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Safety, Privacy, and Terms of Use Agreement
Carpoolworld.com cannot and does not ensure your safety. By using this web site you agree and accept that we have no responsibility for your safety. You must be 18 or over to use this web site, and you may use it only where permitted by law. By using this web site you acknowledge your acceptance of all of the terms of use described on this page.
Carpoolworld.com does provide several features to help ensure your privacy as well as possible in accordance with Internet standards, while collecting from you the information necessary to find carpool matches for you. We will only use your information to help you find carpool partners. Please read below for details.
Carpoolworld.com uses standard Internet technology and practices to ensure the availability and reliability of its web site and to protect the security of the information stored in it. Unfortunately however, disruptions are always possible as a result of accidents or intentional interference. In no event are Carpoolworld.com or its operators liable for any injuries or losses by any party related to the use of this web site.
You must be 18 years of age or older to use Carpoolworld.com. You may not use Carpoolworld.com where it is prohibited. You consent to have us provide your information to the other users of Carpoolworld.com, as described below, to help you find people to share your transportation. Carpoolworld.com confirms email addresses with a registration confirmation code. If your email address is registered on Carpoolworld.com, it means that you or someone else with access to your email account has confirmed your trip information. By using this web site you acknowledge that Carpoolworld.com is not responsible for ascertaining who actually controls the email accounts used in our system.
If another person has posted your personal information, such as address, phone#, email address, or other, on this web site, then please contact us immediately and we will remove the offending information. There is nothing more we can do and we do not accept any liability whatsoever for this type of problem.
Carpoolworld.com provides a service that enables you to contact and meet new people who may have similar transportation needs. Carpoolworld.com cannot and does not ensure the lawful behavior of the people exchanging information through its web site. You take full responsibility for ensuring your personal safety when interacting with other people whom you meet through Carpoolworld.com. Although we have no specific qualifications to advise you on issues of personal safety, the following practices are suggested as examples and illustrations of actions you could take to ensure your personal safety:
- You do not have to disclose your actual home address, work address, or phone numbers, and you do not even have to disclose your permanent email address to other users of Carpoolworld.com. Read below for tips to maximize your privacy.
- Your initial face-to-face contact with new people should be in a common, populated, public location.
- Record the driver's license and car registration information of the other person's car.
- If you are the driver, record the personal information of your riders.
- Maybe you can take a few pictures of your carpool partners and their cars. Give this information to your friends or family.
Carpoolworld.com only requests the minimal information necessary to perform automatic door-to-door carpool matching. Carpoolworld.com only collects your information to provide you with a ride-sharing service. Carpoolworld.com will not provide your information to anyone else, for any other purpose, unless we are lawfully compelled to do so by a legal authority. We will notify our users by email if their private information is disclosed to third parties. Carpoolworld.com does not send spam and does not employ any intrusive advertising techniques. Please note the following specific privacy-related issues and features:
You do not have to use your real name. You identify yourself in our system with any unique login name you desire.
You must provide a working email address. Because we allow other users to send you emails if they think you are a good match for their trip, we will only show your trip to other users if you have confirmed that your email address is functional (we send a confirmation email to that address and you must respond to it). For an added measure of privacy, if you desire, you can get yourself another email address (many free email services are available on other web sites) and use that email address for your carpoolworld.com email.
We do not display your email address to other users (we do not even include it in our .html source). Initial contacts from our matches page, from one user to another, go through our mail server. In this way, the email sender does not see the email address that he has contacted. We record these initial contacts in our mail server history.
The recipient of the email will see the email address of the sender and may or may not respond to the email. If the recipient responds, he must respond directly to the original sender. That email, and all subsequent emails, are transmitted by and between the parties themselves, with no involvement or record by Carpoolworld.com.
We ask you for your home and work addresses. We use these addresses to determine your exact geographic location (latitude and longitude geocode). We never display these addresses to other users. After your addresses are converted into latitude and longitude coordinates (usually done by our system automatically and instantly), you can erase your addresses (to do this, proceed to the matches page after your email confirmation, then click on the link to edit your trip and blank out the address details).
If you find your latitude and longitude coordinates yourself, you can enter them directly without ever entering your addresses into the web site. We recommend that you do not record your addresses into your trip description but we do not prevent you from doing that.
We allow other users to display a map centered on your approximate latitude and longitude coordinates (within 100 yards/meters of your coordinates). Also, you may choose to enter a more general address, such as street name alone without house number, or street intersection, instead of your full address, to get only an approximate geocode. Additionally, after we geocode your exact street address, you can go back into your trip information and modify your latitude and longitude coordinates directly and 'round them off' to fewer digits of precision. We generally geocode to 6 digits of precision, which is roughly 5 inches or 11 centimeters. You can round off to 3 digits to get a precision of about 1 city block. In general, because our users use a variety of means to provide their geocodes and to edit them manually, it would not be reliable or effective for someone to try to determine your exact location based on the information we make available. Finally, we certainly do not provide more location information than what is available already through a telephone book - in fact, we probably provide less.
We allow you to enter your home and work telephone numbers, and we display this information to the other users. This is optional. The choice is yours to use this feature or not.
We allow you to specify your working hours. Coupled with your home address, this information could theoretically create a vulnerability (someone could plan to rob your home while you are at work). However, because of all the other privacy features described above, we believe the information available in Carpoolworld.com is generally very unlikely to increase your normal level of risk.
In any event, you take full responsibility for your use of Carpoolworld.com, and by using this web site you acknowledge your agreement that Carpoolworld.com has no liability whatsoever for any problem that arises from its use.
We permit you to enter any text that you desire in your trip description. We recommend that you do not provide specific identifying information, but you can provide whatever information you desire. We reserve the right to edit your trip description to ensure appropriate use of the web site according to our own judgment.
Carpoolworld.com reserves the ultimate right to judge acceptable use. Carpoolworld.com may change, delete or de-activate any user's information as required to ensure acceptable use without any liability whatsoever to any party. Your specific freedoms and restrictions are as follows:
You may create, change, de-activate or delete trip information in this web site at any time as needed to help you find other people to share your transportation. You may create multiple trips, but please do not create more than one record for a single trip (do not enter the same trip twice under two different names) because this will clutter the system with duplicate information. If you create a second trip temporarily to 'test' our matching function, please delete one of the trips after your test is completed. If you have more than one trip to match, or if you have one 'standing' trip for your daily commute plus additional trips for one-time events such as cross-country trips, you may create as many trip records as you need (each will require a unique traveler name). If you use the system for one-time trips, please de-activate or delete the trip record after you take your trip.
You must communicate with other users in a civil, polite manner. No abusive language will be tolerated. Carpoolworld.com reserves the right to remove the information for any user who does not comply with the spirit of the Carpoolworld.com community, as judged by the operators of Carpoolworld.com, without any liability whatsoever to any party.
Carpoolworld.com welcomes commercial and/or governmental use of the system by employers, private or public institutions or regional transportation authorities. We also welcome use of our system by transportation companies and organizations including bus services, vanpool services, taxi companies, limousine services, passenger van rental companies, etc.
However, all of these uses, and any use other than non-commercial individual use, must be done under contract with Carpoolworld.com. Carpoolworld.com provides enhanced carpool management features for commercial/governmental use. Information concerning commercial arrangements is available on our web site's Groups information page.
If you have a business that might have a use for our service, please feel free to go ahead and try it out without asking us first, for a live trial. If you like what you see, then please contact us to register for the full service, which is very economical. Also, please keep in mind that registered business users or other groups will also have access to our administrator's functions, which give you more capabilities than just the matching function. Please take a look at our Administrator's Guide for more details about the administration and control features that we provide for carpool group administrators.
Please contact us for additional information, questions or concerns.
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