Privacy Statement

South Coast Surety believes strongly in the protection of personal privacy and is committed to complying with the state and federal regulations that govern the collection and use of personal information. This notice explains to you how South Coast Surety handles and protects the information we collect.

South Coast Surety collects and uses customer information for legitimate business purposes. South Coast Surety does not sell lists of our customers, nor do we disclose customer information to marketing companies except to companies we may hire to provide specific services as permitted by law.

South Coast Surety obtains non-public information about you from the following sources:

• Information we receive from you, such as information on applications or other related forms, which may include your name, address, age, and social security number.
• Information we receive from consumer reporting agencies, government agencies, credit references, employers, insurance companies, attorneys, and financial institutions, such as your credit history, verification of employment, criminal history and net income.
• Information about your transactions with us such as policy coverage, premiums and payment history.

South Coast Surety does not disclose any non-public personal information about you or former customers to anyone except as permitted by law.

• As permitted by law. For example, providing information to industry regulators, to law enforcement agencies, for fraud prevention, to credit bureaus, and to third parties that assist us in processing the product or service you have requested.
• Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, to our Affiliates, so long as the information disclosed is Transaction and Experience Information: and
• To Affiliates and Nonaffiliated Third Parties to the extent necessary to process, obtain service, maintain, administer or enforce the service or product that you have requested we provide.

South Coast Surety protects the confidentiality and security of your personal information.
South Coast Surety restricts access to non-public personal information about you to our employees, and agents who need this information to provide products and services to you. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations to guard your non-public personal information.

Individual rights
You have a right to review your personal information and to request that we correct, amend or delete the information on file.

Web Privacy
When you visit South Coast Surety’s web site, the Web server automatically collects and maintains statistical information from our site’s data logs that concern network traffic flow and volume. The Web server recognizes the name of the Internet domain, the IP address from which you accessed the site, and the time and date. This information does not identify personal e-mail addresses or other personal information. The site’s data log collects this information in aggregate form. The information is used to improve the usefulness of the web site. South Coast Surety’s web site does not use cookies to collect individual information about you and your web site usage.

Right to Privacy Notification
South Coast Surety provides the Privacy Notice so that customers will be confident in understanding how South Coast Surety handles and protects the information we collect. An annual Privacy Notice is sent only to customers who maintain an on-going relationship with South Coast Surety.

Privacy Policy for websites that collect financial information as described under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.

South Coast Surety (hereinafter “Surety”) values the privacy of our visitors/customers and takes every known precaution to safe guard the information we collect from unauthorized use.  The following is a detailed explanation of the privacy policy for “Surety ”.

‍What types of companies are governed under this act?
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act governs the privacy policies of “financial institutions”. Financial Institutions include organizations that offer financial products or services to individuals.  These products or services include such things like loans, investment or financial advice, or insurance. This Act also covers debt collectors, suppliers of real estate settlement services, tax preparers, loan brokers, investment or financial advisers, and non-bank mortgage lenders. The Act exclusively applies to organizations that are “significantly engaged” in such financial activities.  Furthermore, the Act exclusively applies to the collection of information from individuals, not businesses.

The Act treats consumers and customers in a different way with regard to the types of privacy practices the financial organization must employ. A consumer “is an individual who obtains or has obtained a financial product or service from a financial institution for personal, family or household reasons.” A customer “is a consumer with a continuing relationship with a financial institution.”  In order for the customer requirements to be given effect, the relationship between the financial organization and the individual has to be noteworthy and/or long-term. Consumers are entitled to receive a privacy notice from a financial institution only if the company shares the consumers’ information with companies not affiliated with it. Customers are entitled to receive a financial organization’s privacy policy notice automatically.

What information do we collect?
“Surety” believes it is important for you to know what types of information we collect when you use our site, fill out an online application, or sign up for one of our related services.  We gather nonpublic personal information about you when you visit our pages, fill out one of our online applications, and when you register for any of our services.  This may include your social security number, first and last name, home address.  We automatically record the name of the domain (for example,”abccompany.com” if you use a private Internet access account, or “yourschool.edu” if you are connecting from a university’s domain); the IP address (a number that is automatically assigned to your computer when you are using the Internet) from which you access our website; the type of browser and operating system used to access our site; the date and time you access our site; the Internet address of the website from which you linked directly to our site; and the pages you visit.  Additionally, we collect information in the form of a cookie.

A cookie is a text file that is placed on your computer by a Web page server. Cookies are uniquely assigned to you, and can only be read by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you.  Cookies help sites identify return visitors and they perform a variety of significant functions for online financial transactions.  For your security, we do not maintain any of your nonpublic personal information in our cookies. We only use encrypted cookies that do not transmit to your computer’s hard drive. As an alternative, the cookie is kept in your computer’s memory, identifying only your computer while you are logged on. Only www.southcoastsurety.com can read the information in these cookies. This encrypted cookie allows us to process numerous transactions during your visit to our site, without the need for you to have to reenter your password for each individual transaction. When you sign off, or close your web browser, the cookie is destroyed. We may use aggregate, non-personally identifiable information to help us market our products and services that may be of interest to you.

Why do we collect this information?
We use this information in order to serve the needs of our customers. We use the information we collect to personalize the content you see on our pages. We also use your information to process your requests for products and/or services, to improve our customer service, to contact you, to conduct internal investigations, and to supply anonymous statistics for internal and external clients.

How is your information protected?
We use the latest in encryption technology, including 128 bit SSL encryption to ensure that any sensitive information that is sent by you to us via the Internet is protected from unauthorized interception.  We employ the latest in firewall protection to prevent unauthorized access into our information storage areas.  We maintain a rigorous hiring process to screen out potential employees with criminal backgrounds.  All employees that we do hire have to sign a confidentiality agreement that forbids them from disclosing any information to which the employee has access, to other individuals or entities.  We also have back up servers and power supplies to guard against power outages and other natural occurrences that could pose a threat to the integrity of your personal information.  Passwords are required in order for you to gain access to your account.  Once an account has been terminated, measures are taken to remove those users from the system who no longer need access to our system. When an employee is terminated or is no longer with the company, we change the access codes that the employee used to access any customer accounts.  Account login sessions are terminated after three failed login attempts; all terminated login sessions are logged for follow-up.  Passwords must contain at least six characters, one of which is non-alphanumeric.  Passwords are case sensitive and must be updated every 90 days.

Who has access to my information?
We do not rent, sell, or share nonpublic personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies except to provide products or services you have requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances.

Only those employees that are responsible for handling your account have access to your information.  Additionally, employees in our technical department may have access to your information in order to conduct routine checks on the integrity of our system and in order to perform necessary maintenance work.  Should you choose to receive additional information regarding one of our services or products, we may pass your email address to one of our affiliates who offers similar products or services that you might be interested in.  We may only share this information with organizations related to us by common control or ownership.  However, in accordance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, we will never share externally acquired nonpublic personal information about you or your account with our affiliates.    We will never disclose nonpublic personally identifiable information about your account to nonaffiliated organizations unless: (1) you approve or demand it; (2) the information is needed to help facilitate a transaction begun by you; (3) the information is supplied to a highly reputable credit bureau or similar reporting institution; or (4) it is judicially mandated. We do not share nonpublic personally identifiable information to external organizations for independent telemarketing or direct mail marketing of any non-financial related services or products.

At times it may become necessary for us to share information about you to a nonaffiliated organization, such as a vendor or service company.  We may also disclose certain information with other financial organizations that we have a cooperative marketing agreement with. Every single vendor, service company and any other organization with whom we do business are contractually obligated to maintain the highest level of confidentiality and security.

We may also share your information if we believe it is necessary in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of our terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.

Can I correct or remove information from your site?
You always have the option to view your account to make sure the information we have collected from you is indeed correct.  You also have the option of removing any information from your account that you wish to keep private.  However, please note that removing certain information such as your email address, contact information, and the like may greatly hinder our ability to effectively provide the service or products you have requested.  We recommend, that you contact us first to discuss which information you may remove without interrupting the quality of service we intend to provide for you.  Our number is 800-361-1720.

Can I opt out of having certain information collected?
You have the option of disabling your computer’s ability to accept or transmit cookies. This will prevent us from gathering certain non-personally identifiable information from you. You also have the option of removing yourself from any email distribution list that you may have signed up for. Furthermore you have the option to say no to having your information shared with certain third parties.  Please call our toll free number 800-361-1720 if you would like to speak about our opt-out service.

Notice of changes to this privacy policy
We reserve the right to change this privacy policy at any time.  However, if any changes do occur, we will publish the changes to our web site and post a notice on the home page that a new privacy policy has been implemented. We will also take reasonable steps to contact you personally to let you know of the new changes.

Disclaimer
Validatedsite.com is not in the business of providing consulting or legal services and we recommend that you speak to a consultant or an attorney before relying on this privacy policy for your own use.  While we do not think a privacy policy is a legal document, we feel it is a good idea to have a third-party such as a consultant or an attorney review your policy before you begin to implement it on your site.  The privacy policy above should not be construed as the rendering of any business or legal advice.