Privacy and Security Policy
Fine Art Color is absolutely committed to protecting your privacy. We use the information we collect to make your visits to our web site more enjoyable and valuable. We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information to others.
The Fine Art web site is secured using a Thawte Digital Certificate. This ensures that all information you send to us via the World Wide Web will be encrypted. If any other Internet user intercepts the communication he/she will only be able to see it in an encrypted (garbled) form. Certificate technology allows only us to decrypt the information, and view it in plain text form. For more information, please see our Note About Digital Certificates.
You are free to visit our site without identifying yourself, but if you would like to make a purchase, receive free gifts or participate in our Member's Only section of the site, you will need to register. The information you provide during the registration process is considered part of your Members Account. We use this information to fill your requests, provide customer service assistance, speed order processing and improve the content of our site so that we may better serve your needs. Your personal information, including your purchases, e-mail, residential and business addresses and your credit card information, belong to you. We use it only for the purposes you have authorized.
Federal Trade Commission
For your assistance, the United States Federal Trade Commission has created an information page entitled "How to Be Web Ready." This page is located at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/online/webready/index.html and provides general tips and guidelines on how to protect you privacy online. You may also wish to visit the FTC's web page entitled "Traveling In Cyberspace? Be Savvy!" This page is located at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/cybrspce/index.html and provides additional information concerning Internet security and privacy issues.
The Information We Collect
Member Accounts
You are free to browse many areas of our web site anonymously without setting up any type of account or providing any personal information. However, when you are ready to join our Members Only section or place an order, you will need to establish a Member Account. In order to establish a Member Account, visitors are requested to provide both personal information and product preferences. This information is stored and protected by your user-established User ID and Password.
As a Fine Art Member, the information you provide for your Member Account will allow us to better meet your cosmetics needs and to process your orders and notify you of your order status. To set up your account, we need to know your name, shipping address, credit card billing address, credit card number, credit card expiration date, phone number and e-mail address. Other payment options, such as paying by personal check, require name and address, telephone number, name of bank and bank routing and checking account numbers. We also ask that you tell us of your product preferences so that the information we make available to you will be more useful and interesting. You can make changes or updates to you Member Account information at any time.
During the Member Account set-up, we ask if you would like to be on our Member e-mail list. We offer two choices: "Yes, keep me informed" and "No, send order-related e-mails only". If you choose "Yes", you will receive messages about new products, special offers and other important developments and news about Fine Art. If you choose "No", you will only receive messages essential for processing your orders. All e-mails sent to our Member list provide a convenient way to un-subscribe if you choose to do so.
During the Member Account setup, there is a "Remember Me" option. By selecting it, you allow Fine Art to save your User ID and Password so you do not have to re-enter them each time you wish to return to a Members Only section of the web site or place an order. We remember you by placing a log file, called a "cookie", with your web browser. The "cookie" contains only enough information to identify you upon return visits. Your browser has options to accept, reject, or provide you with notice when a cookie is sent. For more information, please see our Note About Cookies.
No information, other than that found in the "cookie", will be accessibly by us. Access to you user information always requires both your User ID and Password.
Return Instructions
The form for requesting a Return Merchandise Authorization asks for you name, e-mail address, telephone and invoice numbers. This information allows us to reply to product returns requests.
Information Collected Automatically
You may have heard news media reports of some unscrupulous web site operators surreptitiously capturing personal information from site visitors. Fine Art does not engage in such practices. The only information that we capture which you do not specifically and knowingly tell us is the time you accessed the site, what pages you viewed and the Internet protocol (IP) address of your computer. Each computer that connects to the Internet is assigned a unique IP address for identification purposes. If you come to our site visa a link, we may also capture the location of the site you linked from.
This information is automatically captured by our web server and is a customary, safe and well-accepted practice among legitimate web site operators. The information is of little use on an individual site visitor basis and becomes useful only when combined with similar information from other visitors. As is the case with most other web site operators, we use the combined information to measure viewing treads and gage the popularity and usefulness of each of our web pages. In other words, the information helps us identify the type of web site content our visitors value most. This allows us to continuously refine and development the site in order to meet the changing needs of our visitors.
How We Protect Your Personal Information
Secure Socket Layer Encryption
Ensuring secure online exchange of information is an important part of our pledge to honor your privacy. Fine Art utilizes secure socket layers (SSL) to protect your personal information. SSL encrypts all personal information, such as your name and credit card number, so that it can not be read in transit. When you place an order with Fine Art, your credit card information is captured and stored separately from your order so that it cannot be read by anyone other than our customer service staff. Only customers using browsers that support SSL can complete their order online using our secure processing procedure.
If you don't have a browser that supports SSL, or if you don't feel uncomfortable sending your credit card information over the Internet, you may fax or call our Customer Service Department to complete your order. You will be provided with instructions for doing so during the order processing stage when you are ready to check out. You may also pay by personal check. Please visit our Payment Options section in Customer Service for more information. You may also wish to see our Note About Digital Certificates for additional information about SSL encryption.
Reputable Credit Card Processing
All Fine Art credit card transactions are processed through SurePay, LP. You can find SurePay on the Internet at http://www.surepay.com. We selected SurePay as our primary credit card clearing house because of their experience and reputation for reliability, integrity, sensitivity to security issues and excellent customer service.
The high standards that Fine Art requires of its clearing house are in turn reflected by SurePay's equally high standards with respect to the merchants it approves for acceptance into its credit card clearing program. In order for a merchant to be approved, SurePay conducts an extensive application and verification investigation of the merchant. Fine Art met all of SurePay's verification requirements and was approved without qualifications.
Unlike some merchants doing business on the Internet, Fine Art has a direct relationship with SurePay. The account is in our name. Many merchants who accept credit cards have to rely on middlemen between them and the clearing house that actually processes the transactions. What this means is that more people are involved in the transaction and thus, more people have access to your credit card information. The more people involved, the more chances of mistake and skullduggery. In many cases, these will be people that you don't know and have no way to check out.
Fine Art deals directly with its clearing house. No middlemen are involved and we can be easily checked out.
If you have any questions about how your credit card information is used, please e-mail us at creditcard@fineartcolor.com or call us at 800-xxx-xxxx.
Limited Employee Access
Fine Art limits employee access to personal information to those with a business reason for knowing such information. We educate our employees so that they will understand the importance of confidentiality and customer privacy. Fine Art also takes appropriate disciplinary measures to enforce employee privacy responsibilities.
Updating Your Personal Information
You can help Fine Art maintain the accuracy of your personal information and product preferences by notifying us when any of your information changes. If at any time you wish to update your information or preferences, please visit our Customer Service page.
Links To Other Sites
Fine Art's web site contains links to non Fine Art sites which we believe will be of interest to you. Fine Art assumes no responsibility for the content or the privacy policies and practices of such sites.
A Note About Cookies
Cookies are small text files that are stored on your computer's hard drive. They are used to keep track of settings and preferences or data for a particular web site. Because the web servers that respond to requests for web pages have no way of knowing who is making a request, they have no way of storing settings for specific users or changing the page they send based on choices a user has made on another page. Cookies solve this problem by saving the settings on the user's computer.
When the user's browser requests a page, it sends the settings that apply to that page along with the request. Because the browser will only send the settings back to the server that originally created them, cookies are a very secure way of maintaining data that is specific to a particular user.
Cookies can be temporary or permanent. The user's browser keeps track of temporary cookies as long as it is running, but deletes them when it is shut down.
Temporary cookies are used to pass information between web pages during a single visit. (Online shopping carts are a good example of this.) The browser saves permanent cookies as tiny files on the user's computer in order to maintain settings or data between multiple visits. "Permanent" cookies are actually set to expire at some time in the future (commonly between 30 days and a year from their creation date), and are automatically deleted from the user's system at that time.
Although other methods are now available, cookies are still the most popular way for saving personal choices between visits to a web page without having to log in each time you come to the page.
Fine Art uses permanent cookies to store your User ID and Password. The cookies are set to expire one year after their creation, at which time your browser should automatically delete them from your hard disk drive. While cookies are an invasion by the web site into your "space", they do provide the convenience of not having to enter login type identification more than once during the life of the cookie. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator both allow the cookie function to be disabled should you desire.
A Note About Digital Certificates
When you connect to a secure web server you want to be sure that you are actually connecting to the server that you think your are. To give you that assurance, your browser ask the server to authenticate itself. Authentication is quite a complex process involving public keys, private keys and a digital certificate. The certificate tells you that an independent third party has agreed that the server belongs to the company it claims to belong to. A valid certificate means that you can have confidence that when you send information to our server you in fact send it to us and not an imposter.
VeriSign Inc. (http://www. verisign.com) and Thawte Consulting (http://www.thawte.com) are the two largest issuers of digital certificates in the world. Thawte issued the Fine Art certificate. Both VeriSign and Thawte require that those requesting a certificate provide documentary proof that they are in fact who they say they are. In many cases, the proof must be in the form of documents that have been filed with a government agency. See, for example, the Required Documentation on the Thawte web site at http://www.thawte.com/certs/server/docs.html.
VeriSign acquired Thawte in 1999 and thus became the dominant player in the digital certificate field.
When you connect to a page on a web site which has a digital certificate attached, a "Pad Lock" should appear in the task bar at the bottom of your browser window. Presence of the pad lock indicates that your browser has established a secure socket layer (SSL) connection with a server that has been authenticated to be the one you believe it is.
Early Microsoft and Netscape browsers did not support SSL and the use of digital certificates. All recent version of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator support this feature. If you have an old browser, it would be well worth your time to upgrade to a current version. Due to the continuing browser war between Microsoft and Netscape the upgrade probably will be free. You can upgrade the browser of your choice by visiting fineartcolor.com/broswer-upgrade.
A Note About Java Applets
A Java applet is a small program that is delivered to a browser by a web page and is then run within the browser to provide some functionality. Because applets run on the user's computer and their origin may not be trustworthy, certain safeguards have been built into an applet's architecture in order to limit their ability to do damage and wreck havoc on your computer. These safeguards include preventing applets from having access to the computer's file system.
The Fine Art uses Java applets from time to time to display animation and process some user inputs on forms.
Summary
Fine Art is committed to protecting your privacy. We use the information we collect on our web site to make shopping and serving you cosmetics needs an enjoyable and rewarding experience. We do not sell, trade or rent your personal information to others.
Your Consent
By using our web site, you consent to our collection and use of the information outline above. If we make any changes to our Privacy and Security Policy, we will post those changes on this page so that you are always aware of what information we collect and how we use it.
Please address comments or questions regarding Our Privacy and Security Policy to privacy@fineartcolor.com. |
