Privacy

 Privacy Policy

iMahal is committed to safeguarding your privacy online. Please read the following policy to understand how your personal information will be treated as you make full use of our services. This policy may change from time to time so please check back periodically.

 
This policy will explain to you how iMahal deals with the following privacy issues:

¤ What personally identifiable information is collected from you.
¤ What cookies are and how they are used.
¤ How your information is used.
¤ Who is collecting your information.
¤ With whom your information may be shared.
¤ What choices are available to you regarding collection, use, and distribution of your information.
¤ How to change your information.
¤ How iMahal treats your personal financial information.
¤ The kind of security precautions that are used to protect the loss, misuse, or alteration of your information.
¤ What else you should know about your online privacy.
 

What personally identifiable information is collected from you.

iMahal collects information in several ways. Some personal information is gathered when you register. During registration, iMahal asks for your email address, gender, age, country, state, education, and occupation. The more information you volunteer, and the more accurate it is, the better we are able to customize your experience. In addition to registration we may ask you for personal information at other times, including (but not limited to) when you:

  • Enter a promotion sponsored by iMahal.
  • Make a purchase using iMahal.
  • Make travel arrangements using iMahal.
  • Post a classified ad or personal webpage at iMahal.
  • Submit a listing for a website at iMahal.
  • Report a problem with one of our services.

If you contact iMahal we may keep a record of that correspondence. iMahal also occasionally asks users to complete surveys that we use for research purposes. Wherever iMahal collects personal information we make an effort to include a link to this Privacy Policy on that page.
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What cookies are and how they are used.

As part of offering and providing personalized services, iMahal may use cookies to store and sometimes track information about you. A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. Webpages on iMahal where you are prompted to log-in or that are customizable may require that you accept cookies.

Generally, we use cookies to:

  1. Remind us of who you are and to access your account information (stored on our computers) in order to deliver to you personalized service. This cookie is set when you register or sign in and is modified when you sign out of our services.
  2. Estimate our audience size. Each browser accessing iMahal is given a unique cookie which is then used to determine the extent of repeat usage (usage by a registered user versus usage by an unregistered user) and to help target advertisements based on user interests and behavior.
  3. Assist merchants who work with iMahal to track visits to and business at their stores, and to process the items in your shopping basket. This information collected by cookies is sometimes called "clickstream" or "click trail" and may also describe which pages you have seen in each merchant's store.
  4. Track your progress and number of entries in some of our promotions. When an iMahal-hosted promotion uses cookies, the information written to the cookie indicates the person's progress through the promotion, and may be used to track entries, submissions, and status in winning special prizes.
  5. Measure certain traffic patterns, which areas of iMahal's website you have visited, and your visiting patterns in the aggregate. We use this research to understand how our users' habits are similar or different from one another so that we can make each new experience on iMahal a better one. We may use this information to better personalize the content, banners, and promotions that you and other users will see on our website.

Advertising networks that serve ads onto iMahal may also use their own cookies.

iMahal also collects IP addresses for system administration and to report aggregate information to our advertisers. In addition, iMahal iMail may include IP addresses in outgoing mail message headers.
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How your information is used.

iMahal's primary goal in collecting personal information is to provide you, the user, with a customized experience on our website. This includes personalization services, interactive communications, online shopping, and other types of services, most of which are completely free to you. In order to provide services free of charge, we display advertisements. By knowing a little about you, iMahal is able to deliver more relevant advertisements and content, and hence better service, to you.

In our role of delivering targeted advertisements, iMahal plays the middleman. Advertisers give us an advertisement and tell us the type of audience they want to reach. iMahal takes the advertisement and displays it to users meeting that criteria. In this process, the advertiser never has access to individual account information. Only iMahal has access to individuals' accounts. This kind of advertisement targeting is done with banner ads as well as promotional email. You will only receive special offers via email from iMahal if you have indicated in your account preferences that you would like to receive them. You can change your account preferences at any time.

iMahal does research on our users' demographics, interests, and behavior based on the information provided to us upon registration, during a promotion, from our server log files or from surveys. We do this to better understand and serve our users. This research is compiled and analyzed on an aggregated basis. iMahal may share this aggregated data with advertisers or business partners.
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Who is collecting your information.

When you are on the iMahal website and are asked for personal information, you are sharing that information with iMahal alone, unless it is specifically stated otherwise. For example, some iMahal services may be offered in conjunction with a partner company. In order to provide this co-branded service to you, it is necessary for us to share your personal information with our partner company. If data is being collected and/or maintained by any company other than iMahal, you will be notified prior to the time of the data collection or transfer. If you do not want your data to be shared, you can choose not to allow the transfer by not using that particular service.

Promotions that run on iMahal may be sponsored by companies other than iMahal or may be cosponsored by iMahal and another company. Some or all data collected during a promotion may be shared with the sponsor. If data will be shared, you will be notified prior to the time of data collection or transfer. You can decide not to participate in the promotion if you don't want your data to be shared.

Please be aware that iMahal advertisers or websites that have links on our site may collect personally identifiable information about you. The information practices of those websites linked to iMahal are not covered by this privacy statement.
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With whom your information may be shared.

As a general rule, iMahal will not disclose any of your personally identifiable information except when we have your permission or under special circumstances, such as when we believe in good faith that the law requires it or under the circumstances described below. The following describes some of the ways that your information may be disclosed.

Business Partners & Sponsors: iMahal may disclose your personal information to business partners or sponsors, but this is specifically described to you prior to data collection or prior to transferring the data. Some or all data collected during an iMahal promotion may be shared with a sponsor. If personally identifying data about you will be shared, we will tell you before we collect or transfer the data.

Many promotions offer opportunities to request additional information from sponsors. By requesting more information, you give iMahal permission to transfer your personal information to the sponsor so they can fulfill your request. In many instances, only your email address will be shared. If more information will be shared with the sponsor, you will be notified prior to the transfer.

From time to time, you may be offered the opportunity to receive materials or special offers from third parties. If you opt-in to receive information from these third parties, iMahal will (with your permission) share your name and email address with them.

Third Party Data & Data in the Aggregate: Under confidentiality agreements, iMahal may match user information with third party data. Also, iMahal discloses aggregated user statistics (for example, 45% of our users are female) in order to describe our services to prospective partners, advertisers, and other third parties, and for other lawful purposes.

Other: iMahal may also disclose account information in special cases when we have reason to believe that disclosing this information is necessary to identify, contact, or bring legal action against someone who may be violating iMahal's Terms of Service or may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) iMahal's rights or property, other iMahal users, or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities. iMahal may disclose or access account information when we believe in good faith that the law requires it and for administrative and other purposes that we deem necessary to maintain, service, and improve our products and services.
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What choices are available to you regarding collection, use, and distribution of your information.

iMahal may, from time to time, send you email regarding our products and services. In addition, if you indicated upon registration that you are interested in receiving offers or information from iMahal and our partners, we may occasionally send you direct mail about products and services that we feel may be of interest to you. Only iMahal (or agents working on behalf of iMahal and under confidentiality agreements) will send you these direct mailings and only if you indicated that you do not object to these offers. If you do not want to receive such mailings, simply tell us when you give us your personal information.

On some types of iMahal promotions, we will ask for your email address so that we can keep you informed about the status of your entry. When you participate in these types of promotions, you automatically receive promotion-related email, unless you choose the no-email option that some promotions offer. Occasionally these promotion-related email messages may include targeted advertisements.

You also have choices with respect to cookies. By modifying your browser preferences, you have the choice to accept all cookies, to be notified when a cookie is set, or to reject all cookies. If you choose to reject all cookies you may be unable to use those iMahal services that require registration in order to participate.

iMahal does not sell or rent user information to anyone. We will notify you at the time of data collection or transfer if your data will be shared with a third party and you will always have the option of not permitting the transfer. If you do not wish to allow your data to be shared, you can choose not to use a particular service or not to participate in certain promotions or contests.
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How to change your information.

Your iMahal iAccount can be deleted or deactivated, but doing so will result in not being able to access any members-only area of the iMahal network, including your iMahal iMail account (if you have one). Please contact webmaster@imahal.com for further instructions about deleting or deactivating your iMahal account. Residual information will remain within our archive records.


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How iMahal protects personal financial information.

Keeping your personal financial information private is vitally important to us. As with all information, iMahal will never rent or sell your personal financial information. If you use personal financial services from iMahal, we will accept information from your financial institution in an encrypted format and will present it to you from a secure server.

Knowing that you use certain services may help us to offer you better content and advertisements. But as with all personally identifiable information, we do not make this available to any third parties without your permission. Any user statistics that we may provide to prospective advertisers or partners regarding financial product or service usage on iMahal are provided in the aggregate only and do not include any personally identifiable information about any individual user.

Please note that there may be many places on the iMahal website where you can transmit credit card information to complete a purchase transaction or to verify your identity. Any time we ask for a credit card number we transmit that credit card number in an encrypted format. We use industry-standard, SSL (secure socket layer) encryption.
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The kind of security precautions that are used to protect the loss, misuse, or alteration of your information.

Your iMahal iAccount is password-protected so that you and only you have access to this personal information. You may edit your iMahal iAccount by using your iMahal user name and password.

We recommend that you do not divulge your password to anyone. iMahal will never ask you for your password in an unsolicited phone call or in an unsolicited email. Also remember to sign out of your iMahal account and close your browser window when you have finished your work. This is to ensure that others cannot access your personal information and correspondence if you share a computer with someone else or are using a computer in a public place like a library or cyber cafe.

As a global company iMahal has users all over the world. When you give iMahal personal information, that information may be sent electronically to servers outside of the country where you originally entered the information, such as to the United States or other countries. In addition, that information may be used, stored and processed outside of the country where you entered that information. Whenever iMahal handles personal information as described above, regardless of where this occurs, iMahal takes steps to ensure that your information is treated securely and in accordance with the relevant Terms of Service and this Privacy Policy.

Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your personal information, iMahal cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information you transmit to us or from our online products or services, and you do so at your own risk. Once we receive your transmission, we make our best effort to ensure its security on our systems.
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What else you should know about your online privacy.

Please keep in mind that whenever you voluntarily disclose personal information online - for example on discussion boards, through email, or in chat rooms - that information can be collected and used by others. If you post personal information online that is accessible to the public, you may receive unsolicited messages from other parties in return.

Ultimately, you are solely responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your passwords and/or any account information. Please be careful and responsible whenever you are online.
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