Although the Site uses industry standard practices to protect your personal information, due to technical limitations, 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 information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances (further details of which are set out below in the “Legal Requests” section), or third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. Therefore, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we cannot and do not guarantee, and you should not expect, that your personal information or private communications will always remain private.

As a matter of policy, we do not sell or rent any personal information about you to any third party. However, the following describes some of the ways that your personal information may be disclosed, and by agreeing to the User Agreement and Privacy Policy you expressly agree that your personal information may be disclosed by the Site in the following ways:

Partners. We aggregate (gather up data across all user accounts) personal information and disclose such information in a non-personally identifiable manner to partners and other third parties for 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, password, credit card number, and bank account number, are never disclosed to advertisers.

Community. Throughout the Site, you are identified by your full name. If you select your email address as your full name you will disclose your email address to other users and third parties. As a result, other users and third parties might send you unsolicited email and be able to personally identify all of your activities on the Site. Even if your full name is not your email address, your full name can be used to identify you and your activities throughout the Site. Other people can see the projects that you have supported in the past, associated comments, your postings on the Site, and so on. We also provide a number of ways to allow other users to and more out about you and your Site activities, such as our feature that allows users to quickly see all of the projects you have created and supported at the time. If you are involved in a transaction, we allow other users to view your full name, email address and obtain your contact information.

External Service Providers. There are a number of services offered by external service providers that help you use our Site (e.g., co-branded sites, listing agents, authentication, mediation). If you choose to use these optional services, disclose personal information to the external service providers, and/or grant them permission to collect personal information about you, then their use of your personal information is governed by their privacy policy. We may, for your convenience, provide some of your personal information to the external service provider offering such services. However, before we disclose your personal information to an external service provider, you will have the opportunity to see what data is about to be sent and have the ability to approve the disclosure. To prevent our disclosure of your personal information to an external service provider, you can decline such disclosures 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.

Internal Service Providers. We may use internal service providers to facilitate our services (e.g., search, discussion boards, surveys) and therefore we may provide some of your personal information directly to them. In some instances, the internal service provider may collect information directly from you (such as the situation where we ask an internal service provider to conduct a survey for us). In these cases, you will be notified of the involvement of the internal service provider, and all information disclosures you make will be strictly optional. In all cases, the information we supply the internal service providers is restricted by confidentiality agreements. If you provide additional information to an internal service provider directly, then their use of your information is governed by their applicable privacy policy. Other Corporate Entities. We share much of our data, including personal information about you, with companies, joint ventures and partners that are committed to serving your online trading needs and related services, as allowed by applicable law. To the extent that these entities have access to your information, they will treat it at least as protectively as they treat information they obtain from their other users.

Our partners and joint ventures follow privacy practices no less protective of all users than our practices described in this Privacy Policy, to the extent allowed by applicable law. It is possible that the platform service provider VCEX, subsidiaries, its joint ventures, or any combination of such, could merge with or be acquired by another business entity. Should such a combination occur, you should expect that VCEX would.