iATN - Privacy Policy

Summary of our Policy

iATN has always considered the protection of your private personal information to be of the utmost importance. This privacy policy will detail exactly what our policy is for keeping your information private, but a summary of our policy is:

We do not sell or rent your personal information to third parties.
We do not share your personal information with advertisers or sponsors.
We have zero tolerance for unsolicited commercial email (a.k.a. "spam"). For information on the email iATN sends, please see this page.
We encrypt credit card information and otherwise secure your personal data.
We will display the name, company name, position, and general location (city, state, country, zipcode) of registered members in our public member directory, and may also in other areas of our site, including areas showing who is "online" on our network, and in any Interactive Content created by said member.
Any Interactive Content posted to or sent through the network (e.g. TechMail, forum posts, etc.), is not private and is not covered by this privacy policy.
You may cancel your membership at any time if you do not wish your information to be listed in our public member directory.

By accessing iATN, you are accepting the practices described in this privacy policy.

What Personal Information Does iATN Gather?

The information we receive from members helps us personalize and continually improve the network. Here are the types of information we gather:

Information You Give Us: We receive and store any information you enter on our web site or give to us in any other way. Some of the most common situations in which this occurs include: registering to join iATN, upgrading your account to sponsorship status, updating your account settings, submitting a message to the network (including the forums, TechMail help requests, file library, chat rooms, etc.), replying to a TechMail help request sent by another member, purchasing something from the iATN Store, corresponding with iATN staff, and more.

You can choose not to provide certain information, but then you might not be able to take advantage of many of our features. We use the information that you provide for such purposes as responding to your requests, customizing future features for you, improving and securing our site, and communicating with our members.

Any correspondence with iATN staff (by email, phone, FAX, postal mail, or in person) is not guaranteed to be kept private unless you explicitly request that it be, due to the fact that we may have to share some or all of the information with others to respond adequately to comments, questions, and concerns.
Interactive Content: We receive and store any information entered on the "interactive" portions of our network. We do not consider this information to be private, and as such, this privacy policy does not govern that content. Examples of such content include (but are not limited to): forum posts, chat room discussions, TechMail, comments on other members' content, etc.

In addition, please note that the following personal information may be permanently displayed with any Interactive Content you submit to iATN: name, company name, position, city, state, country, and zipcode.

Since we cannot prevent you from entering other personal information with your Interactive Content, we cannot protect that private information in that case, and it is not governed by this privacy policy.

For example, if a member posts a message to our forums, and they include their email address or phone number in the body of the message, we will not be able to protect that private personal information.

Interactive Content on iATN is also regulated by our Terms of Use.
Replies to TechMail: Whenever you respond to another member's TechMail help request via email, your response is sent through our email servers, to be filtered for attachments, known viruses, vacation notices or auto-replies, and "spam" (unsolicited commercial email), and is then stored in our database. These replies follow the same guidelines as those for Interactive Content, and are likewise regulated by our Terms of Use.
Automatic Information: We receive and store certain types of information whenever you interact with us, and each access of our web site is recorded in logs which we can use for statistical and security analysis. Each time you access our web site, your browser sends your unique IP address, your browser name/version, your operating system version, any "cookies" stored for iatn.net (more on cookies below), the current resource requested, and usually the last page you visited, called the "referrer link."
Other Information: Specific uses of personal information that vary from this privacy policy, if any, may be found throughout our network. If those uses are different than what has been disclosed here, you will be notified beforehand as to the differences which will govern those transactions.

There may be situations where iATN collects data through a survey, web form, or similar process when the page does not link to this privacy policy. In those cases, unless you are informed otherwise, you should assume that iATN treats all information from those pages as it treats its other valuable business records.
Information from Third-Parties: We do not actively collect personal information from any outside sources. However, your personal information may be supplied to us by a third-party in the event of a complaint or legal matter. In those cases, this personal information is not governed by this privacy policy.
Through Network Maintenance: During the course of testing and updates to the software on iATN, certain staff members may see information that you submit in a context that seems private, such as sending email to another member on our network, through our web site. We try to avoid these circumstances, but live testing is often required while improving or repairing the network.

More Information on Cookies

Cookies are simply pieces of information stored in your browser, specific to the site that sends them to your browser. They are very useful for making iATN easy to use, and they are essential to our "automatic login" feature, which allows members to access the secured areas of our site without having to manually login each time. (An optional feature available to all members.)
No other site can access iATN's cookies, and we cannot access other site's cookies. All cookies are stored on your computer hard drive, except for "temporary cookies," which exist only in memory while your browser is open. (In general, we only use permanent cookies.)
We use cookies to store certain preferences you have selected for viewing our site, your username, and your encrypted password. As we develop the site further, we may increase the number of cookies in use. We will NEVER store critical information in cookies, such as credit card numbers, due to security concerns.
There are many programs available to you that can block all cookies sent to your browser. Blocking iATN cookies may result in making iATN harder to enjoy (or eliminate certain features completely). We recommend that you leave cookies turned on. However...
You may tell your browser to ignore "3rd-party cookies" or cookies that are not sent "by the originating server," with no ill effect on iATN. Those types of cookies are normally used by advertising sites to track your movements. We do NOT use those types of cookies.

Does iATN Share the Information It Receives?

Information about our members is an important part of our business, and we take great pains not to reveal the following private personal information to others: email address, username, password, phone number, street address (not including city, state, country, zipcode), and credit card information. Only authorized iATN staff, agents, and credit card processors have access to private member information, and even then only in a tightly controlled manner.

Agents of iATN: From time to time we may need to use third party agencies to carry out our normal business operations, such as sending email, delivering content over the internet, or providing services to you. When we do this, we will ensure these agencies agree to adhere to our privacy policy when working with our data.
Credit Card Processing: If you purchase something from the iATN Store, or upgrade your iATN account to sponsoring member status, your name, billing & shipping addresses, purchase information, and credit card information is necessarily shared with our credit card processing companies to complete the transaction. We are currently using Authorize.Net and VeriSign for credit card processing services. All communication between our servers and theirs is encrypted with SSL 128-bit security to protect your information while in transit.
Aggregate and Anonymous Information: iATN may share aggregate and/or anonymous statistics and related information with third parties. At no time will any personally-identifiable information be included. Most of this information will be in the form of network growth, usage statistics and demographics of registered members.
Corporate Sponsors: iATN has several corporate sponsors which subsidize the network and provide great support to our members. At no time have we ever shared your personal information with these companies, nor will we in the future without your express consent.
Member Sponsor Webpages: Those members that upgrade their account to sponsorship status receive the ability to maintain a webpage on iATN that can be used to supply as much or as little information about themselves as they wish. Many members choose to reveal their postal address, phone number, FAX number, email address, and more. iATN does not control what personal information sponsoring members choose to display on their pages, and each sponsor is able to update their webpage at any time to add or remove such information.
Member Directory / Signature: Members of iATN agree (upon registration) to allow us to display their full name, company name, position, city, state, and country in our member directory. This information is thus freely available to anyone browsing the iATN web site, and is not protected by iATN. If they do not wish to have this information displayed, they can cancel their iATN account, and their listing in the directory will be removed within one week.

In addition, this same personal information is displayed, to some extent, with all Interactive Content created on iATN (any messages posted to the forums, TechMail help request system, chat rooms on iATN, etc.). We feel that requiring this minimum amount of personal information on your content on the network is necessary to add legitimacy to iATN. You may choose not to submit Interactive Content on iATN if you do not wish to reveal this personal information in this instance.
Business Transfers: In the unlikely event that iATN (or substantially all of its assets) are acquired, member information will most likely be one of the transferred assets. However, before such a transfer takes place, we would require that the acquiring company abide by this privacy policy when dealing with member information, and/or we will give members the opportunity to "opt out," at which point their information would NOT be transferred.
Third-Party Web Sites: iATN does not control the privacy practices of its advertisers, sponsors, and other third-party sites that it promotes or links to. If you click through a banner ad or link and submit your information to a third-party, you will be subject to their privacy policies.
Private Email from Members: As explained in this policy, iATN does not reveal your email address to other members (although you may have decided to release that information in Interactive Content submitted on our network, which we cannot control). However, we DO make it possible for other members to contact you on iATN through the use of a form on our website. Your email address is never revealed to the member in this case. They would see only your non-private personal information, such as your name, company name, position, and general location (city, state, country, zipcode). We may also allow the general public to send private email to members in the same fashion.
Breach of Terms of Use, Guidelines, Etc.: In the event that a registered member breaches our Terms of Use, our guidelines, the member agreement, or the laws governing iATN and its members, we reserve the right to use any information we have obtained from said member -- personal, or otherwise -- to (among other things) protect the property, safety, and rights of iATN. Under these circumstances, said information is not governed by this privacy policy.
With Your Consent: Other than as set out above, you will receive notice in the unlikely event that information about you might go to third parties, and you will have an opportunity to choose not to share the information.
Unforeseen Circumstances: Due to the existing regulatory environment, 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. For example: third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications; authorities may supply search warrants for our premises; a program error, hardware glitch, network problem, or other technical issue may inadvertantly reveal personal information; we may need to disclose personal information to enforce our Terms of Use, or to protect the property, safety, and rights of iATN. Therefore, although we constantly strive to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personally identifiable information or private communications will always remain private.

How Secure Is Information About Me?

We work to protect the security of your credit card information during transmission by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) software, usually with the largest key-lengths available.
We display only the last four digits of your credit card numbers when confirming the processing of your credit card information. Of course, we securely transmit the entire credit card number (using SSL) to the appropriate credit card company during card processing.
Any credit card numbers stored in our computer database are protected using very strong encryption, of which only authorized staff members have key knowledge. We will also protect physical access to the machine(s) on which the secured database resides, and network access to the machine(s) will be severely prohibited or denied entirely.
We do not disclose member passwords to any party that cannot validate their identity, except to those who can receive email at the same address used to create the membership. (Thus, you must maintain the security of your personal email account if you wish to keep your iATN account secure.)

What Information Can I Access?

We provide an Account Settings page where registered members can view their personal information stored on iATN. Most of this information can be updated by members from that same location. (Note that when you update information, we usually keep a copy of the prior version for our records.) If there is any personal information listed in that area which you cannot change directly, such as your name, please contact iATN Support ().

What Choices Do I Have?

You can always choose not to provide information to us, although this may result in the inability to use certain or all parts of iATN, including the entire members-only area of our network.
You can add or update certain information in the Account Settings area of our site. When you update information, we usually keep a copy of the prior version for our records.
If you do not wish to receive email from iATN, you must cancel your account, also available near the bottom of the Account Settings page. For information on the email iATN sends, please see this page.
Your browser can be configured as to how it receives, handles, and stores "cookies" sent by our site. The degree to which you can manipulate these settings depends on your web browser's capabilities. Restricting the cookies accepted from iATN by your browser may have a negative impact on your ability to use iATN.
Many third-party programs exist to allow you to control and limit the information which flows between your computer and the internet. Installation of some of these programs may have a negative impact on your ability to use iATN.

What Happens When I Cancel My iATN Account?

If you cancel your iATN membership account, you will no longer receive email from us, and your name, company, position, and location will no longer be listed in our member directory. (Please allow up to one week for this to be completed.)

Your personal information will remain in our database, though your account will be flagged as "cancelled," and only iATN staff will have access to this information (except where noted above in regards to your name, company name, position, and general location appearing with all Interactive Content). This information will still be subject to this privacy policy, regardless of account status.

We keep this information to prevent duplicate accounts from being created, to prevent fraudulent use of iATN, and to allow people to re-activate their accounts in the future more easily. (Registration forms would not have to be completed again.)

PLEASE NOTE: Any Interactive Content you previously submitted to iATN will still be displayed and used by iATN, and cannot be removed from the network. For more information on our Interactive Content policies, please consult our Terms of Use.

Does iATN Collect Information From Children?

iATN does not currently offer any services to children, and therefore does not knowingly accept membership or other information from those under 18 years of age.

Terms of Use, Notices, and Revisions

If you choose to visit iATN, your visit and any dispute over privacy is subject to this policy and our Terms of Use, including limitations on damages, arbitration of disputes, and application of the law of the state of California. If you have any concern about privacy at iATN, please email us at .

This policy and the Terms of Use will most likely change in the future, and use of information that we gather now is subject to the privacy policy in effect at the time of our use of said information. You should check our web site frequently to see recent changes. We provide the current version number and last date of change for help identifying updated policies.

Related Practices and Information

Contact Information

iATN
P.O. Box 1599
Brea, California, USA 92822

Phone: (714) 257-1335
Email:

Privacy Policy - History

Revision 1.0.5 (May 21, 2007) Clarified "Agents of iATN" section.
Revision 1.0.4 (July 22, 2006) Updated our mailing address.
Revision 1.0.3 (March 8, 2004) Removed our FAX number from the contact information to avoid FAX harvesting by spammers. (Please email if you need our FAX number.)
Revision 1.0.2 (December 29, 2003) We added this revision history section to track changes to our privacy policy. We added links to our page discussing the email we send to this privacy policy.

International Automotive Technicians' Network