Funeralwise.com Privacy Notice
Effective Date: July 8, 2019
This Funerawise.com Privacy Policy (“Policy”) outlines the information that Funeralwise, LLC, (collectively, “Funeralwise”, “we”, “us” or “our”) gathers, how we use that information, and the options you have to access, correct, or delete such information.
OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU
We keep your personal information personal and private. We will not sell, rent, share or otherwise disclose your personal information to anyone except as necessary to provide our services or as otherwise described in this Policy without first providing you with notice and the opportunity to consent.
We want to earn your trust. Supplying us with certain personal information enables us to make Funeralwise.com a more valuable resource for you. We believe the best protection we can offer is to put you in control of that personal information.
Funeralwise.com is owned and operated by Funeralwise, LLC. We are committed to protecting your privacy on our publicly available web sites (our Sites): https://www.funeralwise.com/ (Funeralwise.com), https://planning.funeralwise.com (Funeral Planner, Quick Plan, and Advanced Plan) and https://store.funeralwise.com (Memorial Store).
We encourage you to read this Privacy Notice to learn about our policies regarding the collection and use of personal information in our possession. It will help you determine what information you are comfortable providing to us. It also describes the choices available to you regarding the use of, your access to, and how to update and correct your personal information.
COLLECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION
Funeralwise only processes personal information in a way that is compatible with and relevant for the purpose for which it was collected or authorized. In general, we may use the information we collect to:
- Provide, operate, maintain, improve, and promote our Sites and services.
- Enable you to access and use our Sites and services.
- Process and complete transactions, and send you related information, including purchase confirmations and invoices.
- Send messages concerning transactions, and responses to your comments, questions, and requests.
- Provide customer service and support, including sending you technical notices, updates, and security alerts.
- In accordance with your email preferences, provide you with information about products and services, features, surveys, newsletters, offers, promotions, contests, and other news or information about us.
- Process and deliver contest or sweepstakes entries and rewards.
- Comply with legal obligations as well as to investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions, unauthorized access to our sites, and other illegal activities.
- Personalize our Sites and service, including by providing features or content that match your interests and preferences; and process for other purposes for which we obtain your consent.
No Personal Information is Required for General Access our Websites
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 all other content on Funeralwise.com, including our forums and blogs. You may also shop in our Memorial Store without providing any personal information.
Information You Give Us to Request Certain Specific Information or Tools
We provide free access to our “Quick Plan,” our “Word to the Wise Guides,” our newsletters, and our funeral planning forms upon your request. We will immediately email you a link to access the requested item when you submit a request form with your first name and email address. Request forms for all our tools and information are available on Funeralwise.com. We retain the data submitted when you fill-out any online forms.
Information You Give Us to Use the Advanced Plan
- You must create an account if you wish to use our free “Advanced Plan.” You can add as many funeral plans as you wish to an account. You will have the option to create an account when you have completed a Quick Plan. We require your first name (for purposes of correspondence), a plan nickname (to identify the plan), an e-mail address, and a password to create an account. This enables us to save your funeral plans, protect them from unauthorized access, and allows you to retrieve them at your convenience.
- You may permanently delete your funeral plans and related personal information using the plan delete function on the Manage My Plans page of your account. We retain deleted funeral plans for up to 30 days to enable us to restore plans that have been accidentally deleted.
- The Advanced Plan enables you to create a comprehensive funeral plan. Initially, your Advanced Plan will contain the basic funeral interment and service choices that you made when completing a Quick Plan. The Advanced Plan enables you to record your preferences for your funeral ceremonies. You may also record extensive personal information including, gender, marital status, race, ethnicity, nationality, birth date, city of birth, current and past residences, educational background, academic degrees, military experience, career, and professional information. If the funeral plan is for someone else you may record the date of death. In the Advanced Plan, you may also record contact and identity information about family, friends, and other contacts. Recording this information is entirely optional. You are in total control of how much of this information you provide.
- If you choose to use the “Plan Guardian” feature of your Advanced Plan, 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. When you invite a Plan Guardian you can specify whether he/she will have “View Only” access to your plan or “Full Edit” capability. You can subsequently change this selection at any time. Also, you can remove a Plan Guardian at any time. These capabilities are available from the Manage My Plans page of your account.
- Your Advanced Plan account and funeral plans are private. You can decide who you wish to share them with. There is no way to publicly search for and find this information. From the Manage My Plans page you can email 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. Also, you can print out copies of your funeral plan to share with others and/or to retain for yourself. The print version of a funeral plan can also be saved digitally in PDF format.
- You can contact us here to request that we delete your Advanced Plan account or by using the “Remove My Account” function on the Manage My Plans page of your account.
Information You Give Us to Access the Insurance Quote and Agent Assistance
We provide a free insurance quote and “Funeral Insurance Finder” service on Funeralwise.com and in the Advanced Plan. Certain personal information about the proposed insured individual is required to provide you with an insurance quote, including the insured’s first name, date of birth, state of residence, gender, and tobacco use. Also, we need the type of insurance coverage to be quoted and the insurance coverage amount. In addition, we require certain personal information about the person to contact regarding the insurance quote, including the contact person’s first and last name, and email address. We retain all of this information for purposes of following up with additional information.
At your request, our affiliated insurance agents will call the contact person to provide additional assistance regarding insurance options. We require a telephone number for the contact person. We retain the contact telephone number for purposes of follow up.
Information You Give Us to Participate in Surveys and Sweepstakes
We occasionally send surveys to collect data about public opinions on topics pertaining to funerals, funeral plans, and related matters. We retain your responses to survey and sweepstakes questions but we do not share your identity and specific responses with others. However, we do aggregate the responses and publish summaries of the results.
Information You Give Us for Funeral Planning Services
We may offer a personal funeral planning service via email, online chat, and telephone. Certain of these services may be free of charge and others will be provided on a fee basis. You may request these services by submitting an online form, by initiating an online chat, or by calling a toll-free number, all of which will be available on Funeralwise.com and in the Advanced Plan. We will retain the information that you give us for purposes of providing the services requested.
How to Request Removal of Personal Information
Your e-mail address gives us a non-intrusive way to contact you regarding your funeral plans and any other informational content and documents that you may have requested. Any other information you have provided, including your telephone number, is associated with your email address. As such, your email address is an effective identifier if you wish to contact us regarding any or all of your personal information.
Out of respect for your privacy, you may choose to stop receiving our newsletter, Word to the Wise Guides, or informational and marketing emails by following the unsubscribe instructions included in these emails. You can also use the email unsubscribe feature to request that we remove you from any or all telephone follow up calls.
Also, you can contact us here to request that we remove you from any or all emails and telephone calls, and to completely remove your personal information from our database.
Funeralwise collects information under the direction of its Clients and has no direct relationship with the individuals whose personal data it processes. If you are a customer of one of our Clients and would no longer like to be contacted by one of our Clients that use our service, please contact the Client that you interact with directly. We may transfer personal information to companies that help us provide our service. Transfers to subsequent third parties are covered by the service agreements with our Clients.
Funeralwise has no direct relationship with the individuals whose personal data it processes. An individual who seeks access, or who seeks to correct, amend, or delete inaccurate data should direct his query to the Funeralwise’s Client (the data controller). If requested to remove data we will respond within a reasonable timeframe.
We will retain personal data we process on behalf of our Clients for as long as needed to provide services to our Client. Funeralwise will retain this personal information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.
Information We Automatically Collect
When you access our Sites whether, by computer, mobile phone, or other devices, we automatically collect certain information about your use of our Sites. As is true of most web sites, this information does not personally identify you and may include browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, geographical information, date/time stamp, length of visit, page views, and/or clickstream data. We retain this data in “log files” and we do not associate or link this automatically-collected data to other information we collect about you.
Cookies
A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. Funeralwise and its partners use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies to remember your actions and preferences over a period of time to personalize your browsing experience, analyze trends, administer the Sites, track users’ movements around the Sites, and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. You can control the use of cookies by configuring your browser’s privacy settings, but if you choose to disable cookies, it may limit your use of certain features or functions on our Sites or service.
We work with 3rd party “Service Providers” to either display advertising on our Sites or to manage our advertising on other sites. Our Service Providers may use technologies such as cookies to gather information about your activities on our Sites and other sites in order to provide you advertising based upon your browsing activities and interests.
Facebook Custom Audience Ads
We may display interest-based ads to you when you are using Facebook through a tool offered by Facebook called The Facebook Pixel. The Facebook Pixel is a transparent 1 pixel by 1-pixel image placed on our site that collects certain information about visitors to our Sites. This allows us to analyze the demographic characteristics of visitors to our Sites. Also, we use this data to build Custom Audiences on Facebook based on what they viewed on our site. We may target these Custom Audiences with ads that we believe may be of interest to them. However, we do not share with Facebook any of the personal information you have provided to us.
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. We do not sell your personal information to 3rd parties as well. 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:
- In certain situations, Funeralwise may be required to disclose personal data in response to lawful requests by public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.
- 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 others, investigate fraud or respond to a government request. However, nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal defenses or objections that you may have to a third party, including a government’s, request to disclose your personal data.
- If Funeralwise 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 work with 3rd party Service Providers to help us run our business. Examples of these functions include payment processing, sending mail, delivering e-mail, maintaining the safety and security of our database, managing our advertising programs, and analyzing data for our business purposes. These Service Providers have access to your information to the extent necessary to perform these tasks but may not use it for other purposes. These companies are authorized to use your personally identifiable information only as necessary to provide these services to us.
- 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.
- We collect your location-based information for the purpose of searching for funeral homes, cemeteries, cremation services, and other funeral providers in your area (our Search Directory). We will only share this information with our mapping provider for the sole purpose of providing you this service. When you access our Search Directory you will be given the option to allow or deny location-based services for purposes of your search.
SECURITY
The security of your personal information is important to us. We take all reasonable steps to protect the information we receive from you from loss, misuse, or unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and/or destruction. 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 the 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
Upon request, Funeralwise will provide you with information about whether we hold any of your personal information. If your personal information changes, or if you no longer desire our service, you may correct, update, amend, delete/remove, or deactivate it by emailing our customer support here.
To protect the privacy and security of all users, we reserve the right to take reasonable steps to verify your identity prior to granting access to or processing changes or corrections to such information. We will respond to your request within a reasonable time frame.
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.
CHILDREN
Our website and/or services are not directed at children and our services are designed for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13 years of age, and the use of our services by children under 13 years of age is forbidden.
RIGHTS WE RESERVE
We reserve the right to contact you concerning your account and your funeral plans whenever we determine, in our sole judgment, 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