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Privacy Policy

Member Privacy Policy Disclosure

San Mateo Credit Union has always made it a top priority to protect the privacy of our members. That's why SMCU never shares your non-public personal information for the benefit of third parties, nor do we sell our member lists to catalogs, direct mail companies, magazines, or other non-financial service providers.

It has always been our standard to share your information only with carefully selected companies that perform services on our behalf. We work with these companies for specific business purposes and maintain strict confidentiality agreements. Our employees are specially trained in the importance of member privacy. We maintain the highest physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to ensure that your private information is protected at all times.

If you terminate your membership with SMCU, we will not share any of your information except as may be permitted or required by law.

Protection on Our Web Site

When you browse our web site, www.smcu.org, you do so anonymously; information about you is not collected. Our servers collect only standard non-identifying information - such as date and time visited, IP address, city, state, and country - which is used to compile standard statistics on site usage.

When you access our online banking service, SMCU Online, session cookies are used. Session cookies are necessary for the security of your account and are used for authentication only. "Cookies" are small pieces of information sent by a web site's server to a user; the user's computer may show the information back to the server on subsequent pages or actions. Session cookies end and are no longer valid when the session with the server ends.

SMCU provides hyperlinks as a convenience to you and has no control over the content posted at these web sites, nor does SMCU make any representation as to the content of these web sites. Hyperlinks to other internet resources are to be used by you at your own risk. The content, accuracy, opinions expressed and other links provided by these resources may not be investigated, verified, or monitored by SMCU, and such links are not endorsed by SMCU unless otherwise specifically stated. If you believe that SMCU has provided a hyperlink to a site that contains infringing or illegal content or which makes available cracker tools or other circumvention devices, we ask you to notify SMCU so that we may evaluate whether (in SMCU 's sole discretion) to disable it.

Information We Gather

SMCU is here to serve you and to meet all your financial needs. Sharing the information with carefully selected business partners enables us to:

Process your transactions
Follow your authorized instructions
Offer you valuable opportunities
Conduct our credit union operations
Protect the security of our financial records

In these instances, we may disclose non-public personal information to relevant third-party companies. In every instance, we ensure these organizations maintain strong confidentiality protections on your behalf.

It may be required that we share information about you with others to complete your transactions and provide you with personalized products and services. Information we disclose about you may come from several sources:

  • Membership and loan applications, as well as other forms that contain details such as your name, address, social security number, and income
  • Financial transactions, which indicate account balances, payment history, and credit card usage
  • Financial companies, such as insurance companies or government agencies
  • Non-financial companies, such as consumer reporting agencies
  • Regulators, auditors, examiners, or other government officials, as legally required
  • Verification of information which you provide on an application, such as that confirmed by employers or other financial institutions
  • Information obtained from census forms

Your Choices Regarding Privacy

A financial information privacy law has been designed to protect you, the consumer, by offering a means to prevent your information from being sold or inappropriately shared with others. It's called "opting out," and it allows you to formally request that SMCU not sell your personal data. Again, SMCU never sells or shares your non-public personal information for the benefit of third parties - even before this opt out law was written.

1. No Action Required

SMCU never sells or shares your personal information. This disclosure is for your information, and you may want to retain it for your records.

2. Opting Out

Although selling information is something we never do, you have the opportunity to formalize this policy by selecting to opt out. By selecting to opt out, you request SMCU to not share your non-public personal information.

Please be aware that if you decide to opt out, SMCU will continue to share non-public personal information with companies that perform services on our behalf. Please see the section entitled "Information We Gather" regarding how this information is used. Choosing to opt out will not apply to the following:

Disclosures that are legally permitted
Disclosures made to companies that perform services on behalf of SMCU
Disclosures to other financial partners with whom we have joint marketing agreements

If you have a joint account with SMCU, it is necessary to submit only one opt-out notice. This privacy request may be made by any owner, and will remain in effect until you inform us otherwise. Opting out can be done at any time, and can be accomplished in several ways:

Complete and mail the Opt-out form. (Available online by clicking here)

Call us at (650) 363-1725.

Fill out an Opt-out form in any branch.

If you wish to stop receiving unsolicited credit card offers in the mail, call 888-567-8688 toll-free and follow the recorded prompts.

Keep documents containing personal information in a safe place, or shred them when they are no longer needed.


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