Home Equity Share Privacy Policy

Welcome to Home Equity Share. We strongly believe that consumers deserve the utmost respect when it comes to the privacy of their personal information. Our privacy policy applies to all current and former Home Equity Share members. Following is a summary of Home Equity Share’s privacy practices. Click on any of the topics below or scroll down to get more details.

We collect information about you:

  • Directly from you as a Home Equity Share member at the time of registration.
  • Periodically as you update your profile information.
  • Through feedback from other users of Home Equity Share with whom you may conduct business.

We share or use your information:

  • With other members of Home Equity Share, but only as much information as you choose to reveal about yourself.
  • If we are provided your consent or approval.
  • To establish and maintain your membership.
  • To offer promotions, goods and/or services that we believe may be of interest to you.
  • To assist you in obtaining the goods and services you request.
  • To update, improve, modify or enhance the operations of this web site.
  • As permitted or required by law.
  • To assist law enforcement or other appropriate entities which we believe in good faith are conducting examinations or investigations of possible fraud or illegal activities.
  • To investigate possible violations of our Terms of Use Agreement
  • Home Equity Share does not sell or rent your information to third parties for marketing purposes.

We give you choices regarding your information:

  • You have choices about the personal information you display about yourself.
  • We give you easy access to update your personal profile and view your transaction documents.
  • You can update your personal preferences at any time.

We protect your information:

  • Using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption technology to protect your personal information that you submit via Home Equity Share.
  • By limiting employee and third party access to your personal information on a “need to know” basis

Links to other important information:


You can give us feedback or submit questions at any time by sending e-mail toprivacy@homequityshare.com.

Note Regarding Children Under 21

Members of the Home Equity Share community must be U.S. Residents that are twenty-one (21) years of age or older. People under the age of twenty-one (21) years are not eligible to participate in the offerings on this web site.

We collect information about you

Home Equity Share collects personal information as part of the registration process for people joining the web site and utilizing the services provided therein. This information includes name, e-mail, address, telephone number, credit rating, real estate preferences, and several other items. If you have a question regarding our services, we may collect your name and e-mail address in order to respond to your requests.

Each member has their own Member Profile, where they post information about themselves as potential equity sharing partner. These Member Profiles may contain basic information regarding your credit grade and other financial information, in addition to any other information you make the personal decision to post. You may elect to be identified only by your screen name, which you choose and which you can use to remain anonymous. If you provide identifying information, either in your choice of screen name or otherwise, it is your choice, and you do so at your own discretion.

We use your information to facilitate matches between potential equity sharing partners in the Home Equity Share community. We may use this information to contact you for customer service purposes.

We also ask for feedback from the Home Equity Share community members about their experiences and about the people with whom they interact.

We share your information

Because Home Equity Share provides a real estate co-ownership matchmaking service, it is important that equity sharing partners have sufficient information about each other in order to consider possibly partnering. You are welcome to share as much information about yourself as you think is necessary and appropriate. Such sharing of information is entirely your choice, and you share this information at your own discretion.

If you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about our web site, we will ask you for your friend’s e-mail address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time e-mail inviting him or her to visit the web site. We store this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time e-mail and tracking the success of our referral program. Your friend may click on the unsubscribe link at the end of the e-mail to prevent Home Equity Share from sending additional e-mail to his or her e-mail address.

We have relationships with trusted third parties that perform services on our behalf. This includes professional service providers such as real estate agents. With your consent, We may share your Member Profile contents with these professional service providers, in order to serve and provide services to you. All service providers are bound by contract to maintain the confidentiality of your personal information.

We may share your information with law enforcement or other government agencies as required by law.

Home Equity Share does not sell or rent your personal information to third parties for marketing purposes.
We give you choices regarding your information
Some information is required in order to participate in the Home Equity Share community. For example, we need certain information in order to verify your identiy as an individual.

Some information is optional, such as details about the time period in which you seek to buy a house and the type of property you want to buy. You can share as much or as little optional information as you like. It is entirely your own choice, and you share this information at your discretion.

You can access, review, and modify the personal information you submit at any time. To update your personal profile information, you can log in to your account using your login ID and password specified at the time of registration.

We give you the opportunity to “opt-out” of having your personally identifiable information used for certain purposes. For example, you can elect not to receive newsletters, promotional material, e-mails from other Home Equity Share members, event notifications, research or surveys. You can opt out of receiving these communications, or you can view or change your account opt-out preferences, by logging into your account and changing your preferences. There are some messages you cannot opt out of, typically for security or legal reasons. Examples of these include messages regarding certain changes to this Privacy Policy or disclosures regarding changes to the Terms of Service of this web site.

The information we collect from you when you register as a Home Equity Share member is kept securely in our database. We retain this information to satisfy legal requirements such as recordkeeping and for purposes of fraud prevention, auditability and data integrity.
We protect your information

At Home Equity Share, we are committed to maintaining the security and confidentiality of your personal and financial information. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that meet or exceed industry standards for financial institutions.

We protect your sensitive account information by storing it in encrypted form on computers not connected to the Internet. We control access to this information via secure web pages, and limit access to only those employees or third parties on a need to know basis. We do not allow visibility to Social Security number, bank account information, or credit card information via the web site.

We employ firewalls and other security technologies to protect our servers from external attack. We enable our servers with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to establish a secure connection between your computer and our servers, creating a private “conversation” that cannot be viewed or accessed by other parties. We test our systems regularly to insure that our security mechanisms are up to date.

The security of your account also depends on the protection of your Home Equity Share password. You should not share this password with anyone. We have developed procedures for recovering your password which will not require you to send us your password via e-mail or give it out over the phone. If you ever receive an e-mail requesting entry of your e-mail address and/or screen name and password, please confirm that you are on a web site with a URL beginning http://www.homeequityshare.com/ or https://www.homeequityshare.com .

Other important information

Marketing preferences

Home Equity Share does not sell or rent your information to third parties or marketing firms. We do send communications to you periodically to notify you of status or events related to your participation in our community. Some of these communications are required as part of transactions you are contemplating through our web site.

Our use of cookies

Cookies are small text files created by a web site that store information on your computer, such as your preferences when visiting that site. Home Equity Share may use cookies when you sign in, to keep track of your personal session, including some account identifiers so that we can ensure that you are the only person making changes to your account. We may also use cookies to track your activity on our site as a unique person. All of this information is stored in an encrypted fashion for security reasons, and no personal information about you is stored.

We may use session ID cookies to make it easier for you to navigate our site. Session ID cookies expire when you close you browser. We may use a persistent cookie that remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time, so that we can recognize you when you return to our web site. You can remove persistent cookies by following directions provided in your Internet browser’s “help” file; however, because we use cookies for our sign-in functionality, if you choose to disable cookies you will not be able to log on to the Home Equity Share web site.

Our use of web beacons

We may employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons/Web Bugs), that help us better understand user interaction with our web site. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We do not tie the information gathered by clear gifs to our customers’ personally identifiable information.

Third party links

Home Equity Share may post links to third party web sites that are not subject to this privacy policy. Some member pages may also contain links unrelated to Home Equity Share. If you visit these web sites, we encourage you to read their privacy policies before providing them with any personal information.

Helpful tips on protecting your information

Screen name selection: Your screen name is what members of Home Equity Share and visitors to our web site use to identify you. In order to protect your privacy, you should choose a screen name that does not closely resemble your real name.

Password reminder: It is a good practice to select a password for your account that is unique, a combination of letters, numbers and symbols, and isn’t predictable or easy to guess. For instance, “Sinbad” may be your pet’s name and easy to remember, but “+Sinbad9” would be difficult for someone to guess. Another good practice is to change your password periodically (every 90 days).

If you use any public forums on this web site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We do not monitor or mask personally identifiable information that may appear on the forums, so if you choose to put personal information on the forums you do so at your own risk.

State law

You may have privacy rights under applicable state law in addition to those outlined in this privacy policy.

Individual customers who reside in California and have provided their personal information may request information regarding disclosures of this information to third parties for direct marketing purposes. Such requests must be submitted to us at the following mailing address: CA Privacy Request, Home Equity Share, Inc., PO Box 2004, Monterey, CA. 93940. This request may be made no more than once per calendar year. We reserve our right not to respond to requests submitted other than to the address specified in this paragraph.

Changes to this policy

To accommodate changes to our web site, changing technology, and possible legal requirements, Home Equity Share may change this privacy policy at any time. We will promptly post any policy changes to this page and notify our members directly with notice of any material changes.

For additional information, or if you have any questions regarding this policy or the privacy practices at Home Equity Share, please submit your questions or comments directly to privacy@homeequityshare.com via e-mail or via facsimile to (915) 773-5170. Any personal information you submit will be used solely to respond to your requests.

You can also send questions or comments to: Home Equity Share Inc., ATTN: Privacy Department, PO Box 2004, Monterey, CA. 93940.

If you have questions or concerns regarding our Privacy Policy, you should contact us at privacy@Home Equity Share.com or at the mailing address or facsimile number shown above.

Last revision date: July 4, 2007