Internet Privacy Policy
At Edfinancial Services, we continue to develop technological enhancements for students, families, schools and our partners. We are committed to excellence in customer service, and your privacy is important to us. This policy is effective on July 13, 2011.
TRUSTe Privacy Program
Edfinancial Services has been awarded TRUSTe's Privacy Seal signifying that this privacy policy and practices have been reviewed by TRUSTe for compliance with TRUSTe's program requirements including transparency, accountability and choice regarding the collection and use of your personal information. TRUSTe's mission, as an independent third party, is to accelerate online trust among consumers and organizations globally through its leading privacy trustmark and innovative trust solutions. If you have questions or complaints regarding our privacy policy or practices, please contact us at info@edfinancial.com. If you are not satisfied with our response you can contact TRUSTe here.
What this Privacy Policy Covers
This Privacy Statement applies to Edfinancial Services and governs data collection and usage at all Edfinancial Services sites and services such as www.Edfinancial.com.
Edfinancial Services is a servicer of student loans and provides various online services for other providers of educational funding. You may access some services provided by Edfinancial Services with pages that are co-branded through the site of one of our partner lenders. It is important to note that this privacy policy does not apply to other areas of that lender's site that are not provided by Edfinancial Services.
Some areas of our websites may provide links to non-Edfinancial Services sites. If you link to a site that is not an Edfinancial Services website, the privacy policy of that site and its terms of use of use apply to you. We encourage you to learn about the privacy policy of any third party before giving personal information to them.
Use of Personal Identifying Information
Edfinancial Services does not collect any nonpublic personal information from visitors to our sites unless you expressly provide it to us through one of our online services. Edfinancial Services does not sell, rent or lease its customer lists to third parties. If you choose to register on an Edfinancial Services website in order to utilize an online service that requires you to log in, Edfinancial Services will collect basic information such as name, email address and brief demographic information. If you choose to submit an online loan application, Edfinancial Services will collect information such as your Social Security Number, and that of your endorser or co-borrower, if applicable, date of birth, driver's license number, phone number, and references required for the completion of a student loan application. Edfinancial Services will store this information for six (6) months for purposes of research, resend requests, and to send via batch to your school.
We currently use Google Analytics to track visitors by collecting anonymous statistics with first-party cookies, small text files with a single string of anonymous text or numbers. We do not collect any personally identifiable information about website visitors using this tool. The type of information we collect includes pages visited, product, school and lender codes, IP address, the type of browser you are using, the websites you visit immediately before and immediately after you visit our websites, and other anonymous data involving your use of our websites. By supplementing our records, this information helps us learn things like what pages are most attractive to our visitors, which of our products most interest our customers, and what kinds of offers our customers like to see. We do not link an IP address with the identity of a computer user.
If you choose not to uncheck the Offers box on your registration form, you agree that Edfinancial Services or Edamerica, Inc. may periodically send educational or marketing information to the email address with which you registered. You may unsubscribe to this service at any time by following the instructions included in each email communication. You may also contact us for assistance at info@edfinancial.com or by calling 1-800-337-6884. You will be notified when your personal information is collected by any third party that is not our agent/service provider, so you can make an informed choice as to whether or not to share your information with that party.
Certain processes, such as online loan applications, will require that you provide your social security number and date of birth if you choose to continue with the online process. Once this information is provided, it will be associated by Edfinancial Services with the user account that is then logged on, and you will not need to provide it again. Thereafter, you will only need your username and password to access your account information or to complete forms in other processes. For your security, the social security number that you enter cannot be used with any other account.
Though we make every effort to preserve user privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law where in we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on our Web site.
Data Retention
We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services. If you wish to cancel your account or request that we no longer use your information to provide you services contact us at info@edfinancial.com. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.
Minimum Age Requirement
By law, Edfinancial Services cannot collect any information from persons who are not yet 13 years of age. If you are under 13 years of age, you can utilize the information provided in many areas of our site, but you are not authorized to create an account.
Updating Personal Information
You may update or modify or delete basic personal information associated with your account by using the Edfinancial Services login manager or by contacting us at info@edfinancial.com or at 1-800-337-6884.
Use of Cookies
If you choose to register with the Edfinancial Services Sites in order to utilize a service that requires you to log in, your user ID will be stored in a temporary "cookie" on your web browser. A cookie is a text file that is placed on your hard disk by a web page server to help us identify you. Cookies cannot be used to run programs or deliver viruses to your computer. The cookie that manages your login will be removed as soon as you close your browser. Other cookies that are used are for customization of content and contain no personally identifying information. Our cookies are not used to collect any nonpublic personal information. We do not link the information we store in cookies to any personally identifiable information you submit while on our site.
Website Use Information
Web servers at Edfinancial Services automatically recognize your domain name, but not your e-mail address. No nonpublic personal information is collected unless you choose to provide it to us through one of our online services. Our web server does collect information such as domain name, number of hits, pages visited and length of user session in order to compile website statistics that enable us to analyze how our websites are used. This information is then used to improve the usefulness of the sites.
Confidentiality and Security
The security of your personal information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number and/or social security number) on our registration or order forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). To learn more about SSL, visit http://info.ssl.com/article.aspx?id=10241.
In addition to the use of SSL technology, we follow industry-accepted best practices for protecting personal information, both during transmission and at rest on our systems. While no method of communication over the Internet or electronic storage is ever 100% secure, we have gone to great lengths to protect your personal information through the use of layered firewalls, intrusion detection/protection systems, file level encryption of data while at rest and encryption of data while in transit over our network. All systems provide extensive logging and automated reporting of issues enabling timely response, interdiction and corrective actions if necessary.
If you have any questions about security on our Web site, you can email us at info@edfinancial.com.
Passwords
The Edfinancial Services login manager allows you to change your password at any time.
If you forget your password, there is a link on the Edfinancial Services login manager that will enable you to enter your username or email address with which you originally registered. When you submit this information, if your information matches what Edfinancial Services has recorded for you, your username and password will be emailed to you.
Changes to this Privacy Policy
Edfinancial Services may occasionally update this Privacy Policy to reflect company and customer feedback. We encourage you to periodically review this Policy to be informed of how Edfinancial Services is protecting your information. If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If, however, we are going to use users' personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time of collection we will notify users by posting a notice on our Web site for 30 days.
Contact information
If you have any questions about this policy please contact:
Customer Privacy
Edfinancial Services
120 North Seven Oaks Drive
Knoxville, TN 37922
1-800-337-6884 or info@edfinancial.com
California Privacy
If you are resident of California, “Your Privacy Rights” allow you to receive an Information-Sharing Disclosure. This disclosure provides a list of categories of personal information shared, during the immediately preceding calendar year, with other businesses for their direct marketing purposes, and the names and addresses of other businesses with whom such information was shared. You may request this disclosure by contacting us at the information provided above.
We will respond to requests made to the designated contact point and provide the Information-Sharing Disclosure within 30 days of receipt of request.
If your request is made to an address, other than the one provided in this policy, the Information-Sharing Disclosure will be responded to in a “reasonable time period,” no later than 150 days from receipt of the request.
For more information, visit the California Privacy homepage.