Privacy Policy

UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. respects the privacy rights of its (online) users and subscribers and is committed to providing you with a secure online environment. We have adopted an Online Privacy Policy ("Privacy Policy") that guides how we collect, store and use the information you provide us online. If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should contact the Website Administrator at registration(at)unitedwinecellars.com.

This Privacy Policy applies only to the information that UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. collects online, not offline. Please note, also, that this Privacy Policy applies only to the unitedwinecellers website and not to other sites or other companies or organizations to which UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. or its website is linked. When you link to any other sites from the unitedwinecellers website, this policy no longer applies and UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. does not control the activities of those sites.

What information does UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. collect?
You can browse our sites without telling us who you are or revealing any personal information about yourself. Once you give us your personal information, you are not anonymous to us. If you choose to provide us with personal information, you consent to the transfer and storage of that information on our servers located in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

We may collect and store the following personal information:

• email address, physical contact information, and (depending on the service used) sometimes financial information, such as credit card or bank account numbers;
• transactional information based on your activities on the sites (such as bidding, buying, selling, item and content you generate or that relates to your account);
• shipping, billing and other information you provide to purchase or ship an item;
• community discussions, chats, dispute resolution, correspondence through our sites, and correspondence sent to us;
• other information from your interaction with our sites, services, content and advertising, including computer and connection information, statistics on page views, traffic to and from the sites, ad data, IP address and standard web log information;
• additional information we ask you to submit to authenticate yourself or if we believe you are violating site policies (for example, we may ask you to send us an ID or bill to verify your address, or to answer additional questions online to help verify your identity or ownership of an item you list);
• information from other companies, such as demographic and navigation data; and
• other supplemental information from third parties (for example, if you incur a debt to UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V., we will generally conduct a credit check by obtaining additional information about you from a credit bureau, as permitted by law).

Who is collecting my information and how will it be used?
UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. collects the personal information you provide on our site. We will use the information you submit to the unitedwinecellars website to send you advertising or promotional materials should you indicate to wish so. We also use your personal information for our internal marketing and demographic studies, so we can constantly improve the services we provide you and can better meet your needs. We may combine your information with information we collect from other companies and use it to improve and personalize our services, content and advertising (should you have chosen to wish to receive advertisements).

The demographic information (e.g., age and gender) you provide us is collected may be disclosed in aggregate to third parties. This aggregate demographic information cannot be used to personally identify you or your computer. UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. does not sell or rent other personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent.

With whom does UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. share my personal information?
From time to time, UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. may employ and share your personal information with entities who use it solely to provide support for the internal operations of UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. and the unitedwinecellars website. These entities will not use your personal information for any other purpose, and have agreed to maintain the confidentiality, security, and integrity of the personal information they obtain from us.

We may disclose personal information in the good faith belief that we are required to do so by law, including but not limited to disclosure to law enforcement or other government officials in connection with an investigation of fraud, intellectual property infringements, or other activity that is illegal or may expose you or us to legal liability.

In the event of a merger, acquisition, reorganization, bankruptcy, or other similar event UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V.’s customer information may be transferred to UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V.’s successor or assigned, if permitted by and done in accordance with applicable law.

Information You Share on the unitedwinecellars website
Your user information is displayed throughout the unitedwinecellars website (and so available to the public), and is connected to all of your activities on the website. Other people can see your bids, purchases, items for sale, storefronts, feedback, ratings and associated comments, notices sent to other users/members about suspicious activity and policy violations on our sites refer to user information and specific items. So if you associate your name with your user information, the people to whom you have revealed your name will be able to personally identify your activities.

If you access our sites from a shared computer or a computer in an internet café, certain information about you, your activity, reminders from UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. etc, may also be visible to other individuals who use the computer after you.

Using Information from the unitedwinecellars website
UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. enables you to share personal and financial information to complete transactions. We encourage you to disclose your privacy practices and respect the privacy of other users. We cannot guarantee the privacy or security of your information and therefore we encourage you to evaluate the privacy and security policies of your trading partner before entering into a transaction and choosing to share your information. To help protect your privacy, we allow only limited access to other users' contact, shipping and financial information to facilitate your transactions. When users are involved in a transaction, they may have access to each other's name, user information, email address and other contact and shipping information. In all cases, you must give other users a chance to remove themselves from your database and a chance to review what information you have collected about them.

You agree to use user information only for:

• the unitedwinecellars website transaction-related purposes that are not unsolicited commercial messages;
• using services offered through the unitedwinecellars website (e.g. escrow, insurance, shipping and fraud complaints), or
• other purposes that a user expressly chooses.

Cookies and Clear GIFs
UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. uses cookies and clear GIFs to enhance your experience at the unitedwinecellars website. These cookies and clear GIFs let us know how many people are coming to the site (and/or specific parts of it), how frequently, and how they are using the site, allowing us to make updates to content and improve navigation as appropriate.

Cookies are pieces of information that we place on your computer to help us accurately understand how many users are visiting a particular part of the site, how often they visit that site, what content they are most interested in, and how they prefer to shop. To save you the time of re-entering your login information every time you come back to the unitedwinecellars website, UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. may link information contained in a cookie to your email address. We do not use cookies to retrieve information from your computer that we did not originally send in a cookie.

Clear GIFs, sometimes called "Web bugs," are file objects, usually a graphic image such as a transparent one pixel-by-one pixel GIF (Graphics Interchange Format, one of the two most common file formats for images on the Web), that are placed on the unitedwinecellars website or in an e-mail message to monitor user behaviour. The GIF tells us the IP address of the computer that fetched our page, the URL of the page the GIF is on, the time the page was viewed, the type of browser used, and can tell us a previously set cookie value. This anonymous information is returned by the clear GIF to UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. and we use this information to accurately count visitors and understand how they navigate and use our network of sites. UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. does not combine information gathered through clear GIFs with your personal information.

Log Files
Other information passively collected by UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. is in the form of logs - files that record website activity and gather statistics about web users' browsing habits. These entries are generated anonymously, and help UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. determine (among other things) how many and how often users have visited our web site, which pages they've visited, and other similar data. We also use the log file entries for our internal marketing and demographic studies, so we can constantly improve the online services we provide you. Log files are used internally only, and are not associated with any particular user, computer, or browser.

Linking to third party sites
To provide relevant information not found on the unitedwinecellars website and to facilitate online sales, cellar management etc., UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. may provide links from our site to third party websites. UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. will notify users when they are leaving the unitedwinecellars website and we encourage our users to read third party sites' privacy policies before submitting personal information.

To provide users with the ability to comparison shop and purchase online, UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. has affiliate relationships with some of our retail affiliates. We may use cookies and/or clear GIFs (described above) to track shopping behaviour on our sites and on our retail affiliates' sites. No personally identifiable information is tied to this shopping behaviour. Tracking this behaviour helps us better understand user preferences and plan product listings with our affiliates.

Opt-in
If you do want UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. to send you e-mail or regular mail, you can opt-in at the time of registration or at the time of information collection. If you are receiving e-mails or regular mail and at a later date you choose to opt-out and have your name removed from UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V.’s e-mailing list, you can do so by sending an e-mail to registration(at)unitedwinecellars.com. Please note that “welcome” and service e-mail communications are not promotional in nature and, therefore, an opt-in/opt-out is not provided. These are simply to notify the user of a service they recently signed up for or to notify the user of website issues.

Safeguarding your personal information
UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. will only collect personal information to the extent deemed reasonably necessary to serve our legitimate business purposes, and we will take appropriate steps to ensure the security and integrity of any information you provide to us. Any information provided to UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V. on the unitedwinecellars website is housed in a secure data centre, and sensitive information such as credit card numbers are secured using SSL encryption.

Review, update and removal of personal information
If you have registered with our site, you may at any time review and/or update the contact information we have for you or inform us that you want us to remove your information from our database by either visiting the online profile section of one of our sites or contacting us at regular mail and at a later date you choose to opt-out and have your name removed from UNITED WINE CELLARS B.V.’s e-mailing list, you can do so by sending an e-mail to registration(at)unitedwinecellars.com. If you choose to send us an e-mail, please be sure to the e-mail address you used to register so that we can verify your request.

Questions and Complaints
Any questions or complaints about this privacy statement can be addressed by contacting us registration(at)unitedwinecellars.com.

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the home page, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.

We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by e-mail, or by means of a notice on our home page.

For additional information about the unitedwinecellars website, please see our Terms of Use.