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Why We Need to Know About You
We need to know about you so that we can provide you with the insurance and other products and services you’ve asked for. We may also need information from you and others to help us verify your identity in order to prevent money laundering and terrorism. What we need to know about you includes your address, age and other basic information. But we may have to know more about you, including your finances, employment, health, hobbies or business you conduct with us, with other Otterstedt companies (our “affiliates”) or with other companies.
How We Learn About You
What we know about you we get mostly from you. But we may also have to find out more about you from other sources in order to make sure that what we know about you is correct and complete. Those sources may include your adult relatives, employers, consumer reporting agencies, health care providers and others. Some of our sources may give us reports, and they may disclose what they know about you to others.
How We Protect What We Know About You
We treat what we know about you confidentially. Our employees are told to take care in handling your information. They may get information about you only when there is a good reason to do so. We take steps to make our computer databases secure and to safeguard the information we have about you.
How We Use and Disclose What We Know About You
We may use anything we know about you to help us serve you better. We may use it, and disclose it to our affiliates and others, for any purpose allowed by law. For instance, we may use your information, and disclose it to others, in order to:
- Help us evaluate your request for an Otterstedt product or service
- Help us process claims and other transactions
- Confirm or correct what we know about you
- Help us prevent fraud, money laundering, terrorism and other crimes by verifying what we know about you — Help us run our business
- Process data for us
- Perform research for us
- Help us comply with the law
- Audit our business
Other reasons we may disclose what we know about you include:
- Doing what a court or government agency requires us to do; for example, complying with a search warrant or subpoena
- Telling another company what we know about you, if we are or may be selling all or any part of our business or merging with another company
- Giving information to the government so that it can decide whether you may get benefits that it will have to pay for
- Telling your health care provider about a medical problem that you have but may not be aware of
- Giving your information to a peer review organization if you have health insurance with us
- Giving your information to someone who has a legal interest in your insurance, such as someone who lent you money and holds a lien on your policy
Generally, we will disclose only the information we consider reasonably necessary to disclose. We may use what we know about you in order to offer you our other products and services. We may disclose this information (other than consumer reports and health information) to our affiliates so that they can offer their products and services, or ours, to you. Our affiliates include life, car and home insurers, securities firms, broker-dealers, a bank, a legal plans company and financial advisors. In the future, we may have affiliates in other businesses.
We may also provide information to others outside of the Otterstedt companies, such as marketing companies, to help us offer our products and services to you. If we have joint marketing agreements with other financial services companies, we may give them information about you so that they can offer their products and services to you; however, we cannot do this if the state law that applies to you does not allow it. Except for joint marketing arrangements, we do not make any other disclosures of your information to other companies who want to sell their products or services to you. For example, we will not sell your name to a catalog company. And we will not disclose any consumer report or health information to other companies so that they can offer their products and services, or ours, to you.
How You Can See and Correct Your Information
Generally, we will let you review what we know about you if you ask us in writing. (Because of its legal sensitivity, we will not show you anything that we learned in connection with a claim or lawsuit.) If you tell us that what we know about you is incorrect, we will review it. If we agree with you, we will correct our records. If we do not agree with you, you may tell us in writing, and we will include your statement when we give your information to anyone outside Otterstedt.
How You Can Get Other Material From Us
If you want to know more about our privacy policy, please contact us at our website, www.otterstedt.com, or write to your Otterstedt company, c/o Otterstedt Main Office, 540 Sylvan Avenue, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632
You May Have Additional Rights Under Other Privacy Laws
In addition to any other privacy notice we may provide, federal law has established privacy standards and requires us to provide this summary of our privacy policy once each year. Individuals may have additional rights under other applicable laws.
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