Privacy Policy

PROTECTING YOUR PRIVACY

MERATAS ONLINE CONSUMER INFORMATION PRIVACY POLICY

Meratas Inc. (“Meratas”) is dedicated to helping our clients and the people we serve along the path to their financial success. To further our mission, we host innovative websites and mobile applications and provide visitors with helpful and timely information along with interactive tools. We respect the privacy and security of information about our customers and visitors to this website. This Online Consumer Information Privacy Policy (“Privacy Policy”) describes our privacy practices concerning information collected in connection with Meratas’s general product and services website (the “Site”), which is located at Meratas.com, and sets forth our policies on how we collect, use, and disclose information collected on this Site. By visiting our Site and/or using the features made available to you on the Site, you are agreeing to the terms of this Privacy Policy.

Meratas also shares customer information with affiliates and outside companies. Meratas’s Privacy Notice describes our principles and practices regarding how we share customer information with affiliates and outside companies.

Information We Collect

We may collect both Personal Information and Other Information in connection with the services on the Site. “Personal Information” is any information that alone or together with other information in Meratas’s possession relates to an identified or identifiable person, such as name, phone number, email, address, and online account information such as username and password. “Other Information” is any additional information that is not Personal Information, such as information about usage of the Site that does not identify you personally or certain information that we or third parties collect about you in other contexts. If we combine Other Information with Personal Information, we will treat the combined information as Personal Information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Personal Information We Collect Directly From You

We collect Personal Information when you voluntarily choose to provide such information directly to us, such as when you register for access to the Site, fill out an application for a loan or credit, create an account with us, manage your account on our Site, contact us with inquiries, request information or materials from us, or otherwise interact with our Site. Such information may include your name, phone number, email, address, social security number, date of birth, information regarding your academic record, and online account information such as a username and password.

Personal Information We Receive From Third Parties

We may collect and receive Personal Information about you from third parties, such as our affiliates, joint-marketing partners, consumer reporting agencies, or third-party data providers. Such information may include demographic information, income or credit information, information regarding your academic record, or information about the products and services that we believe may interest you.

Log Data And Other Information

We and our affiliates and our third-party service providers may automatically collect and store certain information when you visit or use the Site, including information such as the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the device you use to connect to the Internet, browser type, device type, mobile device ID (UDID), screen size and resolution, Internet Service Provider (ISP), the Site you came from and exited to, operating system, user agent string, Internet connection type, links you click, searches conducted on the Site, date/time stamp, and pages visited. To obtain such information, we may use logs or applications that recognize your computer and gather information about its online activity.

Cookies And Other Technologies

We and our affiliates or our third-party service providers may place and read data stored (via session and/or persistent “cookies” or other device specific storage capabilities) on the device you are using, and use other technologies such as web beacons (including clear GIFs, tracking pixels, JavaScript, and tags), when you visit or use our Site or open a Meratas email. Cookies are small data files that are placed on your device for a variety of purposes, including to identify your device and/or your account when you return to the Site. A web beacon is an electronic file or code that usually consists of a single-pixel image or tag that is embedded on a website or in an email. We and our service providers may use web beacons and cookies to determine whether and when you receive and open our emails; these beacons and cookies may also capture information such as the type of device, operating system, email program, and web browser used to view the email or the advertisement, the IP address from which you opened the email or the advertisement, whether you click on any advertisements or links in the email, and which documents you download. These technologies enable us to gauge the effectiveness, relevance, and value of our email communications, as well as to target relevant advertising to you and to measure the impact of that advertising on your Meratas relationships.

You can generally remove, block, or disable cookies by using the settings located in your browser. If you decide to remove or not accept cookies, some features and services on our Site may not work properly and the offers we provide when you visit or use our Site may not be as relevant to you or tailored to your interests. For further information about deleting or blocking cookies, please visit: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/. Information about how to opt out of the use of cookies for certain purposes (such as interest-based advertising) is discussed below in the section titled “Third-Party Analytics and Interest-Based Advertising.”

How We Use The Information That We Collect

We and our affiliates or our third-party service providers may use the Personal Information that we collect from you or from third parties, transaction information, and Other Information that we or our third-party service providers collect from our server logs, cookies and other technologies for a variety of purposes, including to develop, offer, deliver and improve our products and services, to offer products and services of our affiliates, marketing partners, and other companies, to process your refinance applications or other transactions, to fulfill legal and regulatory requirements, and as otherwise permitted by applicable law. For example, we may use the information to:

Our Disclosure Of Your Personal And Other Information

We may share your Personal and Other Information with other parties for a variety of purposes, as described below.

Affiliates: We may disclose Personal and Other Information to Meratas affiliates for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. Meratas affiliates may contact you by e-mail or other means, where permitted by law, to make you aware of Meratas’s product and service offerings.

Service Providers and Business or Marketing Partners: We may disclose Personal and Other Information to our service providers and business partners, who use it to perform tasks on Meratas’s behalf or for joint marketing efforts. Among other things, service providers help us manage and improve the Site, provide Meratas services, send firm offers of credit and promotional materials to you, provide payment processing services, provide debt collection services, and administer your accounts. Our service providers may collect, process, and retain information about you directly on behalf of Meratas. Our service providers are prohibited from using the information we provide to them for their own purposes or for the purposes of any other entity.

Consistent With Our Financial Privacy Notice: We may also share our customer’s Personal and Other Information with affiliates and outside companies as described in our Privacy Notice.

Legal Purposes: We also may use or share your Personal or Other Information with third parties when we believe, in our sole discretion, that doing so is necessary:

Aggregated or De-Identified Information: From time to time, Meratas may share aggregated or de-identified information about users of the Site or Meratas’s products and services, such as sharing reports on the usage of the Site or Meratas’s services for regulatory reporting or marketing purposes.

Third-Party Analytics And Interest-Based Advertising

We partner with third parties to collect information to engage in analysis, auditing, research, and reporting. These third parties may set and access cookies on your computer or other device and may use web beacons (including clear GIFs, tracking pixels, JavaScript, and tags) to collect information about your activity on the Site and how you respond to our marketing emails. In particular, the Site may use Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics to help collect and analyze certain information for the purposes discussed above. You may opt out of the use of cookies by Google Analytics here.

We also partner with third parties to provide targeted advertising services that are customized based on your online activities over time and across unaffiliated websites (“Interest-Based Advertising”). These third parties may use cookies and web beacons (including clear GIFs, tracking pixels, JavaScript, and tags) to collect information about your activity on our Site, and they may combine it with information about your activity on other, unaffiliated websites, information that we have collected about you in other contexts, or demographic information. For example, third parties may use the fact that you visited the Site to target online ads for Meratas services to you on non-Meratas websites and to send targeted marketing emails to you. For information about behavioral advertising practices, including privacy and confidentiality, visit the Network Advertising Initiative website or the Digital Advertising Alliance website.

The use of online tracking mechanisms by third parties is subject to those third parties’ own privacy policies. You may remove yourself from the targeted advertising of companies within the Network Advertising Initiative by opting out here, or of companies participating in the Digital Advertising Alliance program by opting out here. Please note that the opt-out will apply only to the specific browser or device from which you opt out, and therefore you will need to opt out separately on all of your browsers and devices. If you delete or reset your cookies, change browsers, or use a different device, any opt-out cookie or tool may no longer work and you will have to opt out again.

Some browsers have a “do not track” feature that lets you tell websites that you do not want to have your online activities tracked. At this time, we do not respond to browser “do not track” signals, but you may opt out of interest–based advertising of companies within the Network Advertising Initiative and for companies participating in the Digital Advertising Alliance by visiting the opt-out pages described above.

Reviewing And Updating Your Information

Unless prohibited by law, you have the right, upon reasonable notice, to view any Personal Information collected from you through your visits to or use of our Sites, to make corrections to such information if necessary, or to request that such information be removed from our systems. You may do so by contacting us at the address indicated at the end of this Privacy Policy.

Security

In our information technology systems environment, Meratas maintains commercially reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards (including secure disposal methods) designed to protect your personal information against loss or unauthorized access, use, modification, or deletion. However, no security program is foolproof, and thus we cannot guarantee the absolute security of your personal or other information.

Children’s Privacy

The Site is not directed to children under the age of 13, and we do not intend to collect personal information from children under 13 years of age. If we learn that we have collected this information from a child under the age of 13, we will promptly take all reasonable steps to delete the data from our system except when required by statute or regulation to maintain for record keeping purposes.

Changes To This Privacy Policy

Technology and the Internet are rapidly changing. Meratas therefore is likely to make changes to the Site in the future and as a consequence will need to revise this Privacy Policy to reflect those changes. Meratas will post all such changes on the Site, with an “effective date” indicating when the changes will take effect, so you should review this page periodically.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions or comments about this policy, you are welcome to write or call us toll free at:

Consumer Privacy

Meratas

P.O. Box 113343 

Stamford, CT 06902

866-539-4580

Hours of operation: Monday – Thursday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST.

The effective date of this Online Consumer Information Privacy Policy is October 1, 2021. It replaces all prior online information privacy policies posted by Meratas on its corresponding Sites. We reserve the right to change our Online Consumer Information Privacy Policy. Any changes to our Online Consumer Information Privacy Policy will be reflected in the updated version displayed at our corresponding Site.

MERATAS PRIVACY NOTICE

WHAT DOES MERATAS DO WITH YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?

Financial companies choose how they share your personal information. Federal law gives consumers the right to limit some but not all sharing. Federal law also requires us to tell you how we collect, share, and protect your personal information. Please read this notice carefully to understand what we do.

The types of personal information we may collect and share depend on the product or service you have with us. This information can include: (i) social security number and income; (ii) account balances and payment history; and (iii) transaction or loss history and employment information.

When you are no longer our customer, we may continue to share your information as described in this notice.

All financial companies need to share customers’ personal information to run their everyday operations. In the section below, we list the reasons financial companies can share their customers’ personal information; the reasons Meratas chooses to share; and whether you can limit this sharing.

REASONS WE MIGHT SHARE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

For our everyday business purposes, such as to process your transactions, maintain your account(s), respond to court orders and legal investigations, or report to credit bureaus.

To potentially offer our products or services to you.

WHO WE ARE

Who is providing this notice? Meratas Inc., a New York corporation.

WHAT WE DO

How does Meratas protect my personal information?

To protect your personal information from unauthorized access and use, we use security measures that comply with federal law. These measures include computer safeguards and secured files and buildings.

How does Meratas collect my personal information?

We collect your personal information, for example, when you:

open an account and send or receive money

pay your bills and give us your income information

provide account information and give us your contact information

pay us by check and give us your wage statements

We also collect your personal information from other companies, credit bureaus or affiliates.

WHY CAN’T I LIMIT ALL SHARING?

Federal law gives you the right to limit only:

sharing for affiliates’ everyday business purposes — information about your credit worthiness affiliates from using your information to market to you

sharing for non affiliates to market to you

DEFINITIONS

Affiliates: Companies related by common ownership or control. They can be financial and non-financial companies.

Non-affiliates: Companies not related by common ownership or control. They can be financial and non-financial companies. Meratas does not share with non-affiliates so they can market to you.

Joint Marketing: A formal agreement between non-affiliated financial companies that together market financial products or services to you. Meratas doesn’t jointly market.

Meratas may use specific tools from Google AdWords to help market ourselves. This includes the following information:

Google AdWords features are based on Remarketing with Google Analytics and is used to advertise Meratas online. This is done by remarketing the Company to reach people who previously visited our website, and match these people with the correct message from the Company.

Third-party vendors, including Google, may show our ads on sites across the Internet.

Meratas and third-party vendors, including Google, use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookie) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) together to inform, optimize, and serve ads based on someone’s past visits to your website.

Visitors can opt out of Google’s use of cookies by visiting Google’s Ads Settings. Alternatively, opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page.

FINANCIAL INSTITUTION VERIFICATION

Meratas may use certain non-affiliate technologies, such as Plaid Technologies, Inc. (“Plaid”) to gather End User’s data from financial institutions. By using our service, you grant Meratas and Plaid the right, power and authority to act on your behalf to access and transmit your personal and financial information from the relevant financial institution. You agree to your personal and financial information being transferred, stored and processed by Plaid in accordance with the Plaid Privacy Policy.

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