privacy policy

Last Updated: 12 December 2023



The policy set forth below is provided only in English to avoid any misinterpretations caused by a language translation. If necessary, seek the proper advice, or do not use this site.

In this privacy policy (“Policy”), we describe our collection of your information, including personal information, that we collect about you whether through our website, www.vulcca.com (our “Site”), or offline (e.g., if you contact us, through your real estate agent, or interact with our social media pages), and the services available through our Site and offline (collectively, our “Services”).

For California residents, please see the section at the end of this Notice entitled Additional Information for California Residents (the “California Section”), which discusses the categories and specific pieces of personal information that we collect from California residents, how we use that information, and California residents’ rights with respect to the personal information we collect. If any other section in this Privacy Policy can be read to conflict with the California Section, then the California Section controls with respect to California residents.

Any dispute over privacy is subject to this Policy including its applicable limitations on damages and the resolution of disputes.


Scope

This Policy applies to all visitors to our Site, as well as any information that we obtain about persons offline, including buyers/sellers/renters/owners. The descriptions below regarding our collection, use, and disclosure of your information apply equally regardless of our relationship with you unless noted otherwise.



The Information We Collect About You

We collect information directly from you, automatically as you use our website, and from other sources. The type of information that we collect about you varies based on your relationship with us (e.g., whether you are a prospective buyer or seller of real estate, real estate agent, or vendor) and how you interact with us (e.g., through our Site or offline). Specifically, we collect this information as follows:

 

Information that We Collect Directly From You

We collect information from users of our Services (including buyers, sellers, owners, renters, and other persons) when you take the following actions:

  • Create an Account: Prospective buyers, sellers, and other interested persons may use our Services without creating an account. Certain features of our Services (such as saving properties, saving searches, and real-time listing alerts) require account creation. When you create an account, we collect your name, email address, and any other information that you choose to provide (such as whether you are looking to buy or sell a home, geographic preference, and price range). Once you create an account, you can keep track of your favorite homes.
  • Purchase History: We maintain a record of whether you purchase, rent, or sell a property using our services.
  • Participate in a Survey: If you choose to provide feedback, such as participating in a survey, we will collect this information from you, which may include your contact information and your feedback.
  • Contact Us: If you contact us, whether online or by other means, we will record information about the reason for your inquiry.
  • Sign Up for our Newsletter: We collect your name and email address if you request our newsletter.

In addition, if you are a vendor (such as a real estate photographer), we collect your contact information and specialty. You also may create an account with us as described above.


Information We Collect About You From Other Sources

  • Your Friends and Real Estate Agent: We may obtain information about you from your friends and/or real estate agent so that you can collaborate with one another about properties of interest.
  • Social Media: If you post information on our social media pages, we may collect the information that you post. We do not typically associate your social media information with the personal information we collect about you.
  • Internet Service Providers, Operating Systems, Analytics Providers: As described below, we collect data automatically through your use of our Site and our Services. This information may come from internet service providers, operating systems, and analytics providers that provide services on our behalf.


Information We Collect Automatically

We automatically collect information about you when you use our Services (usage information). The type of information that we collect varies depending on the settings of your web browser or device, but it may include: the pages you view on our Site; the date and time you access our Site; how long you use our Services; the type of web browser you are using (for example, Firefox or Chrome); the type of device you are using (for example, whether you are using a mobile device); your Internet Protocol address; and device IDs (including device advertising identifiers). With your permission, we will collect your device’s location information to help you identify available properties near your location; you may disable this feature through your device’s settings. Our service providers also may track your behavior through links that you click on our Site. See the section below titled “Cookies and Tracking” for more information. We may associate this information with the personal information that we collect about you, such as whether and when you logged into your account.

We collect this information from Internet Service Providers, Operating Systems, and Analytics Providers: as stated above, we collect data automatically through your use of our Services.



Our Use of Your Information

We use your information, including personal information, for a variety of business and commercial purposes:

  • Transactional Purposes: to establish and maintain your account, to provide our services to you, and for other transactional purposes.
  • Customer Service/Communications: to provide you, upon request, with personalized search results; for technical support to answer your inquiries.
  • Marketing/Advertising: for marketing purposes, including to provide you with information about properties and services that may be of interest to you. Our marketing communications with you may include communications via postal mail and email. We, and our service providers, also use your information to determine the success of our advertising campaigns, regardless of the marketing and advertising channel.
  • Administration: for administrative purposes, including to manage our inventory; to help us better understand how our persons access and use our Services, including the pages viewed, or other Site activity; to maintain security and operability of our Site (including for debugging purposes); to provide reports to prospective partners, service providers, regulators, and others; to implement and maintain security, anti-piracy, fraud prevention, and other services designed to protect you and us; to enforce this Policy.
  • Research and Development/Analytical Purposes: for research and development purposes, including to analyze trends, improve our Services, products, and customer experience; to understand what parts of our Site are most popular or to improve upon our Services; to understand our customer demographics; and for other research and analytical purposes.
  • Legal Compliance: to comply with applicable legal or regulatory obligations, including to respond to a subpoena or court order; to cooperate with law enforcement or other governmental investigations; and as part of legal proceedings.
  • Protection of us and others: where we believe it is necessary to protect us and others, including, without limitation to detect, prevent, and respond to fraud, security incidents, or other issues where we believe it is appropriate to protect us and others.
  • Additional Note Regarding Aggregated and De-Identified Data: we may use data in aggregated and de-identified form for research, analytics, marketing, and any other purposes.



Sharing of Information

We may share your information, including personal information, with the following entities:

  • For all persons: we may share your information with the following persons/entities and in the following situations:
    • Corporate Relatives. We may share your information with any current or future parent company, affiliate, subsidiary or division.
    • Vendors. We may share your information with vendors to perform a service on your behalf, such as a photographer or stager for a property that you own or are listing.
    • Service Providers. We share your information with our service providers or others who perform functions on our behalf. For example, we share your information with service providers who host our Site; coordinate mailings; analyze aggregate information about our customers; assist us in detecting and deterring fraud, security incidents, or other unlawful activity; and for other business purposes as described above in how we use your information. We also permit service providers to collect information about you online through cookies and other tracking tools; please see the Cookies and Tracking and Analytics Providers sections below.
    • Analytics Providers/Advertisers. As set forth above, we share information with analytics providers to assist us in implementing and evaluating relevant advertising. We also may disclose certain information (such as your email address) to Facebook Custom Audience, which may use it to target advertising to you. See Interest-Based Advertising below.
  • Additional Disclosures Related to Vendor Information: we may share your information with home owners and real estate agents who are seeking a vendor that provides your services.
  • Additional Disclosures Related to buyers, sellers, owners, or renters: we may share your information with your real estate agent and other friends/collaborators at your direction. Specifically, you have the option of sharing select searches and properties with your chosen real estate agent or friends.

We may also share your information in the following ways:

  • Business Transfers. We may share your information with another entity if we or any of our current or future corporate relatives are acquired by or merged with another legal entity, if any of our assets or the assets of one of our corporate relatives are sold or transferred to another legal entity, as part of a bankruptcy proceeding, or as part of a sale of a business or a similar transfer of assets.
  • In Response to Legal Process. We share your information when we believe it is appropriate to comply with the law or a regulatory requirement; to comply with governmental, administrative, or judicial process or other similar requirement or order, such as a subpoena or court order; to cooperate with law enforcement or other governmental investigations (without necessarily requiring the law enforcement or government agency requesting the information to formally serve us with a subpoena); or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved. We also reserve the right to report to appropriate law enforcement or governmental agencies any activities that we believe are in violation of applicable laws, rules, or regulations without providing notice.
  • To Protect Us and Others. We share your information where we believe it is necessary to prevent or investigate a possible crime, such as fraud or identity theft; to enforce a contract; to protect the legal rights, Services, your safety, or the safety of any other person or entity; to enforce this Policy; and to monitor and remediate security issues.
  • Aggregate and De-Identified Information. We may disclose aggregate and de-identified information about our customers for marketing, advertising, research, or other purposes.



Opting-Out of Marketing Emails

You may opt out of marketing messages by following the instructions in the email. Please allow up to ten (10) days for us to process your request. Please note that opting out of email messages from us will not opt you out of messages from real estate agents with whom you interact, which are separate businesses from us. If you opt-out of marketing communications, we still may send you transactional messages related to your use of our Services.



Security

We take commercially reasonable measures designed to safeguard your data. Please note, however, that no measure is 100% perfect, and we recommend that you take measures to protect your data, such as not using the same password for multiple accounts, creating unique passwords, and safeguarding your own information. We cannot ensure or warrant the ultimate security of any information you transmit.



Cookies and Tracking

We and our service providers use cookies and other mechanisms to track information about your use of our Services.

  • Cookies. We or our service providers may use cookies to track visitor activity throughout our Services. A cookie is a text file that a website transfers to your device for record-keeping purposes. We or our service providers may use cookies to track user activities on our Site, such as the web pages you view and time you spend on our services. The help section on most browsers will tell you how to prevent your computer from accepting new cookies, how to have the browser notify you when you receive a new cookie, or how to disable cookies altogether. Visitors to our Site who disable cookies may not be able to browse certain areas of the services. When you register at the Site, we may use a cookie to store a unique, random session ID. We may use this ID to identify you in our database and to track information while you are on our Site.
  • Clear GIFs, Pixel Tags and Other Technologies. Clear GIFs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in functionality to cookies, which are embedded invisibly on web pages. We or our service providers may use clear GIFs (also known as web beacons, web bugs, pixel tags, or action tags, among other names), in connection with our services to perform functions like tracking the activities of visitors to our services, helping us manage content, and compiling statistics about use of our Services. We or our service providers may also use clear GIFs in emails to help us track email response rates, identify when our emails are viewed, and track whether our emails are forwarded.
  • Embedded Scripts. We may use embedded scripts, which is code designed to collect information about how visitors interact with a website, such as the website that linked you to our Site.
  • Analytics. We use service providers, such as Google Analytics, to evaluate the use of our Services. We use these tools to help us improve our services, performance, and user experiences. These entities may use cookies and other tracking technologies, such as web beacons or local storage objects (LSOs), to perform their services. To learn more about Google’s privacy practices, please review the Google Privacy Policy at https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/. You can also download the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on to prevent your data from being used by Google Analytics at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
  • Do Not Track. Our Services do not respond to Do Not Track signals. You may disable certain tracking as discussed in this section (e.g., by disabling cookies).



Interest-Based Advertising

We also use Facebook advertising, including Facebook Custom Audience. As set forth above and in the Cookies and Tracking section below, we may disclose certain information (such as your email address) to Facebook Custom Audiences (for more information on Facebook Custom Audience, go to the Facebook ad preferences page)—so that we can better target ads and content to you and others with similar interests on third parties’ websites or media (“Custom Audiences”).

In addition to Facebook, we use network advertisers to serve advertisements on unaffiliated websites and other media (e.g., social networking platforms). This enables us and these network advertisers to target advertisements to you for products and services in which you might be interested. Ad network providers, advertisers, sponsors and/or traffic measurement services may use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (including clear GIFs), Flash LSOs and other tracking technologies to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content to you. These cookies and other technologies are governed by each entity’s specific privacy policy, not this one. We may provide these parties with information, including personal information, about you to assist us with our advertising campaigns.

You may opt out of many ad networks. For example, you may go to the Digital Advertising Alliance (“DAA”) Consumer Choice Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having information used by DAA companies. You may also go to the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”) Consumer Opt-Out Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having information used by NAI members.



Children’s Privacy

Our Services are not designed for children under the age of 13. If we receive actual knowledge that we have received personal information from persons under the age of 13, we will delete the information from our database.



Future changes

We may update this Policy from time to time. It is your responsibility to check this Policy periodically for changes.



Contact Information

Please contact us at privacy@vulcca.com if you have questions about this Policy.



Additional Information for California Residents

The policy set forth below is provided only in English to avoid any misinterpretations caused by a language translation. If necessary, seek the proper advice, or do not use this site.

In this section, we provide additional information to California residents about how we handle their personal information, as required under California privacy laws including the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”). This section does not address or apply to our handling of publicly available information lawfully made available by state or federal government records or other personal information that is exempt under the CCPA.



Categories of Personal Information Under the CCPA

In this section we describe, generally, how we have collected and disclosed personal information about consumers in the prior twelve (12) months (from the Last Updated date above). Please note that this section applies to persons other than our real estate agents and vendors, except to the extent required by the CCPA.

 

Categories of Personal Information Collected and Disclosed


The list below identifies the categories of personal information (as defined by the CCPA) we have collected about consumers, as well as how we have disclosed such information for a business or commercial purpose. For more information about the business and commercial purposes for which we collect, use and disclose personal information, please see the sections above:The Information We Collect About You and Our Use of Your Information.

  • Identifiers
    • Includes direct identifiers, such as name, alias user ID, username, account number or unique personal identifier; email address, phone number, address and other contact information; IP address and other online identifiers.
    • We may disclose this information to service providers, advisors and agents, government entities and law enforcement, affiliates and subsidiaries, data analytics providers, social networks, internet service providers, operating systems and platforms, our franchisees (at your direction), real estate agents (at your direction), and vendors (at your direction).
  • Commercial Information
    • Includes records of personal property, homes purchased or for rent, your rental and home purchase history.
    • We may disclose this information to service providers, advisors and agents, government entities and law enforcement, affiliates and subsidiaries, data analytics providers, internet service providers, operating systems and platforms.
  • Usage Data
    • Includes browsing history, clickstream data, search history, access logs and other usage data and information regarding an individual’s interaction with our website and other services, and our marketing emails and online ads.
    • We may disclose this information to service providers, advisors and agents, government entities and law enforcement, affiliates and subsidiaries, data analytics providers, social networks, internet service providers, operating systems and platforms.
  • Geolocation Data
    • Includes precise location information about a particular individual or device.
    • We may disclose this information to service providers, advisors and agents, government entities and law enforcement, affiliates and subsidiaries, data analytics providers, social networks, internet service providers, operating systems and platforms
  • Inferences
    • Includes inferences drawn from other personal information that we collect to create a profile reflecting an individual’s preferences, characteristics, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities or aptitudes. For example, we may analyze personal information in order to identify the offers and information that may be most relevant to customers, so that we can better reach them with relevant offers and ads.
    • We may dicsclose this information to service providers, advisors and agents, government entities and law enforcement, our affiliates and subsidiaries, advertising networks, data analytics providers, social networks, internet service providers, operating systems and platforms


Do We “Sell” Personal Information?

Under the CCPA, a “sale” includes disclosing or making available personal information to a third-party in exchange for monetary compensation or other benefits or value. Although we do not disclose personal information to third parties in exchange for monetary compensation, we may disclose or make available certain categories of personal information to third parties in order to receive certain benefits or services, such as when we make browsing information available to third party ad companies (through third party tags on our Site) in order to improve and measure our ad campaigns and reach users with more relevant ads and content. As defined by the CCPA, we may “sell” certain categories of personal information as follows:

  • Usage Data and Identifiers to advertising networks and data analytics providers
  • Customer Records to advertising networks and data analytics providers
  • Name, Contact Information and Other Identifiers to marketing partners who may contact you about products and services that may be of interest to you.

Please note that we may share your information with our franchisees at your direction in order to respond to your requests. As described above, if you express interest in a property listed by one of our franchisees or are looking for property in a location serviced by a franchisee, we will share your information with the respective franchisee in order to respond to your request or inquiry. Please also note that if we are engaged in a corporate transaction, we may disclose your information as part of that transaction. The CCPA does not consider these disclosures to be a sale.

Sources of Personal Information

As further described in the discussion about the Information We Collect About You, we may collect personal information from the following sources: directly from you; data analytics providers; social networks; internet service providers; operating systems and platforms; your friends; your real estate agent; and government entities.



California Residents’ Rights


CCPA Rights

In general, California residents have the following rights with respect to their personal information:

  • Do-not-sell (opt-out): to opt-out of our sale of their personal information. We do not sell personal information about California consumers who we know are younger than sixteen (16) years old. California residents may opt out of sales of their personal information by us, by submitting a request at https://www.requesteasy.com/5dfe-0156.
  • Right of deletion: to request deletion of their personal information that we have collected about them and to have such personal information deleted (without charge), subject to certain exceptions.
  • Right to know: with respect to the personal information we have collected about them in the prior twelve (12) months, to require that we disclose the following to them (up to twice per year and subject to certain exemptions):
    • categories of personal information collected;
    • categories of sources of personal information;
    • categories of personal information about them we have disclosed for a business purpose or sold;
    • categories of third parties to whom we have sold or disclosed for a business purpose their personal information;
    • the business or commercial purposes for collecting or selling their personal information; and
    • a copy of the specific pieces of personal information we have collected about them.
  • Right to non-discrimination: the right not to be subject to discriminatory treatment for exercising their rights under the CCPA.


Submitting CCPA Requests

California residents may submit CCPA requests [to opt out of sales, requests to know (access) and requests to delete their personal information] through one of the following methods:

In addition, California residents may opt of “sales” of their personal information by us at https://www.requesteasy.com/5dfe-0156.

When you submit a request to know or a request to delete, we will take steps to verify your request by matching the information provided by you with the information we have in our records. You must complete all required fields on our webform (or otherwise provide us with this information via the above toll-free number/webform to verify your request). In some cases, we may request additional information to verify your request or where necessary to process your request. If we are unable to adequately verify a request, we will notify the requestor.

Agents

Authorized agents may initiate a request on behalf of another individual by contacting us at privacy@vulcca.com; authorized agents will be required to provide proof of their authorization, and we may also require that the relevant consumer directly verify their identity and the authority of the authorized agent.

Financial Incentives

We may make available certain programs or offerings that are considered “financial incentives” under the CCPA. We do not currently offer any financial incentives.


For more information about our privacy practices, you may contact us as set forth in the Contact Information section above.