Privacy Policy
(Updated February 2012)
1. No disclosure for third party marketing. Mission Asset Fund (MAF) will not rent or sell your personal information to third parties.
2. Information you provide through registration or updates. When you apply to Lending Circles, we collect basic information about you through the registration process – your name, email address, and a means to authenticate your account (for example, a password). You can review and update the account information, at any time, in writing by contacting a designated representative of MAF.
3. Information collected about the Loans that you have borrowed or made (“Loans”). MAF collects information on your Loans, individually (for example, amount of a Loan Total, date of distribution, Loan status) and in the aggregate (for example, number of Loans and the distribution of Loans by gender, geographic location). If you participate in Lending Circles, MAF makes information on these Loans available to you, upon request. MAF will not disclose your personally identifiable Loan information to any third party without your consent. MAF may further publicly display and disclose Loan information, either in a personally identifiable or anonymous manner, for example, as part of the latest activity of any Lending Group in which you may participate, as part of the current activity on the Website and as part of a historical visualization of activity on the Website or in other materials.
4. Integrated third party features. If you use features on the Website or services associated with Lending Circles that are integrated with third party websites or services (for example, Twitter and Facebook) to share information about your activity in Lending Circles (for example, information about recently completed Loan payments or distributions and whether you “like” MAF) through the third party website or service, MAF will share this information with the third party website or service and additional information, if any, that you choose to provide to MAF in order to use these features (for example, your username for the third party website or service). However, MAF reserves the right to withhold or withdraw information related to borrowers to the extent necessary to protect the privacy of borrowers. If you use interactive features on MAF to indicate that you "recommend" a particular feature or listing on MAF, that information will be collected and may be displayed on the Website and furthermore shared on any applicable third party websites and services to which you have authorized such information sharing.
5. Donations. MAF collects information on any donations you make to MAF (whether through the Website or offline) to communicate with you (for example, to provide donation confirmations) via your email address, physical address or through other means of contact that you have chosen to provide to MAF.
6. Customer service. If you contact MAF customer service, we will collect the information you provide (for example, your name, email address, physical address, phone number and question/comment) in order to contact you and address your question or comment.
7. Applications. If you submit an application to MAF (for example, to be an employee, volunteer, borrower or partner), we collect the information you submit (for example, name, phone number, resume, cover letter and position of interest) to assess the application and follow up with you on such submission.
8. Information from third parties. MAF collects your information from third parties to facilitate activities and transactions for the operation of the Website and Lending Circles, improve User experiences on the Website and in the Program and further MAF’s mission.
9. Information from cookies and web beacons. Cookies are small text files created by a website that store information on your computer, such as your preferences when visiting that website. Similar to many websites, if you have enabled cookies in your browser, MAF, independently and through enabled third party tools and programs, collects certain technical information using cookies, such as the path of users to the Website, pages visited, originating IP address, browser type, browser language and the date and time of the user's visit. This information helps MAF track trends and improve areas of the Website and Program, and are common analytics used by most websites. If you have disabled cookies, the Website may not work as it is intended because MAF uses cookies. Web beacons are tiny graphics with a unique identifier that are similar in function to cookies but, instead of being stored on your computer, are embedded invisibly on web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Web beacons are used to track the online movements of internet users and help MAF better understand User interaction and engagement with the Website and Program (including without limitation, in electronic Communications).
10. Electronic communications. From time to time you will receive disclosures, notices, documents and information based on your account information, status or activity (collectively, "Communications") from MAF (for example, confirmations of Loans, confirmation receipts for donations, statements or other information, confirmation of email address or password changes, or customer service inquiries regarding the status of or activity in your account). By participating in Lending Circles, you agree that all Communications from MAF relating to your use of the Website and participation in Lending Circles may be provided or made available to you electronically by e-mail or at the Website. To access the Communications electronically, you will need to use a computer with Internet Explorer 8.0 or above, Chrome 4.0 or above, Safari 4.0 or above, Opera 10.0 or above or Firefox internet browsers and with hardware capable of running these internet browsers. You may withdraw your consent to receive Communications electronically by contacting MAF in the manner described below. However, if you withdraw your consent to receive Communications electronically from MAF (other than for the optional emails), MAF will not have the ability to permit you to borrow or lend any additional Loans. The withdrawal of your consent will not affect the legal validity and enforceability of electronic Communications provided by us in connection with any of your Loans that have not been fully paid, or any electronic Communications provided by MAF prior to the time you withdraw your consent. It is your responsibility to keep MAF informed of any changes in your email address so that you continue to receive all Communications without interruption. By registering for Lending Circles, you acknowledge that you can access the electronic Communications, and you consent to having all Communications provided or made available to you in electronic form and to participate in the Program electronically. We may also provide you with Communications through physical mail.
11. Optional emails. By default, you will receive the following types of emails from MAF, but you can choose not to receive these emails through a preference on the Website or in the email: Loan notifications, lending notifications, MAF news, Loan updates, and partner messages. MAF will not disclose your email address to other borrowers or lenders.
12. Disclosure to affiliates, service providers, agents and representatives. MAF’s affiliates and service providers, agents and representatives of MAF and its affiliates may be provided access to your personally identifiable information as part of, or incident to, their provision of services to MAF (for example, processing Loan transactions, distributing MAF emails and credit bureau reporting). All such access shall be under appropriate confidentiality agreements and limited to use to provide services to MAF to help MAF further its mission.
13. Disclosure of non-personally identifiable data. MAF reserves the right to disclose information that does not directly identify you, for example, aggregated or anonymized data, for educational, informational or promotional purposes in furtherance of MAF’s mission.
14. Legal disclosures. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Privacy Policy or the Terms of Use, you acknowledge, consent and agree that MAF may disclose information in order to: (a) comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request; (b) protect the rights, property and safety of MAF, Users and others, including intellectual property rights; and (c) enforce or apply our agreements and policies.
15. Use of your information. In addition to the uses (including display and disclosure) of your information that we have described above in this Privacy Policy, MAF uses your information that MAF has collected as described above in this Privacy Policy in order to facilitate activities and transactions for the operation of the Website and Program, improve User experiences on the Website and in the Program (for example, to personalize the content provided to you on the Website and to enhance connections between partners and lenders) and further MAF’s mission.
16. Links to other websites. If you follow any links which remove you from the Website (for example, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and any websites that use data from our API), this Privacy Policy no longer applies – i.e., the privacy policies and practices of other websites and other parties are governed by their respective terms of use and privacy policies. Please note that electronic payment processing for (i) loan disbursements or (ii) loan payments from a Borrower’s account to MAF’s account is provided by the third-party payment processing provider, Citibank.
17. Note regarding children under 18. The Lending Circles program is intended to be used by adults. It is not intended for children, and MAF does not want to collect any personal information for persons who are under the age of 18. MAF recommends that parents do not post, or permit others to post, any personally identifiable information with respect to persons under the age of 18. If you believe that we have any information from a child under age 18, please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
18. Security. MAF takes reasonable steps to maintain appropriate physical, technical and administrative security to help prevent loss, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure and modification of personal information. While we take these reasonable efforts to safeguard your personal information, no system or transmission of data over the Internet or any other public network can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.
19. Location of data. MAF is headquartered in the USA. Your personal information may be accessed by MAF, our affiliates, service providers, agents and representatives in the USA or elsewhere in the world. By providing us with personal information, you consent to this transfer. MAF will protect the privacy and security of personal information according to this Privacy Policy regardless of where the personal information is processed or stored.
20. Retention period. MAF reserves the right to retain your personal information for a period of seven years or more to satisfy legal requirements such as recordkeeping and tax and credit reporting requirements, as well as for purposes of fraud prevention, audit and data integrity. In addition, MAF reserves the right to retain, as well as to use and disclose as permitted pursuant to this Privacy Policy, your personal information for such period of time as reasonably needed by MAF to facilitate activities and transactions for the operation of the Website and Program, improve User experiences on the Website and in the Program and further MAF’s mission. MAF reserves the right to retain information that does not directly identify you, for example, aggregated or anonymized data.
21. Modifications; Interpretation. MAF may update or modify this Privacy Policy from time to time. If any changes are made, MAF will reflect the date on which any such changes are made and posted by updating the "last updated" date at the top of the page. Please be sure to check this page periodically for changes. Capitalized terms used but not defined in this Privacy Policy have the meanings set forth in the Terms of Use.
22. How to contact MAF. We take privacy seriously and we value yours. For additional information, or if you have any questions regarding this Privacy Policy or the privacy practices at MAF, please submit your questions or comments directly to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. via email. You can also send questions or comments to:
Mission Asset Fund
Attn: Privacy Policy
2301 Mission Street #303
San Francisco, CA 94110
