Your Privacy at iGolder

"We treasure your privacy like gold"

 

All your transactions at iGolder are private and confidential.  We do not disclose any particulars or details unless compelled to do so by a court order of competent jurisdiction regarding a criminal activity, or if we believe in good faith that the disclosure of personal information is necessary to prevent a criminal activity, or to investigate violations of our Account Agreement.  In the case of a criminal investigation, the law enforcement agency must strictly abide by our criminal procedure rules.  We do not comply with fishing expeditions, where a government agency may ask for account information without a court order of proper jurisdiction.

 

iGolder respects your privacy.  We keep your name and address private and confidential - we will use your name and address only to send you a 6-digit PIN when you decide to upgrade your account to become a Verified Member.  We will never share or query a third party database for validating your name and/or address.

 

We will never sell, rent, or share any of your personal information to or with anyone.  For instance, we use our in-house mailing software to send our newsletter to make sure your email address is never compromised.  Also, there is absolutely no outsourcing of any member information to a third party “help desk” vendor or an offshore facility. Our privacy goes beyond protecting your personal information; we do not disclose aggregate statistics, such as visitor demographics, transaction volumes and how many members joined iGolder.  We believe such statistics are fun and entertaining; however, they represent a privacy and security issue.

 

Your Privacy as a Visitor

We consider ourselves to be privacy fanatics and we believe that distrusting politicians and bureaucrats is a healthy habit.  Since the government and the ISPs collude to spy on us, we encrypt all our pages using the strongest encryption available.  ISPs receives billions of taxpayer's money for spying on us, sharing our private information with bureaucrats, all acting in their self-interests and craving for more taxpayer's money.  It is very likely your ISP records every website your visit, every web page URL you read, every email you send and receive, and how much time you spend on each activity.  By encrypting all pages at iGolder.com, your ISP will not be able to know which URL you visited on our website.  For instance, you may have spent your time watching an educational video in our multimedia section, or listened to an MP3 interview in our audio section, downloaded an eBook about gold, visited our online directory, made a transaction with someone else, or just verified your balance.  Because all our network packets are encrypted, your ISP can only record the IP address with the date & time the network packet was transmitted.  This information is almost useless because many websites may share the same IP address, thus making the recording of the IP address an unreliable method for spying Internet activity. Also, a brief visit to iGolder can easily generate thousands of network packets, making it very expensive for the ISP to log the IP address of every network packet.  As an extra precaution, we will make sure our IP address changes often, rendering the ISP logs almost meaningless and extremely difficult to analyze.  In the end, spying is all about economics: the spying agents are trying to maximize their return on investment, and the more expensive it is to spy on citizens, the lower the incentive to continue spying.  Spying stops when it becomes more expensive than the benefits it provides.

 

Of course, encrypting every bit of information requires more processing, however the benefits are worth the extra cost of a more powerful server and a minuscule additional bandwidth.  Encryption also protects your privacy from third party organizations compiling visitor statistics. Websites such as Compete.com or Quantcast.com purchase logs from ISPs to determine top keywords driving traffic and compute visitor demographics by gender, age, education and income.  Many websites love to brag about their visitors, especially regarding education and income, however we prefer to keep a low profile and to fly under the radar.

 

Privacy of Your Email Address

iGolder offers you the option to keep your email address private.  Each sub-account has a field to enter an alias or nickname for doing business.  Also, our private secure messaging allows our members to communicate among each other without revealing their email address.

 

Privacy of Your Feedback Reputation

iGolder maintains a feedback reputation for each member.  Most of the feedback reputation, such as the number of ratings and feedback comments, is kept private with the option of disclosure to another member or on your public profile.  However, your Karma value is always displayed next to your alias.

 

Use of Cookies

Cookies are necessary for maintaining a session when you login to iGolder.  Without cookies, all pages would be static and you would not be able to view your balance nor make any trades.  We also use cookies to optionally remember your login name so you do not have to re-enter it each time you visit iGolder.  However, for security reasons, we never store your password in a cookie.

 

Fraud Prevention

In order to combat fraud, we have to record everything from your IP address to your transaction history.  We retain such information for five years in case of a criminal investigation.

 

No Third Party Statistics

Because of privacy concerns, we do not use any third party tools to compile visitor statistics.  Instead, we use our own in-house software to analyze our logs and compile statistics about the popularity of our web pages so that we can improve our website according to the preferences of our members.

 

Information Safety

We take great care to keep your private information safe and secure.  We use encryption before writing sensitive information to disk and we archive our encrypted logs to a secret remote server.  We keep at minimum the amount of data we retain on the main server iGolder.com, thus reducing the incentive to steal private data, and reducing potential damages in case the database is stolen.  Also, keeping a lean database gives a great performance boon.

 

iGolder goes the extra mile and implements numerous security features to protect your account from unauthorized access.  We encourage you to read our Security Features to realize how much we care about keeping your account secure.