Privacy Notice



Effective Date: January 1, 2013

Funeralwise.com, owned and operated by Funeralwise, LLC, is committed to protecting your privacy on our web site www.funeralwise.com. We believe the best protection we can offer is to put you in control of your personal information. By reading this Privacy Notice you’ll learn about our policies regarding information in our possession. It will help you determine what information you are comfortable providing to us. We want to earn your trust. Supplying us with certain personal information enables us to make Funeralwise.com a more valuable resource for you.

Funeralwise LLC has been awarded TRUSTe's Privacy Seal signifying that this privacy notice 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. The TRUSTe program covers only information that is collected through this web site, www.funeralwise.com.

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 notice or practices, please contact us here. If you are not satisfied with our response you can contact TRUSTe here.

Information You Give Us

1. You are free to access any of our informational content without giving us any personal information. This includes our content on funeral planning, funeral customs, funeral etiquette, grief, and our funeral guide. It also includes our forums and blogs.
2. You may use our “Quick Plan” without providing any personal information, however, you must register with us to use our full-featured online funeral planner . Registering involves creating an account. We require your first name, e-mail address and a password. This enables us to save your funeral plans, protect them from unauthorized access, and allows you to retrieve them at your convenience.
3. Your e-mail address gives us a non-intrusive way to contact you regarding your funeral plans. If you wish to subscribe to our newsletter(s), we will use your name and email address to send the newsletter to you. Out of respect for your privacy, you may choose to stop receiving our newsletter or marketing emails by following the unsubscribe instructions included in these emails, accessing the email preferences in your account settings page or you can contact us here.
4. By providing us your personal information you can use our online funeral planner, which involves recording your funeral preferences and choices. You can complete a basic funeral plan without supplying any personal identification beyond your registration information. If you choose to create a comprehensive plan, you’ll be recording more extensive personal information as well as information about family, friends and other contacts. You are in total control of how much of this information you provide.
5. We save the information you include when you voluntarily contact us by e-mail, regular mail or by telephone. Also, we retain data submitted when you fill-out any online forms.
6. If you choose to use a plan guardian, we will ask you for your guardian’s name, relationship to you and email address. We will automatically send your proposed guardian a one-time email inviting him or her to accept the guardianship. Funeralwise.com stores this information for the purpose of sending a one-time email and keeping a record of the guardian. Your guardian may contact us to request that we remove their information from our database. We allow you the ability to send a plan to family members, caretakers or whomever you would like to have a copy. The email address is only used to send a one-time copy of a plan and is not stored.

Information We Automatically Collect

We receive and store certain types of information when your web browser connects with Funeralwise.com and you navigate through our site. For example, we learn what type of browser you’re using, the identity of your internet service provider, how long you visited, and which of our web pages you accessed. By analyzing the usage patterns on our website, we can identify ways to improve our site design.

"Cookies." When you visit Funeralwise.com, we assign you a random identification number and store it in a small file on your computer. This type of file is known as a Cookie. It is a common practice among websites to place these Cookies on visitors’ computers. By itself, a Cookie does not tell us who you are but it does enable us to analyze your patterns of usage when you visit us more than once. If you choose to provide us certain personal information, the cookie will help us personalize your experience at Funeralwise.com. Most web browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, however, you can change your browser options to block them if you prefer. Check your browser’s "help" function to find out how to make this change.

The use of cookies by our partners, affiliates, tracking utility company, service providers is not covered by our privacy notice. We do not have access or control over these cookies. Our partners, affiliates, tracking utility company, service providers use session ID cookies to make it easier for you to navigate our site.

Our Notice on Sharing Your Information

We do not share your personal information with any 3rd party -- without your explicit authorization or as outlined in this privacy notice. This is called an "opt-in" notice because you must tell us that it’s okay to share your information. It’s how we put you in control of your privacy. The following exceptions apply:

• We release account and other personal information when we determine, in our sole judgment, that it is necessary to comply with applicable laws, such as to comply with a subpoena or similar legal process, when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, protect your safety or the safety of other, investigate fraud or respond to a government request.
• If Funeralwise.com is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, you will be notified via email and/or a prominent notice on our web site of any change in ownership or uses of your personal information, as well as any choices you may have regarding your personal information.
• We provide our database to parties that we employ to perform certain functions on our behalf. Examples of these functions include payment processing, sending mail, delivering e-mail, maintaining the safety and security of our database, and analyzing data for our business purposes. These agents have access to your information to the extent necessary to perform these tasks but may not use it for other purposes.
• We share aggregate statistical information about our customers, site usage patterns and funeral preferences. However, we do not specifically identify you unless you have given us permission to do so. For example, we will inform advertisers about the number of visitors to our site and how many have seen or clicked on their advertising banner.

Security

The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. When you enter personal information on our registration forms or in our online funeral planner, we encrypt the transmission of that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). We employ independent e-commerce service providers to process transactions in our online store. Credit card details are stored encrypted using AES-256 encryption. They also follow all Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) requirements to ensure the secure handling of credit card information. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore, we cannot guarantee its absolute security. If you have any questions about security on our web site, you can contact us here.

User Access and Choice

If your personal information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may correct, update, amend, delete/remove, or deactivate it by accessing your account here and making the change on your Manage My Plans page or by emailing our customer support here.

We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

Links to Other Sites

Our website maintains links to 3rd party sites that offer products or additional information that may be of interest to you. When you click on one of these links you are entering another website for which we have no control. Therefore, these privacy policies do not apply once you enter another website. Please refer to the privacy policies posted on any linked sites for information about their practices.

Blog/Forum

Our web site offers publicly accessible blogs or community forums. You should be aware that any information you provide in these areas may be read, collected, and used by others who access them. To request removal of your personal information from our blog or community forum, contact us here. In some cases, we may not be able to remove your personal information, in which case we will let you know if we are unable to do so and why.

Social Media Widgets

Our web site includes social media features, such as the Facebook Like button and widgets, such as the ShareThis button or interactive mini-programs that run on our site. These features may collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our site, and may set a cookie to enable the feature to function properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our web site. Your interactions with these features are governed by the privacy notice of the company providing it.

Rights We Reserve

We reserve the right to contact you concerning your account and your funeral plans whenever we determine, in our sole judgement, that it is appropriate or necessary to do so. Also, we reserve the right to change our privacy policies by posting any changes in this Privacy Notice. If we make any material changes we will notify you by email or by means of a notice on this site prior to the change becoming effective. We encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on our privacy practices.

Additional Information

If you have any questions about our policies, go to Contact Us to send your inquiry. We will attempt to respond within 3 business days.

Funeralwise, LLC
601 Elmwood Avenue
Wilmette IL 60091