Merced Mutual Insurance Company

About Insurance Information Practices and How Your Right to Privacy is Protected

Like you, we are concerned with your privacy, and its protection.

As our customer, we want you to understand how we gather information, how we protect it, and what are your rights and responsibilities regarding recorded information about you.

Most of the personal information we collect comes from your application. We use this information to help decide whether or not a policy can be issued and for rating purposes. To assist in making necessary business decisions, we may need to obtain additional information about you and any family members who are applying for insurance. This information may be requested from public records, consumer reporting agencies, other insurance coverage, and general reputation.

If we order a consumer report from an independent reporting agency, it will obtain information about you in the same way that we would. That is, it may contact you or persons you know. It may personally inspect your property. The information collected by the agency is retained and later shared with others who use these reports. If we use a consumer reporting agency to prepare a report on you, you have the right to be personally interviewed by it. Information you give the agency during an interview will be included in the report sent to us. If you wish to be interviewed, please tell us how the agency can contact you. Even if you are not interviewed, you have the right to request a copy of the report. Contact us or your agent.

What We Do With Information About You

Information about you will be kept in our policy records. We will refer to and use that information for purposes related to issuing and servicing insurance policies and settling claims.

Without your prior authorization, we may, as permitted by lay, share information about you continued in our files with certain persons or organizations. The types of persons or organization we may share this information with include:

Your agent or sales representative
Adjusters, appraisers, investigators and attorneys
Persons or organizations who need the information to person a business, professional or insurance function for us, such as business that help us with data processing
Other insurance companies, agents or consumers reporting agencies as it is need in connection with any applications, policy or claim involving you
An insurance support organization which is established to collect information for the purpose of detecting and preventing insurance crimes or fraudulent claims
Persons or organizations that conduct actuarial or underwriting studies
Governmental authority as required by law.

How Do We Protect The Confidentiality of Information About You?

Our Company maintains appropriate security standards and procedures to prevent unauthorized access to your information in whatever medium it is stored. We limit employee access to personally identifiable information to those with a business reason for knowing such information. Merced Mutual Insurance Company also believes in educating our employees so that they will understand the importance of confidentiality of personal information, and in taking appropriate measures to enforce employee privacy responsibilities.

How You Can Review Recorded Information about you

You have the right to review recorded information about you contained in our files. If you have any question s about what information wee have on file, please write us. We will need your complete name, address, date of birth, and all policy numbers under which you are insured. Tell us what information you would like to receive. Within 30 business days of receipt of your request, we will contact you and inform you of the nature of recorded information about you in our files. At that time, we will also tell you the identity of the persons or organizations to whom we have disclosed this information in the preceding two years. We will also let you see and copy, in person, such recorded information or we will mail you a copy if you prefer.

There are some kinds of information, however, that we are not required to give you access to. This type of information is generally collected when we evaluate a claim under the insurance policy or when the possibility of a lawsuit exists.

If You Disagree With Our Records

If, after reading the information in your file, you believe it is incorrect, please notify us. Tell us what is inaccurate and why. You have the right to request that we correct, amend or delete information that you feel is incorrect.

Upon receiving your request, we reinvestigate the information you think is incorrect. If we agree with you, we will make the necessary corrections, amendments or deletions. We will also notify persons or organizations to whom we have previously disclosed the inaccurate information of the change. Insurance support organizations to whom we systematically reveal information will also be informed of the change.

If we disagree with you, we will notify you and give your reasons for refusing to correct, amend or delete the information you feel is incorrect. If you are not satisfied by our refusal and the reasons, you have the right to place a statement in our files, explaining why you believe the information is incorrect. In that case, we will ask you to send us a concise statement of what you believe is the correct information and why you disagree with our refusal to correct it. When we receive your statement, we will place it in our file and send a copy of it to persons and organizations to whom we have previously disclosed or systematically disclosed information. If we make any subsequent disclosure of information in your file, we will also disclose your statement.