junction”) provides online and mobile websites (the “Site” or “Sites”), applications (the “Apps”), widgets (the “Widgets”), API(s) access (the “API”), embedded functionality (the “Embedded Functionality”), website and application plugins (“the Plugins”), and related Internet services for use by Home Junction and customers of Home Junction, (collectively, the “Services”). Home Junction respects your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal information. The Services are operated by Home Junction, Inc. or in some cases the customers of Home Junction (collectively, the “Company”, or “we” or “us” or “our”) for users of the Services (“you”). This Privacy Policy sets forth our policy with respect to information that is collected from visitors and/or users of the Services. Under applicable law, Home Junction is the “data controller” of personal data collected through the Services. This policy describes how the information that we collect from you is used. Please read this policy carefully before you provide us with any personal or other information. By using our Services, you expressly consent to the information handling practices described in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy statement is incorporated into and is subject to the Home Junction Terms of Use. If you have questions about this policy, please email us at privacy@homejunction.com.
1. The Information We Collect
When you interact with us through our Services, we may collect and store a variety of information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to our Services or use our Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, address, email, phone number, payment information, IP address, device ID, any messages, images, or other content you send via a chat feature that you may have if that chat feature is a part of our Services, and more. This may occur at various points throughout use of our Services. We may combine this information with other information that we collect from your activity from use of our Services such as areas that you access, your browser type and language, the types of searches you perform, particularly in the areas of a home search (examples include housing, neighborhoods, schools), ads you’ll find most useful, the date, time, and duration of your visit(s), or information collected from other companies. We also may store such information that may be included in databases owned and maintained by affiliates, agents or service providers. We may use third party web site analytic tools such as Google Analytics with our Services that employ cookies to collect certain information concerning your use of our Services. We may assign your computer one or more cookies or other unique identifiers which may collect and keep track of information to facilitate access to our website and to personalize your online experience, such as your local computer’s settings, which account you have logged into, and notification settings. Cookies are pieces of data that Services can set on your browser or device that can be read on future visits. We may expand our use of cookies to save additional data as new features are added to our Services. In addition, we may use technologies such as web beacons and single-pixel gifs to record log data such as open rates for emails sent by our Services. The use of those tools helps us improve the quality of our Services to you, by identifying information which is most interesting to you, tracking trends, or storing information that you may want to retrieve on a regular basis, such as your saved lifestyle filters, saved searches, saved homes, alerts, and more. We also create a record of your usage behavior on the Services and what information you are requesting. At any time, you may adjust settings on your browser to refuse tools such as cookies. Further information about the procedure to follow in order to disable cookies can be found on your Internet browser provider’s website via their help screen(s). Also, you may give us permission to collect your information in other services. For example, you may connect a social networking service (“SNS”) such as Facebook or Twitter to our Services. At any time, you may adjust settings on your SNSs to disallow this activity. We may also use standard Internet tools, such as web beacons, clear.gifs, and similar technologies which collect information about web browser usage and enables us to customize our Services and advertisements; or tracking pixels which allow us to track and serve customized advertising based on your behavioral use of our Services. Collectively, these tools help us track users’ movements around our Services and also help us understand user trends and behavioral information. We allow registered users to share invitations with their family, friends, and others including the owner of the host Site and real estate professionals (collectively “Friends”). We use your Friends’ email addresses to send them these invitations, and we retain their addresses for the purpose of identifying them when they use our Services. If they are the owner of the host Site on which you used our Services, we may share with them your activity on the Sites. For others, unless they register with the Sites or request it, we do not send them any other emails or use their email address for other purposes. In an ongoing effort to better understand and serve the users of the Services, we may conduct research on our customer demographics, interests and behavior based on the information collected. This research may be compiled and analyzed on an aggregate basis, and we may share this aggregate data with our affiliates, agents and business partners. We may also disclose aggregated user statistics in order to describe our Services to current and prospective business partners, and to other third parties for other lawful purposes. If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Home Junction Services, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to “Do Not Track” (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance.
2. Usage and Disclosure
Your privacy is important, and we are committed to protecting information that identifies you personally, where you have chosen to keep it private. If you provide information for a certain reason, we may use the information in connection with the reason for which it was provided. In general, we use the information that you provide or that we collect to communicate with you and operate, maintain, and enhance our Services. We monitor aggregate site usage metrics as well as track user-generated content and Users to improve our Services. While using our Services, we may track your areas of interest and we may offer suggestions that may interest you based upon your exhibited usage. We will use your email address for administrative communications such as notifying you of major Services updates, for customer service purposes, to address copyright infringement or defamation issues, or to contact you regarding any content that you have posted to or downloaded from our Services. We may also use this information to present you with information that we believe will be of interest or useful to you. If we do so, the marketing communication we send you will contain instructions permitting you to “opt-out” of receiving future marketing communications. Home Junction is not in the business of selling your information. We consider this information to be a vital part of our relationship with you. There are, however, certain circumstances in which we may share your information with certain third parties, as set forth below: Business Transfers: As we develop our business, we might sell or buy businesses or assets. In the event of a corporate sale, merger, reorganization, bankruptcy, dissolution or similar event, your information may be part of the transferred assets. Consent: We may transfer your information with your consent. Developers: Developers using our SDK or API will have access to their end users’ information, including message content, message metadata, and voice metadata, if any. Developers must use such information only to provide the SDK/API functionality within their applications and/or services. Agents, Consultants and Related Third Parties: Like many businesses, we sometimes hire other companies or individuals to perform certain business-related functions. Examples of such functions include mailing information, maintaining databases and processing payments. Legal Requirements: We may disclose your information if required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to (i) comply with a legal obligation, (ii) protect and defend the rights or property of the Company or Related Companies, (iii) protect the personal safety of users of our Services or the public, or (iv) protect against legal liability. Instances where we may share personal information that you provide, regardless of your opt-status include (i) any legal obligation that we believe we may have to protect the rights of others from harm, (ii) to satisfy any requirement of law, regulation, legal process, or enforceable governmental request; (iii) to enforce or investigate a potential violation of the Terms of Use, (iv) in the event of a pledge of Home Junction assets, or a merger or sale of some or all of the assets of Home Junction, (v) to affiliated companies or other businesses or persons that provide maintenance or security services or conduct data analysis, and (vi) to create reports in which case we require that these parties process such information in compliance with this Privacy Notice and we require these parties to use reasonable confidentiality measures.
3. Our Legal Basis for the Handling of Your Personal Data
The laws in some jurisdictions require companies to tell you about the legal ground they rely on to use or disclose your personal data. To the extent those laws apply, our legal grounds are as follows:
- To honor our contractual commitments to you: Much of our processing of personal data is to meet our contractual obligations to our users, or to take steps at users’ request in anticipation of entering into a contract with them. For example, we handle personal data on this basis to create your account and provide our Services.
- Legitimate interests: In many cases, we handle personal data on the ground that it furthers our legitimate interests in ways that are not overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the affected individuals: This includes: o Providing a safe and enjoyable user experience; o Customer service; o Marketing (e.g. sending emails or other communications to let you know about new features); o Protecting our users, personnel, and property; o Analyzing and improving our business (e.g. collecting information about how you use our Services to optimize the design and placement of certain features); o Managing legal issues.
- Legal compliance: We need to use and disclose personal data in certain ways to comply with our legal obligations.
- To protect the vital interests of the individual or others.
- Consent: Where required by law, and in some other cases, we handle personal data on the basis of your implied or express consent.
4. Your Alternatives to Disclosure
Certain areas of our Services will not be protected by this privacy policy because you have made an active choice to make that information public. At any time, you may decline to share your personally identifiable information with us, in which case we may not be able to provide you some of the features and functionality found in our Services. Moreover, you may update, correct, or delete your user information and preferences at any time. This privacy policy will not apply if you input your personally identifiable or other information (i) to crowd-source information, request information, or do public postings, (ii) for discussion purposes on areas within our Services related to neighborhood information or data that is already publicly available on other business or governmental websites, and (iii) to respond to an advertised offer.
5. Aggregated non-personal and other information
We create analytics, behavioral, and trend reports with third parties which may include aggregate anonymous information collected from all users of our Services. This information does not personally identify individuals, but instead provides a helpful understanding of various associations of information within our Services and the groups of people who prefer certain types of information and Services.
6. E-mail Management
You may receive email or correspondence from Home Junction or the owner of our Sites for a variety of reasons including if you took an action within our Services that requested (i) an email or report, (ii) an alert, (iii) a future notification, or (iv) a regular newsletter or information piece. You may also receive email or correspondence from Home Junction or the owner of our Sites if (i) you tagged your home or business for rent or for sale, or (ii) if you have crowd-sourced data into our system. We respect your desire to manage email and offer you various methods of opting-out at your leisure.
7. Base Layer Map Providers
Google, BING, MapQuest, Yahoo!, MapBox, OpenStreetMaps and other imagery included in our Services is supplied by these respective companies and their use is subject to their respective Privacy Statements.
8. Third-Party Websites
This Privacy Policy applies only to our Services. Our Services may contain links to other websites not operated or controlled by us (the “Third Party Sites”). The policies and procedures we described here do not apply to the Third Party Sites. The links from our Services do not imply that we endorse or have reviewed the Third Party Sites. Please refer directly to these third parties and websites regarding their privacy policies.
9. Unsolicited Information
You may provide us with ideas for new products or modifications to existing products, and other unsolicited submissions (collectively, “Unsolicited Information”). All Unsolicited Information shall be deemed to be non-confidential and we shall be free to reproduce, use, disclose, modify our Services, and distribute such Unsolicited Information to others without limitation or attribution.
10. Information From Children
Home Junction abides by federal law and the guidelines set up by the Federal Trade Commission regarding youth privacy (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). As such, we will not knowingly collect any personal information from persons under the age of 13 and our Services are not designed to attract their attention. If you are a parent or guardian of a child under the age of 13 and believe he or she has disclosed personal information to us, then please contact us at privacy@homejunction.com. For residents of the European Economic Area (“EEA”), where processing of personal information is based on consent, Home Junction will not knowingly engage in that processing for users under the age of consent established by applicable data protection law. If we learn that we are engaged in that processing with such users, we will halt such processing and will take reasonable measures to promptly remove applicable information from our records.
11. Storage and Security of Information
The Company is based in the United States. No matter where you are located, you consent to the processing and transferring of your information in and to the U.S. and other countries. The laws of the U.S. and other countries governing data collection and use may not be as comprehensive or protective as the laws of the country where you live. Personal information will be processed and stored by Home Junction in databases hosted in the United States. We take reasonable steps to protect the information provided via the Services from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction. However, no Internet or email transmission is ever fully secure or error free. In particular, email sent to or from the Services may not be secure. Therefore, you should take special care in deciding what information you send to us via email. Please keep this in mind when disclosing any information via the Internet. When we transmit highly confidential information over the Internet, we protect it through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol. However, please note that this is not a guarantee that such information may not be accessed, disclosed, altered, or destroyed by breach of any of our physical, technical, or managerial safeguards. If a password is used to help protect your accounts and personal information, it is your responsibility to keep your password confidential. Do not share this information with anyone. If you are sharing a computer with anyone you should always log out before leaving a Site or Service to protect access to your information from subsequent users. We generally retain personal data for so long as it may be relevant to the purposes identified herein. To dispose of personal data, we may anonymize it, delete it or take other appropriate steps. Data may persist in copies made for backup and business continuity purposes for additional time.
12. Changes To This Privacy Policy and Contacting Home Junction
We reserve the right to update or modify this Privacy Policy at any time and from time to time without prior notice. Please review this policy periodically, and especially before you provide any information. This Privacy Policy was last updated on the date indicated hereunder. Your continued use of our Services after any changes or revisions to this Privacy Policy shall indicate your agreement with the terms of such revised Privacy Policy. If you have any questions about this privacy policy or believe that we have not adhered to it, please contact us at privacy@homejunction.com. 13. Other Provisions Disclaimer. Home Junction provides information on many topics. Some of this information is created by Home Junction, and some of it is created by third parties. While our Services strive to provide accurate information, Home Junction does not make any warranty regarding the accuracy, reliability or use of any information provided within or on our Services, including data, area coverage, map accuracy, articles, demonstration videos, mortgage calculators, and other tools. International Visitors. For Users visiting our Sites or using our Services, please note that any data you enter into the Sites or Services will be transferred outside of your respective non-U.S. territory for use by Home Junction and its affiliates for any of the purposes described herein. In addition, we may make information that we gather available to worldwide business units and affiliates. By providing any data on or within our Services, you hereby expressly consent to such transfers of your data to the United States and other countries.
(Last updated January 1, 2020)