Catholic Home Loan, a national lender, offers numerous mortgage products. This section explains how Catholic Home Loan protects and uses your information in a safe, secure and responsible manner. We offer you products at a lower cost or with greater convenience by sharing limited information with carefully selected business partners.

We strive to safeguard your data. We do this by: • setting policies and procedures for carefully handling your information; • limiting employee access to sensitive information; • protecting against unauthorized access to customer data using data encryption, authentication, and virus detection technology; • requiring service providers who do business with Catholic Home Loan to comply with privacy laws; • auditing company security practices; • conducting background checks on all employees and providing privacy training.

Our systems automatically switch to "secure" mode when you are asked to enter personal information on our website (such as your loan number, account number or social security number). To keep your data safe, we use: • Encryption and authentication technology • Website design that blocks or limits online display of customer information when not necessary to the transaction • User IDs and passwords to protect customer information.

We design many features of our website so new visitors may anonymously learn about our products and services, view today’s rates and use our educational tools without revealing their identity. For new visitors, we use cookies and Web beacons to collect limited data (such as the date, time and areas of our website visited and the website the new visitor came from). When you select one of our products or services, review your accounts online or respond to marketing materials sent to you directly, we will try to identify your browser and may combine information from "cookies," Web beacons and other information collected online with any other data we maintain about you. By improving the marketing and content of our website and making your online experience more convenient, we are able to better serve our customers' financial needs.

To make products available, often at a savings to you, we may prudently share some customer and former customer non-public personal information with business partners under an agreement requiring the partner to keep the information confidential and only use it for those offers.

To fund and service your loan, comply with government regulations, improve our products and services, and better understand your financial needs, we collect and maintain customer and former customer data. We collect information: • you provide us on applications and other forms (such as your name, address, phone, Social Security and account numbers, assets, income and employment history); • about your transactions with us (such as your loan balance, payment history and other account information); • about your credit history from a credit reporting agency; and • about you and/or your property from business partners and service providers (such as a property appraisal, purchase contract or membership number). We disclose some of this data to third parties (such as credit reporting agencies, regulators and loan investors). We may share some of this information with companies performing services on our behalf. These service providers agree to keep the information confidential and not use it for any other purpose.

Recent versions of most internet browsers support the encrypted transmission of on-line documents and the data you enter on a web page. This means that instead of sending readable text, both your browser and the website's secure server encode all text using a security key. That way, personal data sent to your browser or data you send back would be extremely difficult to decode in the unlikely event it was intercepted by an unauthorized party. The key used for encoding is a random number that is unique to your session at the secure website. There are two grades of internet security: International-grade encryption uses a 40-bit random number negotiated between your browser and the web-server. This means that only one out of about 1,000,000,000,000 possible decoding keys can be used to decipher your data. Domestic-grade encryption uses a 128-bit key, so that the number of possible keys is vastly larger.

Security may be operating without displaying any security icons (or Netscape may show the "broken key" icon) if only part of a frame-based page is employing security. You can verify the security of a page within a frame by opening it in a new browser window. Both Internet Explorer and Netscape allow you to open a link in a new window by right-clicking on the link and selecting that option from the pop-up context menu. When a secure page is open in its own window, instead of being viewed within a frame, you can then see the security icons provided by your browser as well as the "https://" secure protocol prefix in the URL string.

When you visit a website, a small file called a "cookie" may be saved to your computer’s hard drive during your visit. When you revisit the site, the website’s server may open the cookie file and access the stored information. You can usually set your browser to limit or let you know about cookies that a website places on your computer.

A Web beacon is a graphic image (such as a pixel tag or clear GIF) that is placed on a web page or in an e-mail message to monitor user activity (such as whether the web page or e-mail message is read or clicked). They are often invisible because they are very small in size. They are also used on many web pages for alignment purposes. We sometimes use Web beacons to provide an independent accounting of how many people visit our websites or to gather statistics about browser usage at our websites. Some of our web pages and HTML-formatted e-mail newsletters use Web beacons in conjunction with cookies. It is difficult for you to limit the use of Web beacons because there is no easy way to distinguish their use from alignment and other purposes. They may be loaded from a different web server than the rest of the page.

We sometimes use third party advertising companies to serve our internet ad banners on our site and other sites on which we advertise. If you click on one of those ads, you will be directed to our site. If you view a web page where our ads appear, the advertising company may place a cookie on your computer and/or use a Web beacon to access a cookie they previously placed on your computer. These companies do not collect information that can identify you personally, but may use information about your visits to our sites and other sites to measure the effectiveness of ads. We do not give any personal identifiable information to these companies. Unless you are first notified, these advertising companies do not link any online actions or cookie to any information that can be used to personally identify you (such as your name, address or e-mail address). The companies that distribute our ads are prohibited by contract from using information other than for the agreed upon purpose – to help us market our products and services and to measure response rates. Third party advertisers are subject to their own privacy policies. To prevent other advertising companies from placing cookies on your computer, you may adjust the privacy settings for your browser to block or filter cookies, or visit each website individually and opt-out.