Your privacy is very important to us. You must read and agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy before registering on the Shoppingtown.info site. As part of our normal operation we collect, use and, in some cases, disclose information about you to third parties as detailed in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy also governs your use of the information we provide to you. By accepting this Privacy Policy and the User Agreement, you expressly consent to our use and disclosure of your personal information in the manner prescribed in this Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and subject to the shoppingtown.info Terms and Conditions.

1. An Important Note About Children.

Children (those under 18 years of age) are not permitted to use our services without supervision, nor submit any personal information on our site. If you are under the age of 18 years, you may only use use our services in conjunction with and under the supervision of a parent or guardian who is over 18 years of age.

2. Information We Collect

Shoppingtown.info collects personal information when you register and/or use our site so that it can be used to provide services and features that more likely satisfy and meet your needs, to customise our services, and to make the shopping experience on our site safer and easier. We only collect personal information about you that we consider necessary for this purpose.

To use our services, you are required to register with us and provide information such as a username, your title, your name, address, telephone, email address, mobile and fax. We also collect your business information when you open a seller account; such as business name, location, contact name, an image used for contact, contact information, ACN and ABN. Under some circumstances we may require some additional necessary financial information, such as, but not limited to, registering to sell items on our Site. We use your financial and credit card information to verify your name, address, and other contact information, as well as to bill you for your use of our services.

We also retain certain information from the regular usage of the shoppingtown.info site. The following information may be collected: Your buying and selling activities, your IP address, comments about you on your profile page, messages you post or reply to, messages you send through shoppingtown.info to other members and any correspondence you send to us.

We automatically track certain information about you based upon your behaviour on our Site. We use this information to do internal research on our users' demographics, interests, and behaviour to better understand and serve you and our community. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether or not this URL is on our Site), which URL you next visit (whether or not this URL is on our Site), what browser you are using, and your IP address. Some of this information is also necessary to keep functions such as our affiliate program running, and to continually improve our services.

If you establish a credit account with us to pay the fees we charge, we collect some additional necessary information, including your billing address and tracking information from cheques or money orders.

If you choose to leave feedback for other users, or ask or answer a Question via our site, we must collect and store this information disclosed to us in order to achieve this objective.

If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails, or if another user or third party sends us correspondence regarding your activity on the Site, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.

Additional personal information is required and collected if you elect to create a seller account.

We do not collect "sensitive information" (This definition extends to racial, political, religious, philosophical, trade union, sexual preference, criminal record and health and genetic information concerning an individual)

3. Use of your information

We use your personal information (including but not limited to the information in the file we maintain about you, and other information we obtain from your current and past activities on the Site) to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, help ensure safe trading on our Site, and enforce our User Agreement. At times, we may look across multiple users to identify problems or resolve disputes. In particular, we may examine your information to identify users using multiple user name or aliases. We may also share your information with our parent and affiliated companies and joint ventures to help coordinate the services we provide to you, enforce our terms and conditions, prevent fraud, and promote trust and safety. If you choose to list an item for sale on Shoppingtown.info or open a credit account, we use your address and billing information to bill you and provide associated support.

You agree that we may use personal information about you to improve our marketing and promotional efforts, to analyse site usage, to improve our content and product offerings and customise our site's content, layout, and services. This allows us to better tailor our site to meet your needs, so as to provide you with a smooth, efficient, safer and customised experience while using our services. You expressly agree, until you notify us otherwise, to us contacting you by telephone to offer you promotions or information on behalf of us.

You agree that shoppingtown.info will send you emails throughout the selling process, as well as other emails you elect to receive, in addition to customary business communications, including but not limited to payment confirmations. Your contact information is also used to contact you when necessary. In addition, shoppingtown.info may send news letters and promotional emails to members periodically. Such emails will contain clear and obvious instructions for how the member can remove himself or herself from that mailing list. Shoppingtown.info will remove any member from our promotional mailing list upon the member's request.

4. Our Disclosure of Your Information

Although shoppingtown.info 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 despite of all measures taken to prevent this. Therefore, 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, by agreeing to the User Agreement and Privacy Policy you expressly agree that your personal information may be disclosed by shoppingtown.info in the following ways:

Shoppingtown.info Community. Throughout Shoppingtown.info, you are identified by your user name or shop id if you are selling items on our site. As a result, other people can see items you have sold in the past, items you are currently selling, your ratings and comments received from other users, ratings and comments you have left to other users, your questions and answers on items and so on.

We provide a number of ways to allow other users to find more out about you and your site activities, such as our feature that allows display of all your items for sale at the time. If you own a shop account, the contact information you provide will also be listed publically on our site.

Legal Requests. Shoppingtown.info may lawfully disclose your personal information for law enforcement or regulatory purposes. Shoppingtown.info cooperates with law enforcement inquiries and with other third parties to enforce laws, intellectual property and other rights. We can (and you authorise us to) disclose any information about you to law enforcement or other governmental officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringements, piracy or other activity that is illegal or may expose us to legal liability.

5. Your Use of Other Users' Information

In all cases, you must give users an opportunity to remove themselves from your database and a chance to review what information you have collected about them. In addition, under no circumstances, except as defined in this section, are you permitted to disclose personal information about another user to any third party without our consent and the consent of the other user.

We and our users do not tolerate spam. Therefore, without limiting the foregoing, you are not licensed to add an shoppingtown.info user, even a user who has purchased an item from you, to your mailing list (email or physical mail) without their express consent after adequate disclosure.

6. Use of Email Tools

You may not use email forwarding services that we offer to send spam or other content that would violate our User Agreement or Privacy Policy.

If you utilise our email forwarding services to send to an email address that is not already registered under our databases, we do not use that email address for any purpose other than to send your email. We do not rent or sell these email addresses. We do not permanently store the email messages or the email addresses.

7. Control of Your Password

You are solely responsible for all actions taken with your username and password, including but not limited to the accumulation of fees under your account. Therefore we do not recommend that you disclose your shoppingtown.info password to any third party. If you choose to share your shoppingtown.info login details or other information with third parties to provide you additional services, you agree that you are responsible for all actions taken by the third party using your user name and password. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personal information and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if you think the security of your password has been compromised for any reason, you should change it immediately.

8. Accessing, Reviewing and Changing Your Personal Information

Shoppingtown.info provides you with ways in which you can update your personal information, including the changing of your email address, password, address and phone number. You must ensure your personal information is kept accurate and up-to-date. Shoppingtown.info will store your previous personal information to prevent fraud, resolve disputes, assist with any investigations and enforce our User Agreement and legal requirements.

You must promptly update your personal information if it changes. Once posted, you cannot change or remove any public postings made in our ratings and comments, or via our question and answer system.

Upon your request we will deactivate your account. To close your account, please login and click Cancel My Account in the Account Control Panel.

In some circumstances, we will retain in our files information you have requested to remove, including but not limited to fraud prevention, dispute resolution, problem troubleshooting and in assisting with any investigations, enforcing our User Agreement, and in order to comply with legal requirements. Further, such prior information is never completely removed from our databases due to technical constraints and the fact that we back up our systems. Therefore, you should not expect that all of your personal information will be completely removed from our databases under the closure of your account. However, such information will be deactivated from public view and use by other members of Shoppingtown.info, and will only be available to select Shoppingtown.info personnel.

9. Other information we collect

We use additional information to do internal research on our users' demographics, interests, and behavior to better understand and serve you and our community. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether or not this URL is on our site), which URL you next go to (whether or not this URL is on our site), what browser you are using, and your IP address.

10. Credit card security

We protect your credit card information during transmission by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL, 128-bit SSL or higher) software, which encrypts the information you input. Your credit card details are not stored on shoppingtown.info servers. Credit card payments are processed by a third party Australian payment gateway company or bank.

We use industry standard efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal information. However, "perfect security" does not exist on the Internet.

11. Cookies

Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored in a browser-related file on your computer's hard drive when you use our Web site. We use cookies to improve the user experience. We also use them to deliver information and content specific to your interests. Cookies are widely used on most major Web sites.

Shoppingtown.info mostly uses "session" cookies, which are removed from your computer once you leave shoppingtown.info. However, Shoppingtown.info also uses persistent cookies to personalise the user experience, to help protect our members and to provide us with research information. Persistent cookies allow us to track users on shoppingtown.info and help us identify users abusing the shoppingtown.info service. It is also neccessary for us to track visitors traffic flow and behaviour and to perform other tasks such as analysing advertisement and promotion performance and the activity of our affiliate program.

We use data collection devices on certain pages of our site. Cookies are used to assist us in providing customised services and information targeted to your interests. We also offer certain features that are only available through the use of a "cookie".

Cookies are stored on your hard drive, not on our Site. You are always free to decline or disable the use of our cookies if your browser permits, however in that case you may not be able to use certain features on our site and you may be required to reenter your password more frequently during a session.

Additionally, you may encounter "cookies" or other similar devices on certain pages of our Site that are placed by third parties. For example, if you view a web page created by a user, there may be a "cookie" placed within that web page. We do not control the use of cookies by third parties.

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