A Special Note About Children

In our online registration forms and during our telephone registration process, we require you to provide us with information about you. This includes your full name, full street address, phone number, and your e-mail address. As part of the registration process, we assign you a personal User ID and password. We consider this ID and password to be your personal information, and treat it as such.

In some of our auctions we only permit bidding by persons who we have pre-qualified in order to protect all participants in these auctions. Therefore, depending upon the auction for which you register, we may request that you provide us with additional personal information to assure that you meet the minimum standards for the participants in the applicable auction. While our pre-qualification procedures do not, and cannot, guaranty that the successful bidder will not renege or otherwise fail to pay, our goal is to limit these unfortunate occurrences and better serve all participants in our auctions.

If you are registering for an auction in which we accept credit cards, or place an order for any merchandise that we sell or request a catalog for which we charge a fee, we may ask that you provide us with your billing address, shipping address, and credit card information. The credit card information that we may ask you to give us will include the name of the credit card that you would like us to use, the credit card number, and the card's expiration date. In those circumstances where we request credit card information, we may use the information that you provide us to verify your name, address and other personal information in addition to charging your account for the merchandise or services that you buy.

In the course of using our web sites, we may automatically track certain information about you. This information may include the URL that you just came from (whether this URL is on our site or not), which URL you next go to (whether this URL is on our site or not), what browser you are using, and your IP address. Note that many other web sites also collect this information automatically.

Please know that we use cookies on certain pages of our web sites. We use cookies for several purposes, including remembering your log-in information so that you don't have to enter it on every registered-user page. We also use cookies to build a list of lots to track, to keep some of your personal preferences, and to track new users coming from banner ads so that we can see which ads are most cost effective.

Cookies are stored on your hard drive, not on our web sites. You are always free to decline our cookies if your browser permits, although in that case you may be required to reenter your password and log-in information more frequently during a session. Additionally, depending upon the auction, declining cookies may prevent our system from accepting bids. Declining cookies may also prevent you from using many of the features that our web sites offer. To learn more about cookies, and how and why we use them, please click here.

If you choose to bid, buy, or sell on our web sites, we collect information about your bidding, buying and selling behavior.

If you choose to post messages on our message boards, in our chat rooms, or in other message areas of our web sites, we may collect such information about you as you choose to disclose.

If you use a third party service made available to you from one of our web sites, or buy merchandise from a third party whose merchandise is offered on one of our web sites' pages, the third party provider may send us information about you. You should check the third party's privacy policy. Regardless of the third party's privacy policy, please know that any information that we receive from such a third party will be treated by us as if it was received directly from you, and therefore we will use such information only as described in this privacy policy statement and notice.

If you send us personal correspondence such as e-mails or letters, or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities or postings on our sites, we may collect such information into a file specific to you.

The Way We Use Information

Unfortunately, due to the existing regulatory environment, we cannot ensure that all of your private communications and other personally identifiable information will never be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in this notice and privacy policy statement. By way of example (without limiting the foregoing), we may be forced to disclose information to the government or third parties under certain circumstances, or third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. Further, we can (and you authorize us to) disclose any information about you to law enforcement or other government officials as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate. Therefore, although we use industry standard practices to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personally identifiable information or private communications will remain private.

Our Commitment To Data Security

You can correct factual errors in your personally identifiable information by sending us a request that credibly shows error.

To protect your privacy and security, we will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting access or making corrections, which may include asking you to provide us with personal information about yourself. In such event, we may record and maintain the information provided in order to further protect your privacy.