Prosper Privacy Policy

Welcome to Prosper. We strongly believe that consumers deserve the utmost respect when it comes to the privacy of their personal information. Our privacy policy applies to all current and former Prosper members. Following is a summary of Prosper's privacy practices. Click on any of the topics below or scroll down to get more details.

We collect information about you:

Directly from you as a community member at the time of registration.
Periodically as you update your profile information.
From outside sources such as credit bureaus in order to offer you the services you request through this web site.
Through feedback from other users of Prosper with whom you may conduct business.

We share your information:

With other members of Prosper, but only as much information as you choose to reveal about yourself.
With WebBank, a Utah-chartered Industrial Bank, if you register as a borrower and request a loan. Click here for a copy of WebBank's privacy policy.
With other third parties that are involved in the process of providing the services that you request, such as credit bureaus, customer service providers, and collection agencies.
As permitted or required by law.
Prosper does not sell or rent your information to third parties for marketing purposes.

We give you choices regarding your information:

You have choices about the personal information you display about yourself.
We give you easy access to update your personal profile and view your transaction documents.
You can update your personal preferences at any time.

We share and display certain credit and loan status information:

We display borrower listings publicly on the Prosper web site.
Registered Prosper lenders are able to view additional credit data from credit bureau files of borrowers.
We display payment status information on loans.
We notify group leaders of the delinquencies on group members' loans.
We notify your Prosper friends who bid on your listing of the delinquencies on your loans.
We notify group leaders and bidding lenders of cancellations of your listings.

We protect your information:

Using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption technology to protect your personal information that you submit to Prosper.
By limiting employee and third party access to your personal information on a "need to know" basis.

Links to other important information:

Marketing preferences
Our use of cookies
Our use of web beacons
Third party links on this web site
Application Programming Interface (API) service
Helpful tips on protecting your information

You can give us feedback or submit questions at any time by sending email to privacy@prosper.com.

Note Regarding Children Under 18

Members of the Prosper community must be U.S. Residents that are 18 years of age or older. Children under the age of 18 are not eligible to participate in the offerings on this web site.

We collect information about you

Prosper collects personal information as part of the registration process for people joining the Prosper community. This information includes name, email, address, and telephone number. We may collect your social security number and driver license number in order to help determine your credit grade and verify your identity. If you have a question regarding our services prior to registering as a community member, we may collect your name and email address in order to respond to your requests.

Each member has their own community member page, where they may post information about themselves. If you post a listing as a borrower, the listing will contain basic information regarding your credit grade and other financial information, in addition to any other information you make the personal decision to post. You will be identified only by your screen name, which you choose and which you can use to remain anonymous. If you provide identifying information, either in your choice of screen name or otherwise, it is your choice, and you do so at your own discretion.

We use your name and social security number to request a credit report. We use information from your credit bureau file to verify your identity, protect against fraud, and provide Prosper lenders with a more complete picture of a borrower's credit history.

We use your information to prepare your lender or borrower profile and to facilitate requested transactions in the Prosper community. This includes:

Obtaining credit information in order to determine your credit grade.
Communicating with financial service companies to facilitate automatic payments, loan sales, and other services in order to complete your transactions.
Assisting members in completing transactions with other members, including arranging email contacts and collection services if necessary.

If we have trouble processing a transaction, we may use this information to contact you.

A sense of community is what makes Prosper a unique lending source. That's why we ask for feedback from community members about groups and people with whom they interact in transactions.

We share your information

Because Prosper is a community-oriented marketplace, it is important that borrowers and lenders have sufficient information about each other in order to consider transactions. You are welcome to share as much information about yourself as you think is necessary and appropriate. Such sharing of information is entirely your choice, and you share this information at your own discretion.

If you choose to ask someone to be in your network of Prosper friends, or if you choose to use our referral service to tell a friend about our web site, we will ask you for your friend's email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the web site. We store this information for the sole purpose of sending this one-time email and tracking the success of our referral program. Your friend may click on the unsubscribe link at the end of the email to prevent Prosper from sending additional email to his or her email address.

All loans originated through the Prosper marketplace are made to borrowers by WebBank, and if you request a loan your information will be shared with WebBank. Click here for a copy of WebBank's privacy policy.

We have relationships with other trusted third parties that perform services on our behalf. This includes credit bureaus, customer service agents, and collection agencies. We share information with these service providers in order to complete the transactions that you request. All service providers are bound by contract to maintain the confidentiality of your personal information.

We may share your information with law enforcement or other government agencies as required by law.

Prosper does not sell or rent your personal information to third parties for marketing purposes.

We give you choices regarding your information

Some information is required in order to participate in the Prosper community. For example, we need certain information in order to verify your identity as an individual and establish your credit grade.

Some information is optional, such as details about your loan request or personal hobbies. You can share as much or as little optional information as you like. Borrower listings must not include any personally identifiable information, but otherwise the information you choose to share in a listing is entirely your own choice, and you share this information at your discretion. Groups may request more information from you when you request to join their group, and lenders may request information from you if you post a listing as a borrower. It's your choice to share information when borrowing, or requesting admission to a group.

You have the ability to view the loan agreements and other documentation you may have in place in connection with your activities as a borrower, lender or group leader. These documents are accessible through your member account page when you log in.

You can access and review the personal information you submit at any time. To update your personal profile information, you can log in to your account using your email address and password specified at the time of registration. Click on the "Profile" section of "My Account" and make changes to you profile as necessary.

We give you the opportunity to "opt-out" of having your personally identifiable information used for certain purposes. For example, you can elect not to receive newsletters, promotional material, emails from other Prosper members, event notifications, research or surveys, and group leader notifications. You can opt out of receiving these communications, or you can view or change your account opt-out preferences, by going to "My Account > Preferences". There are some messages you cannot opt out of, typically for security or legal reasons. Examples of these include messages regarding fund transfer activity with your accounts, notifications regarding upcoming payments, certain changes to legal agreements, and required loan disclosures.

The information we collect from you when you register as a Prosper member is kept securely in our database. We retain this information to satisfy legal requirements such as recordkeeping and tax and credit reporting requirements, as well as for purposes of fraud prevention, auditability and data integrity.

We share and display certain credit and loan status information

If you register as a borrower and create a listing, we display your listing – including your screen name, Prosper credit grade, debt-to-income ratio, and the narrative description you prepared for your listing – publicly on the Prosper web site. Registered Prosper lenders are able to also view the following additional credit data based on your credit bureau file:

The number of accounts on which you are currently late on a payment; this includes any unpaid charge-offs or other derogatory balances.
The total past-due amount you owe on all delinquent and charged-off accounts;
The number of 90+ days past-due delinquencies in your credit file in the last 7 years.
The number of negative public records on your credit file over the last 12 months, and over the last 10 years; negative public records include, among other things, bankruptcies, liens, and judgments.
The month and year your first recorded credit line was opened; credit lines may include, among other things, revolving, installment, and mortgage credit.
The total number of credit lines appearing in your credit file, along with the number that are open and current; credit lines may include, among other things, revolving, installment, and mortgage credit.
The total balance on all of your open revolving credit lines.
Your bankcard utilization ratio, expressed as a percentage, reflecting the ratio of the total balance used, to the aggregate credit limit on, all of your open bankcards.
The number of inquiries made by creditors in the last six months, as shown in your credit file.
Whether you own a home.

If you obtain a loan as a Prosper borrower, we display loan status information on your loan. We use your screen name to identify your loan; therefore, in order to protect your privacy, you should choose a screen name that does not closely resemble your real name, and you are not permitted to use your real name or other personally identifiable information in your loan listing. If you become fifteen (15) days delinquent on your loan payments, we will notify your group leader and any of your designated Prosper friends who were winning bidders on your loan listing of the delinquency. If your listing is cancelled by Prosper, we notify your group leader and lenders who bid on your listing of the cancellation.

We protect your information

At Prosper, we are committed to maintaining the security and confidentiality of your personal and financial information. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that meet or exceed industry standards for financial institutions.

We protect your sensitive account information by storing it in encrypted form on computers not connected to the Internet. We control access to this information via secure web pages, and limit access to only those employees or third parties on a need to know basis. We do not allow visibility to Social Security number, bank account information, or credit card information via the web site.

We employ firewalls and other security technologies to protect our servers from external attack. We enable our servers with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to establish a secure connection between your computer and our servers, creating a private "conversation" that cannot be viewed or accessed by other parties. We test our systems regularly to insure that our security mechanisms are up to date.

The security of your account also depends on the protection of your Prosper password. You should not share this password with anyone. We have developed procedures for recovering your password which will not require you to send us your password via email or give it out over the phone. If you ever receive an email requesting entry of your email address and/or screen name and password, please confirm that you are on a web site with a URL beginning http://www.prosper.com/ or https://www.prosper.com.

Federal and state regulations may require that we maintain and report aggregate demographic information on members who participate in transactions. We may also maintain information, including personally identifiable information of our members, for a period of seven years or more in accordance with federal and state laws.

Other important information

Marketing preferences

Prosper does not sell or rent your information to third parties or marketing firms. We do send communications to you periodically to notify you of status or events related to your participation in our community. Some of these communications are required as part of transactions you are contemplating or have completed through our web site.

Our use of cookies

Cookies are small text files created by a web site that store information on your computer, such as your preferences when visiting that site. Prosper uses cookies when you sign in, to keep track of your personal session, including some account identifiers so that we can ensure that you are the only person making changes to your account. We also use cookies to track your activity on our site as a unique person. All of this information is stored in an encrypted fashion for security reasons, and no personal information about you is stored.

We use session ID cookies to make it easier for you to navigate our site. Session ID cookies expire when you close you browser. We use a persistent cookie that remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time, so that we can recognize you when you return to our web site. You can remove persistent cookies by following directions provided in your Internet browser's "help" file; however, because we use cookies for our sign-in functionality, if you choose to disable cookies you will not be able to log on to the Prosper web site.

Our use of web beacons

We employ a software technology called clear gifs (a.k.a. Web Beacons/Web Bugs), that help us better understand user interaction with our web site. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user's computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We do not tie the information gathered by clear gifs to our customers' personally identifiable information.

Third party links

Prosper may post links to third party web sites that are not subject to this privacy policy. Some member pages may also contain links unrelated to Prosper. If you visit these web sites, we encourage you to read their privacy policies before providing them with any personal information.

Application Programming Interface (API) service

Many people find value in collecting and measuring certain information provided on the Prosper web site. We offer Prosper API Services in order enable software developers, academic researchers and others to access and interact with Prosper Marketplace data for their lawful purposes – for example, to develop new tools and interfaces that we don't provide on this site. While we do include Prosper screen names, no personally identifiable information is provided or made available to people who use the Prosper API Services.

Helpful tips on protecting your information

Screen name selection: Your screen name is what members of Prosper and visitors to our web site use to identify you. In order to protect your privacy, you should choose a screen name that does not closely resemble your real name.

Password reminder: It is a good practice to select a password for your account that is unique, a combination of letters, numbers and symbols, and isn't predictable or easy to guess. For instance, "Buster" may be your pet's name and easy to remember, but "!Buster1" would be difficult for someone to guess. Another good practice is to change your password periodically (every 90 days).

If you use the Discussion Forums on this web site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We do not monitor or mask personally identifiable information that may appear on the forums, so if you choose to put personal information on the forums you do so at your own risk.

State law

You may have privacy rights under applicable state law in addition to those outlined in this privacy policy.

Notice to Texas residents: Prosper Marketplace, Inc. is licensed and examined under the laws of the State of Texas and by state law is subject to regulatory oversight by the Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner. Any consumer wishing to file a complaint against the Prosper Marketplace, Inc. should contact the Office of Consumer Credit Commissioner through one of the means indicated below: In Person or U.S. Mail: 2601 North Lamar Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78705-4207. Telephone No.: 800/538-1579. Fax No.: 512/936-7610. E-mail: consumer.complaints@occc.state.tx.us. web site: www.occc.state.tx.us.

Changes to this policy

To accommodate changes to our web site, changing technology, and possible legal requirements, Prosper may change this privacy policy at any time. We will promptly post any policy changes to this page and notify our members directly with notice of any material changes.

For additional information, or if you have any questions regarding this policy or the privacy practices at Prosper, please submit your questions or comments directly to privacy@prosper.com via email. Any personal information you submit will be used solely to respond to your requests.

You can also send questions or comments to:

Prosper Marketplace, Inc.
Attn: Privacy Department
111 Sutter Street, 22nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94104

Prosper is a licensee of the TRUSTe Privacy Program. TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to build users' trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. This Privacy Policy covers the web site www.prosper.com. Because we want to demonstrate our commitment to your privacy, we have agreed to have our privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe.

If you have questions or concerns regarding our Privacy Policy, you should first contact us at privacy@prosper.com or at the mailing address shown above. If you do not receive acknowledgment of your inquiry or your inquiry is not satisfactorily addressed, you may contact TRUSTe through the TRUSTe Watchdog Dispute Resolution Process at http://www.truste.org/consumers/watchdog_complaint.php. TRUSTe will serve as a liaison with us to resolve your concerns.

Last revision date: April 15, 2008