Visa Solution Privacy Notice
UPDATED: May 23, 2019
The privacy and security of your Personal Information is important to Visa.
This Privacy Notice explains how Visa USA, Inc. and its Affiliates¹ collect, protect and share your Personal Information when you use the “Visa Solution.” Visa Solution means all of the following: Visa Checkout features, functionality and services, now available or added in the future, whether branded as Visa Checkout or a different name, and whether available through the Visa Solution website or mobile site as operated as a domain or subdomain (“Website”) or through an application or functionality offered by an issuing bank or payment institution, merchant, or other third party (“Services”). If you are a resident of Argentina, Brazil, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, please see the Additional Country/Territory-Specific Privacy Notices.
1. What Personal Information is collected
Personal information is any information that can be used to identify, locate or contact you. It may also include other information that can be associated with an identifiable individual. We may collect the following types of Personal Information:
- Contact Information that you provide as part of using the Visa Solution, such as your name, billing address, telephone number, and email address or other addresses that allow us to send you messages.
- Relationship information that helps us do business with you, such as information about the financial institution or other entity that issued your Visa card, shopping and payment preferences, your use of payment methods and your accounts issued by third parties that are linked to the Visa Solution services you use, and similar information that can help us understand you and offer you personalised content and offers.
- Checkout Information when you use the Visa Solution, including information on the merchants you are shopping with, your payment card number, payment card network, expiration date and security code (e.g., CVV2 of your payment card), billing address, the time and date of the transaction, and the amount of the transaction.
- Information about your interactions with the Visa Solution, such as data collected when you:
- Use the Visa Solution (including information collected using Cookies and Other Data Collection Technologies described below to the extent this information is Personal Information);
- Communicate with us, such as if you contact our customer service centres (including recordings of calls for quality and training purposes);
- Participate in promotions or programmes; and
- Opt in or out of marketing or offers, and other activities.
2. How We Collect Personal Information
We collect Personal Information from you and from other sources.
- In many cases, we collect Personal Information that you provide to us as part of using the Visa Solution directly from you. You may share Personal Information with us when you check out using the Visa Solution, register in or activate a card for the Visa Solution, including through a third party, such as a merchant’s website or application, or our website, participate in a promotion, or sign up to receive messages from us. We also collect Personal Information from you when you contact us, such as for customer service purposes, or to interact with us online.
- We receive Personal Information (including Card Transaction Data) from third parties who are authorised to give us information about you. For example, we may collect Personal Information from third party digital wallets, online merchants and other parties that help facilitate the checkout experience when you use the Visa Solution to make an online purchase. As another example, the Visa Solution may integrate with other services or functionalities offered by your issuer, such as an alerts service. If you choose to use such a service, we and your Issuer may collect and share information (such as your mobile phone number for an alerts service) needed to make the service accessible through your Visa Solution account.
- We may collect information from publicly available sources, such as social media sites or census data, when permitted by the site’s terms of service. For example, if you communicate with Visa using Facebook or Twitter, we may receive additional information about you from your profile. As another example, Visa may also monitor social media channels to learn about experiences that Visa Solution users choose to share, and we may respond to users through social media channels.
- We collect information about your interactions with the Visa Solution when you visit our website, engage with our online advertisements, or call us. For example, when you use the Visa Solution, Visa, third party digital wallets, online merchants and other parties that help facilitate the checkout experience may collect information by setting and accessing cookies and using similar tracking technologies on your computer or device, as described in the Cookies and Other Data Collection Technologies section below. We treat this information as Personal Information when it is associated with other data elements that allow us to identify, locate or contact you.
- We receive Personal Information (including Card Transaction Data) from other Visa services if we are authorised to do. These services include ones that will, for your convenience, automatically update your payment account numbers, any tokens, and expiration dates, and delete invalidated cards, if your issuer participates in such a service.
3. How we use Personal Information
We primarily use your Personal Information to provide the Visa Solution to you. We may use your Personal Information to:
- Fulfil your requests;
- Enable you to check out using the Visa Solution or enhance your Visa Solution checkout experience, including for related purposes, such as authentication, fraud prevention and dispute resolution;
- Generate anonymised and aggregated datasets that can be used for modelling, reporting and analytics, such as to analyse payment, transaction or similar trends;
- Contact you about Visa Solution, including new features and Services, where lawful. For example, we will email you administrative information, which may include information about changes to the Terms of Service and this Privacy Notice, password reset information when needed, or information about new aspects of Visa Solution. This may include Visa contacting you by text (SMS) messages about the Visa Solution, as permitted by applicable law;
- Contact you about Visa promotions or services, including the Visa Solution, if you have given your consent or as otherwise permitted by applicable law; and
- Accomplish our business purposes, including to understand how you use our products, content and services; for analytics and product development purposes; to develop new products and services; (where appropriate) to personalise the offers that we make you and the Visa Solution checkout experience; to personalise, enhance, improve, or modify our current products and services, including the Visa Solution; for fraud and security monitoring purposes, for example, to detect and prevent cyberattacks or attempts to commit identity theft; to identify usage trends, for example, understanding which parts of the Visa Solution are of most interest to users; and to determine the effectiveness of our promotional campaigns, so that we can adapt our campaigns to the needs and interests of our users.
4. Why Personal Information is disclosed to others
We disclose your Personal Information as follows:
- To merchants and other third parties that help facilitate the Visa Solution checkout experience or otherwise support your use of the Visa Solution to complete the actions you initiate using the Visa Solution, which may include, for example, completing a transaction, facilitate shipping, resolving a dispute, signing up for a promotion, helping prevent fraud, providing customer service, and card-on-file storage;
- For your issuer to authenticate and process your transactions, to operate any issuer services accessible through the Visa Solution, to report how you use your payment card in the Visa Solution (including whether it is selected as your preferred card) and to enable your issuer to provide customer service, usage analysis, fraud prevention, and Visa related promotions (based on your preferences with your issuer);
- In some countries/territories, we may share your Personal Information with certain third-party digital wallets when we offer you the option to link to such digital wallets and you choose to do so. If this option is offered, you will have a choice whether to share Personal Information, including payment card information, between the Visa Solution and a given third party digital wallet. (Note that purchases made online using the Visa Solution with third-party digital wallets may not be “tokenised”. This means these transactions, like other Visa Solution transactions, may result in the sharing of payment card information with merchants.);
- Among Visa Affiliates to develop, operate and improve products and services, to facilitate customer service, to comply with legal obligations, and for other uses described in this Privacy Policy;
- To our Service Providers² to facilitate the services they provide us, who are required to only use your Personal Information in accordance with our instructions; and
- To provide address auto-fill functionality, where available. Your mailing address, IP address and the string of characters you enter may be provided to and stored by Google Inc. Please note that Google may process this information for its own purposes in accordance with Google’s privacy policy and users are subject to Google Maps/Google Earth Additional Terms of Service.
5. Other Uses and Disclosures
We also use and disclose your Personal Information as necessary or appropriate:
- To comply with applicable laws and regulations, including laws outside your country of residence;
- To cooperate with public and government authorities, including authorities outside your country of residence;
- To cooperate with law enforcement requests;
- For other legal reasons, such as to enforce our Terms of Service; to protect our rights, privacy, safety or property, and/or that of our Affiliates, you or others; to allow us to pursue available remedies or limit the damages that we may sustain; and in connection with a sale or business transaction.
Please note that we may also use and disclose information about you that is not personally identifiable for any purpose, except where we are required to do otherwise under applicable law. For example, we may publish reports and provide products that contain non-personally identifiable statistical data, such as reports showing general payment card usage trends. These reports do not contain any Personal Information.
6. Cookies and other data collection technologies
Cookies
When you visit the Visa Solution, Services, Websites or engage with the Visa Solution online ads or email communications or subscriptions, Visa and our Service Providers may collect certain information by automated means, using technologies such as cookies and similar tracking technologies. This information may include how you use the Visa Solution—for example, what pages you visit, how frequently you use the Visa Solution, how many and what types of cards you have registered in or activated for the Visa Solution, and the types and frequency of Visa Solution online checkouts you begin or complete.
In many cases, the information Visa and our Service Providers collect using cookies and other tools is only used in a non-identifiable way, without any reference to Personal Information. For example, we use the information we collect about all website users to optimise the Visa Solution and to understand website traffic patterns. In some cases, we also associate the information we collect with your Personal Information using cookies and other technology. This Privacy Notice describes how we use that information when we associate it with your Personal Information.
Many internet browsers allow users to send a “Do Not Track” signal to websites they visit. The Visa Solution has no mechanism to respond to such a signal.
Please refer to our Cookie Notice for more information.
Device information
Visa and our Service Providers may also use device-related information to authenticate that a user attempting to use the Visa Solution is actually the registered user. For example, we may use your IP address, browser information, or other data provided by your browser or device to identify the device being used to access the Visa Solution. When you use device-related authentication techniques, such as fingerprint authentication through your device, the Visa Solution does not receive biometric data about you.
How Can You Manage Cookies?
You may opt out of Site Experience, Performance & Optimization, Social Networking and Marketing Cookies. Please be aware that if Site Experience, Performance & Optimization, Social Networking, or Marketing Cookies are disabled, not all features of the Visa Solution website may operate as intended. Essential Cookies are required for use of the Visa Solution website.
You may also refuse or accept most cookies that may be placed by the Visa Solution website by activating settings on your browser. Information about the procedure to follow in order to enable or disable cookies can be found on your Internet browser provider’s website via your help screen. You may wish to refer to http://www.allaboutcookies.org (available in English, Spanish, French, and German) for information on managing cookies.
Different web browsers may use different methods for managing cookies. Please follow the instructions below, from the web browser manufacturers directly, to configure your browser settings.
- Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE)
- Google Chrome
- Safari
- Firefox
If you want to clear all browser cookies left behind by the websites you have visited, you may be able to download programs from third-party software providers (for example: http://www.lavasoft.com or https://www.safer-networking.org) to do so.
Please note that Visa is not affiliated with, and does not control or endorse, any of the third-party websites listed and is not responsible or liable for them, their content, or any aspect of their software or services.
7. Third party advertising companies and browser tracking information
When you use the Visa Solution, other parties providing services to us may set and access cookies and similar tracking technologies on your computer or device in order to collect information about your online web-browsing activities over time and across different websites and services (including online or cloud computing services and online applications) or mobile applications as described in this Privacy Notice. Visa may engage third parties to serve advertisements that may be of interest to you, based on information that such parties have collected about your visit to the Visa Solution websites and third-party websites and applications. For example, we may use third party advertising networks to serve advertisements to you related to the Visa Solution because you previously used the Visa Solution or visited a Visa Solution website (a behavioural advertising practice sometimes called “retargeting”).
For Australia, Canada and the United States: We have adopted the use of the AdChoices icon, which may appear on the footer of the Visa Solution login page and on certain targeted ads that you may see. You may click on this AdChoices icon to learn more about the collection and use of your information or to opt out of such collection in the future. Please keep in mind that: (i) you will need to opt out on each browser on each of the computers or devices that you wish to exclude; and (ii) even if you opt out, you may still receive ads that are not customised for you.
In addition, you may be able to take advantage of the tool to opt out out of interest-based advertising developed by the Network Advertising Initiative and the Digital Advertising Alliance. Where available, this tool provides a list of parties that may target advertisements based on your online web-browsing activities and the ability to opt out of their use of your information for that purpose.
8. Your Choices
You can unregister from the Visa Solution by following the instructions in the Customer Support section of the relevant Visa Solution website. Once you unregister, you will no longer be able to access, via the Visa Solution, the cards you had registered or activated. Even if you have unregistered, we still may retain and use your Personal Information to comply with law, prevent fraud, resolve disputes, and take other actions as permitted by law.
If you sign up for the Visa Checkout Email Subscription described in the Terms of Service, each promotional email will include a link allowing you to unsubscribe from the Email Subscription and may include a link to adjust your promotional email preferences, including an option to tell us more about yourself and your interests. (We may use any preference information you provide to help us tailor the promotional emails you receive).
Some promotions you receive may have additional privacy notices. Be sure to review any such additional terms, disclosures, and/or requirements before you choose to participate in such promotions.
If you subscribe to or access other services through the Visa Solution that are operated by your Issuer or another third party, those services may offer different ways of making choices. For instructions on how to make those choices about those services, please consult the applicable terms and privacy policy.
9. Access and correction
You can review and edit your Personal Information at any time by accessing the relevant Visa Solution website. You have the right to request access or make corrections to any of your Personal Information not available this way. To do so, please contact us using our contact details provided below. We will respond to your request consistent with applicable law. When permitted by law, we may charge you a reasonable fee for access.
10. International transfers
Visa is based in the United States and operates a global payment network with Affiliates and Service Providers located outside of your country/territory of residence. As a result, Visa may instruct Affiliates and/or Service Providers located worldwide, including in the United States, Singapore, the United Kingdom or Ireland, to process any Personal Information collected by the Visa Solution at any time after it is collected. Such cross-border transfer is necessary for the provision of the Visa Solution services. However, regardless of where your Personal Information is transferred, we will protect it in accordance with this Privacy Notice and the applicable law.
11. Information security and data retention
We use physical, technical, organisational and administrative safeguards to help protect your Personal Information. For example, we use technologies such as firewalls and encryption to help protect your Personal Information. We will retain your Personal Information for the period necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this Privacy Notice unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law.
12. Privacy notices of third parties
If you sign up or use services operated by your issuer or another third party, such as a merchant or other party that helps facilitate the Visa Solution checkout experience, that may be accessible through Visa Solution, there may be additional or different privacy notices (such as the merchant’s privacy notice) which describe any additional or different data practices that apply to those services. Also, other Visa products and websites have their own separate privacy notices. This Privacy Notice only applies to the Visa Solution.
13. Children's data
The Visa Solution is not directed to individuals under the legal age of majority in their respective countries/territories and we request that these individuals not provide Personal Information to the Visa Solution.
14. Changes to this Privacy Policy
From time to time, we may update this Privacy Notice to reflect new or different privacy practices. We will place a notice online when we make material changes to this Privacy Notice. Additionally, if the changes will materially affect the way we use or disclose previously collected Personal Information, we will notify you about the change. Changes to this Privacy Notice will be made in accordance with the Terms of Service.
15. How to contact Visa's Global Privacy Office
If you have questions or comments about our privacy practices, or would like to exercise your rights in accordance with this Privacy Notice, or have a complaint about our treatment of your Personal Information, please:
- Email us.
- Call us:
- From the United States or Canada: 855.847.2032 (toll-free number)
- From Brazil:
- 0800-047-4060 (international toll-free number)
- 844-565-1162 (toll-free number (EUA))
- 0800-892-0581 (international toll-free number—hearing impaired)
- 855-477-1002 (toll-free number (EUA)—hearing impaired)
- From anywhere: +1 303-967-1041 (worldwide international direct dial; international calling rates apply),
- Send us a letter:
Visa Chief Privacy Officer
900 Metro Center Blvd.
Foster City, CA, 94404 USA
Source:
¹ Affiliates are companies that are directly or indirectly controlled by Visa USA Inc. or its parent company Visa Inc. through ownership — for example, Visa International Service Association, Visa Worldwide Pte. Limited, Visa Canada Corporation, Visa International Servicios de Pago España, S.R.L.,Visa Europe Limited, Visa do Brasil Empreendimentos Ltda.
² Service Provider are third-party vendors. For the purposes of law in the European Economic Area, Service Providers are “data processors”. The names and addresses of current service providers to the Visa Solution that may receive Personal Information are listed at Visa Solution Service Providers, and may be updated from time to time.