As a customer of American Federal, you provide us with important information about yourself. You are asked to provide us with this information to help us give you better service and complete your transactions more effectively. We believe it is our responsibility to safeguard your personal and financial information. We have no intentions of selling personal information about our customers to third party businesses.
The following privacy policy explains how we use and protect the information about our customers. We ask that you read it carefully.
American Federal collects nonpublic personal information about you from the following sources:
We do NOT disclose any nonpublic personal information about our customers and former customers to nonaffiliated third parties, expect as permitted by law.
We restrict access to your personal and account information to those employees who need to know that information to provide products or services to you. We maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards that comply with federal standards to guard your nonpublic personal information.
American Federal is pleased to offer financial services to customers via the Internet. The Bank understands and shares the concern that customers may have regarding privacy on the Internet and is committed to protection of customer information.
Visitors to the American Federal web site remain anonymous. We do not collect personal identifying information about Web site users, unless you choose to provide such information to us. This information is used internally, as appropriate, to handle the sender's request and manage the American Federal Web site. It is not disseminated or sold to other organizations.
We may ask customers for personal information when the Bank's web site is used to apply for services. We will ask only for information needed to process applications or provide the services requested. We use a combination of access, authentication, and encryption to create a secure and confidential Internet banking environment and to ensure that information submitted online remains confidential.
For additional security, we recommend that customers conducting business on our Web site log off when leaving our Web site. However, we also "timeout" an Internet Banking session after a specified period of inactivity. This helps to keep others from viewing or continuing Internet Banking acitvity if you leave your PC unattended.
Cookies are small pieces of data that some websites place on a user's hard drive when visiting that site. American Federal's online banking system does not use this type of cookie, and never writes anything to the user's hard drive. Rather, our online banking uses a type of cookie known as a "session cookie", a "non-persistent cookie", or a "pre-expired cookie". These cookies are placed only temporarily and are never stored or saved to the user's computer memory or hard drive. Instead, these cookies are used as part of the stringent security measures in our online banking system. Once the user logs off our online banking site, these cookies expire and are terminated. However, you must set your internet browser to accept cookies to utilize our online banking system.
Customers often communicate with us by e-mail. To efficiently respond to e-mail and to meet legal and regulatory requirements, the bank will preserve the text of e-mail, the e-mail address and our response. We treat information submitted to us by e-mail as confidential and use it only for appropriate business purposes; however, e-mail communications may not be wholly secure from interception.
American Federal recognizes the importance of protecting the personal information of our customers. We maintain procedures designed to protect confidential information about you and your accounts with us
We define personal information as any and all of the information specific to you that you provide us over the Internet or through any other means. This includes personal data as varied as the information you enter into an online application for the Bill Pay Service, questions you may ask via e-mail or personal banking data. We have outlined how we use this information and other information about our Online Privacy Statement in the format of Frequently Asked Questions.
American Federal has the highest regard for the privacy of its customers. We will use personal information only as appropriate in the normal course of our business to provide the products and services you have requested. We will also use this information to provide positive identification of you when you contact us.
Other than under limited exceptions, American Federal's practice is not to share or sell confidential customer information with third parties for marketing or nonfinancial independent use. Maintenance of confidentiality is our standard practice and you do not need to request it. The limited exceptions under which we share confidential customer information with third parties apply only when we are legally required to do so or when we are legally permitted to do so. For example, we are required to share information about you and your products and services with us with parties with whom you are engaged in a lawsuit when we are served with a subpoena or court order. We are also required to share this information with federal or state regulatory authorities as authorized by federal or state law. Consistent with the practice of other financial institutions, we also share certain information about you with reputable credit reporting agencies as authorized by federal law.
We may share personal information with business vendors and service companies only if that information is required to provide the product or service you have requested. For example, in order to receive your ATM/Debit card(s) we provide only the necessary information to the appropriate vendor or service company so that this service can be fulfilled. Our business vendors and service companies are required to adhere to protection and privacy efforts concerning customer information as directed by American Federal and its privacy policies and they must abide by applicable law.
We may also sell business assets, such as mortgage loans or servicing rights. In these cases, we may transfer the related customer information to the purchaser.
American Federal uses multiple levels of security, beginning with the unique user ID and password assigned to each customer. Once connected to the Internet Banking services, your browser uses a secure encryption method to make information entered unreadable during communication with our computers. The systems at our end of the connection are protected by state of the art firewalls and other security measures which act as a virtual information vault for all information and transactions you enter. The technology employed is the same technology that the Department of Defense and other high security government agencies have been using for many years.
