When it comes to your information, your privacy means your right to determine when, how, and to what extent your information is given to others. By respecting your privacy rights, we at The Opt-Index hope to earn your trust. We are in the business of gathering information from individuals, organizing it into our business directory, and making it available to others through our website. Our success depends directly upon the information entrusted to us by individuals who decide they want to be a part of the directory.

Those that wish to participate do so by creating an account with us and voluntarily providing administrative contact and business listing information. Administrative Contact Information is personal information about the owner of the account. It is used solely for our administrative purposes and is considered confidential. Business Listing Information is public information about the business being listed, such as addresses and telephone numbers. We display this information at our website in response to relevant user searches.

Regarding your information, our Privacy Policy describes

• what we gather for the directory,
• what we do with it,
• how we safeguard, and
• what might change.

It is our commitment to you. We hope you find it straightforward. If you do have questions however, please send us an email message at service@optindex.com.

We maintain a distinction between Administrative Contact Information and Business Listing Information. In order to maintain proper contact with account holders, we require certain personally identifiable information from account holders such as name, address, telephone number, and email address. This Contact Information is used solely for our administrative purposes and is considered confidential. It is never made available to the public, including by way of our search results. Listing Information gathered to create an entry in the directory such as company name, description, address, web addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses are by their very nature intended for public display. The Opt-Index will display Listing Information via its website in response to relevant user searches.

We do not gather information from children. The Opt-Index does not solicit or accept information from children under the age of 13. It is a violation of our Terms of Use for a child to enter any personally identifiable information. The Opt-Index encourages parents to teach their children about the use of personal information while on-line and to monitor their use of the Internet.

We do not gather important financial information. Vital identifying information such as social security numbers, driver's license numbers, and bank account numbers are never gathered by The Opt-Index. By neither requesting nor storing this type of information, we hope to reduce the potential for identity theft. We do accept credit card information in order to allow users to purchase additional services, but we intentionally discard each user's credit card data once each transaction is complete. Credit card numbers are not stored at The Opt-Index.

We may use a "cookie" to recognize you when you return to the site. If you are an account holder, you may elect to be recognized automatically at The Opt-Index. This operation is accomplished by placing an encrypted reference to your account on your computer using a "cookie." A cookie is simply a small file placed on the computer's hard drive by the web browser. Only The Opt-Index has access to this information. We use it to spare you the trouble of entering your username and city each time you visit. (You must still enter your password to login.) We do not use this cookie unless you specifically request that we do so by selecting "Remember me when I return" when you login. To remove the cookie from your computer, simply select "Clear username for a fresh user login" at The Opt-Index Login page. The cookie will be erased, and you will appear as an anonymous user. This cookie information is not used to track user activities or assemble information about users. It is the only permanent cookie used by The Opt-Index. (We may also use a temporary cookie each time a user visits in order to manage the session from page to page. If we did not do so, logged-in account holders could not stay logged in between page requests.)

We do not track individual user activities such as the keywords used, sites visited, or people contacted. We do not maintain a per-user activity history, and we do not monitor what any particular user has been doing, even while logged in.

We may collect and share summarized, demographic information from time to time based upon search criteria and results. Collecting general demographic information allows us to determine how our website is being used and what we might to do to improve it. Such information does not contain any personally identifiable information. For example, we may track and publish the top 20 most popular search terms or destination web sites. Although this information is based upon search activity within the directory, it could not be used to identify a particular account. Moreover, in no case will generalized data ever presented in such a manner that individual user data might be distilled from it.

We do not provide Listing Information except through our website. All Listing Information is carefully controlled in our central database and is provided only to web users in response to relevant searches via our website. We do not provide lists of businesses and organizations through any other means for any reason. As with Contact Information however, we may provide information to law enforcement agencies and regulators when necessary to assist with investigations or prevent fraud.

We use Administrative Contact Information sparingly to maintain The Opt-Index. We use Contact Information internally to service accounts, notify account holders of upcoming expiration dates, investigate problems with account information, and to send announcements regarding significant changes in service. We also use Contact Information when requested by individual account holders to answer questions or follow up on problem reports or user feedback. Whenever possible, we confine our contact with account holders to exchanges by email.

Sensitive information is encrypted over the Internet. Administrative Contact Information, login names and passwords, and credit card data are encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology between individual client computers from around the world and our data center. This technology is designed to prevent the data from being read even if intercepted in transit, and it allows individual users to rest assured that they are connected to the one and only Opt-Index. You can verify that SSL is active by looking for a closed padlock symbol in the bottom status panel of your browser or by checking for web addresses that begin with "https:" instead of simply "http:".

We only use our own advertising within The Opt-Index. We do not use third-party banner ads that can often cause one or more cookies to be placed on your computer. These cookies may indeed be used to track your activities from site to site, build a profile, or correlate your habits to your actual identity. Because The Opt-Index generates all of its own advertising links, you may click on these in confidence.

We reserve the right to change our policies as necessary to reflect changes in service. Changes shall become effective immediately at the time of posting. Should any of our policies change substantively for some reason, or should they be liable to change because of some foreseeable event such as the pending sale of the company, each account holder will be notified by email prior to the change. At that time, or at any other time, you may reassess our policies and opt to remove your account completely and to stop using the directory. Small changes to a policy such as simple corrections or clarifications that do not impact the true substance of a policy will not be announced. All users are encouraged to check back as often as they like to review the latest revision. The effective date of the each policy always appears at the bottom of the page.

This Privacy Policy is the only one that affects your information. This policy represents our complete commitment to our users regarding their privacy with respect to their account information. You need not check anywhere else to determine how The Opt-Index will handle your information. If you have any questions regarding this policy, please send an email message to The Opt-Index at service@optindex.com.