Privacy Matters:  Recognition of Members Expectations of Privacy.  Click here to view.
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Miami Firefighters Federal Credit Union is committed to protecting the privacy of our members. In general, you can visit us on the World Wide Web without disclosing to us who you are or revealing any information about yourself.

There are several areas, however, that will collect certain information about you and we want you to know how we handle that information.

If you visit our website, Miami Firefighters Federal Credit Union collects and stores information on the domain you use to access our website, the Internet address of the site from which you linked directly to the site, and the date and time of your visit. This information is used to measure the number of visitors to the various pages on our site to better serve our membership.

If you send an e-mail, Miami Firefighters Federal Credit Union collects and stores personally identifying information in order to process your e-mail, form or application. This information is not sold to any third parties. Due to the volume of e-mail activity, these messages are deleted after they are answered or completed.

If you visit a secure site, such as home banking, you will be asked for a personal identification numbers that will give you access to the member only section of our website. This information enables Miami Firefighters Federal Credit Union to regulate entry to the member only portions of our website and to measure member usage. Any identifying information gathered is not sold to any third parties.

If you link to another site from any of our pages, you are leaving our site pages, and we cannot be held responsible for any information that may be gathered at a linked site. We make every effort however, to ensure that all linked sites follow similar privacy policies as ours to offer you maximum security and privacy.

Cookies - Definition

a. 1. A block of data that a server returns to a client in response to a request from the client. 2. On the World Wide Web, a block of data that a Web server stores on a client system.

Cookies are small text files on your system, used for keeping track of settings or data for a particular Web site. Because the servers that receive your requests for Web pages have no way of knowing specifically who is making a request, they have no way of storing settings for specific users or changing the page they send based on choices a user has made on another page.
Cookies solve this problem by saving settings on your (the user's) system. When your browser requests a page, it sends the settings that apply to that page along with the request. Because your browser will only send the settings back to the server that originally created them, cookies are a very secure way of maintaining data that is specific to a particular user.

Cookies can be temporary or permanent. Your browser keeps track of temporary cookies as long as it is running, but deletes them when it is shut down. Temporary cookies are used to pass information between Web pages during a single visit. (Online shopping carts are a good example of this.)

Your browser saves permanent cookies as tiny files on your system to maintain settings or data between multiple visits. "Permanent" cookies are actually set to expire at some time in the future (commonly between 30 days and a year from their creation date), and are automatically deleted from your system at that time.

Cookies are currently the only way to save personal choices between visits to a Web page without having to log in each time you come to the page.

How Liberty Online, Inc. Uses Cookies
Liberty Online uses cookies on your Web site to store a Session ID. The Session corresponds to a memory location on Liberty Onlines Web servers, where the Credit Unions ID is stored. This ID allows Liberty Online to pull your Credit Unions content from the database.

Occasionally, there is custom work requested that requires cookies. Some examples include (but are not limited to):
Counters
Themes with Changing Photos
Splash Pages

Cookie Concerns
Disabling cookies for your browser is comparable to requesting that your telephone number be unlisted. Although it is an option, it's intended for a small minority of people with extreme security or privacy concerns. If you choose it, you give up a lot of convenience in exchange for a small amount of perceived privacy.

For example, with or without cookies, it is currently possible for the creators of a Web site you visit to keep track of such things as the following:
The address of the page that contained the link that brought you to their site
All the pages you visit on their site
Choices you made on forms on their site
What browser you are using
Extensions you might have added to your browser
The operating system you are using
The time your system clock is set to
The absolute address (IP address) of the server that provides your connection to the Internet

The only thing cookies add is the ability to keep track of this type of information over multiple visits, thereby allowing the creators of the Web site to build a more precise profile of a particular visitor's preferences.

But the creators of a Web site do not have access to personal information such as your name or your e-mail address unless you specifically give it to them. Therefore they have no way of matching any data they might have gathered with a specific user.

The only information available to a Web site that comes close to identifying you specifically is the IP address, but most Internet servers provide connections for multiple users, and each user is usually assigned a new IP address randomly, each time they log on.