Privacy Overview
Protecting your privacy is important to us. Below you will find MetLife's privacy policies. These policies explain how we protect your personal information. If you would like additional information regarding our privacy policies, please contact us through our Ask a Privacy Policy Question form, or write to your MetLife insurance company, c/o MetLife Privacy Office, P.O. Box 489, Warwick, Rhode Island 02887-9954.
MetLife Total Control Account and Individual Life and Annuity Annual Customer Privacy Notice
Online Privacy Policy
Last Updated August 25,2017
Welcome to MetLife!
The companies in the MetLife, Inc. family (collectively, "MetLife") recognize the importance of protecting all information that you, our online visitor, may choose to provide to us. (For purposes of this policy, references to "we", or "us", and "our" mean both of MetLife. To further this commitment, we have adopted this Online Privacy Policy to tell you how each of us collects, uses, stores, and shares the information you provide to us online.
Besides this Online Privacy Policy, we also have other more general privacy policies that may apply to you as a consumer or customer of MetLife. For more information about all of our privacy policies, please visit us at www.metlife.com/about/privacy.
Online Privacy Policy FAQ
What information does this Online Privacy Policy cover?
This Online Privacy Policy only applies to personal information collected on websites with a link to this Online Privacy Policy, and does not apply to information collected by either of us through any other means.
It covers how we collect, use, store, and share personal information as of the date that this Online Privacy Policy is posted.
It also covers information submitted and collected online, and does not necessarily apply to information that we collect offline.
And it only covers websites maintained by MetLife for its domestic operations. Also, this policy doesn't apply to any other websites maintained by other companies or organizations to which we link. MetLife is not responsible for the content or activities provided on those websites.
What types of personal information do we collect about our online visitors?
Personal information is information that identifies you. We only collect personal information voluntarily given to us by our visitors. Generally, we don't require you to give us personal information to access public areas of our website. Certain secure web areas, however, enable or require you to provide personal information online when you use specific features on our website. For example, we collect personal information from you when you:
- Apply for or obtain a product or service
- Register to access your financial account information
- Ask to have a representative contact you
- Ask to receive information about our products or services
- Purchase merchandise from our online store
- Participate in any promotion or survey
- Request customer or technical support
For example, this information may include:
- Name
- Account or policy number
- Social security number
- Credit card or debit card number
- Telephone number
- User name
- Email address
- Postal or billing address
- State identification card number
- Driver's license number
- Passport number
- Medical information
- Date of birth
- Mother's maiden name
- Unique biometric data
Additionally, we may also collect other types of information such as gender, occupation, hobbies, and other preferences.
Children
We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.
Information We Collect Through Technology
We collect information through technology to enhance our ability to serve you. For example, when you come to one of our websites, we collect your IP address. An IP address is often associated with the portal you used to enter the Internet, like your ISP (Internet service provider), company, association, or university. Standing alone, however, your IP address is not personally identifiable information. At times, we also use IP addresses to study how often our visitors visit various areas of our websites. We may combine this information with personal information. Finally, our websites do not respond to browser Do Not Track signals or other similar mechanisms.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Our websites also use cookies and web beacons to collect and store information.
Cookies are pieces of information that a website sends to your computer while you are viewing the website. We use cookies for a variety of purposes. For example, when you return to one of our websites after logging in, cookies provide information to the website so that the website will remember who you are. You can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is sent, or you can choose to turn off all cookies. You can do this through your browser (e.g., Google Chrome or Microsoft Internet Explorer) settings. Each browser is a little different, so look at your browser Help menu to learn the correct way to modify your cookies. If you turn cookies off, you won't have access to many features that make your web experience smoother, and some of our services may not function properly.
Web beacons are small pieces of data that are embedded in images on the pages of websites and in our email communications. We also use these web beacons to analyze the traffic patterns, such as the frequency users visit various areas of our websites. These technical methods may involve transmitting information either directly to us or to another entity authorized by us to collect information on our behalf. We also use web beacons in HTML e-mails that we send our visitors to determine whether our visitors have opened those e-mails or clicked on links in those e-mails.
Network Advertisers. Advertisements managed by third parties may be placed on our websites. These companies are called 'network advertisers.' Network advertisers placing advertisements on our websites may also use cookies and web beacons to collect information when you click on or move your cursor over one of their banner advertisements. You may not realize this information is being collected. In some cases, we may have access to information from web beacons and cookies used by network advertisers on our sites, and this information may permit us to identify other sites that you have visited that are also associated with the network advertiser. In doing so, however, network advertisers do not collect personal information, and we do not give any personally identifiable information to them.
For more information about our ad service provider and its cookies, including information about how to opt out of these technologies, go to http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/ , http://atlassolutions.com/privacy-policy and http://www.aboutads.info/consumers.
Finally, once you've clicked on an advertisement and have left our websites, our Online Privacy Policy no longer applies, and you must read the privacy policy of the advertiser to see how your personal information will be handled on their website.
How is your personal information used and shared?
Whatever the purpose may be, we will only collect information to the extent reasonably necessary to fulfill your requests and our legitimate business objectives. We may also use and disclose your personal information to our affiliates and others for any purpose allowed by law.
Online Activities and Updates
For example, we use and may disclose your personal information to:
- authenticate your identity
- provide you with online planning tools
- process an application for our products and administer your account information
- respond to your product or service information requests
- send you customer newsletters and updates
- provide you with additional materials that may be of interest, including marketing materials
- for other everyday business purposes, such as product development and website administration
e-Cards
When you send an e-card describing any of our products to your friends and family, we delete both sender and recipient email address information after you send the e-card.
Purchase or Sale of Businesses
From time to time, we may purchase a business or sell one or more of our businesses and your personal information may be transferred as a part of the purchase or sale. If we purchase a business, the personal information received with that business would be treated in accordance with all of our privacy policies, including this Online Privacy Policy, if it is practicable and permissible to do so. If we sell a business, we will include provisions in the selling contract requiring the purchaser to treat your personal information in the same way required by our privacy policies, if it is practicable and permissible to do so. The provisions of this paragraph will also apply if we are sold as part of bankruptcy proceedings.
Disclosures Required By Law and Disclosures to Help Protect the Security and Safety of Our Websites and Others
We may disclose any information as permitted or required by law, when we believe in good faith it is necessary for safety purposes, required for legal reporting, or to protect our legal rights or to enforce our Terms of Use or any contest rules. We may also disclose information about you to our auditors, regulators, legal advisors, or to respond to a subpoena.
What choices do you have about the collection, use, and sharing of your personal information?
We don't share our customer's personal information with unaffiliated third parties for their own direct marketing purposes.
If you signed up to receive newsletters or other e-mail messages from us, you can opt-out any time by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the message. You may also choose to opt-out from receiving marketing materials from us by making a request at www.metlife.com/optout.
Finally, at this time, our websites do not respond to browser Do Not Track signals or similar mechanisms.
What kinds of security measures do we take to safeguard your personal information?
The security and confidentiality of your information is extremely important to us. That's why we have technical, administrative, and physical security measures in place to protect your personal information from unauthorized access and improper use. For example, the areas of our website that enable or require you to submit personal information online use encryption to protect that information. We also review our security procedures periodically to consider appropriate new technology and updated methods. But, despite our reasonable efforts, no security measure is ever perfect or impenetrable.
How can you update your personal information?
You can use our online resources page to submit any changes to your contact information.
How can you ask questions, or send us comments, about this Online Privacy Policy?
If you have questions or wish to send us comments about this Online Privacy Policy, e-mail us at privacy@metlife.com or call or write to us at:
MetLife, Inc. Attn.: Privacy Policy Administrator P.O. Box 489 Warwick, RI 02887-9954 (877) 638-7684
You can also contact us through our form, which is available at the link "Ask a Privacy Policy Question" on the first page of this Online Privacy Policy.
How will you know if we amend this Online Privacy Policy?
We may amend this Online Privacy Policy at any time. If we make any material change in how we collect your personal information online, or how we use or share it, we will prominently post notice of the changes on the websites covered by this Online Privacy Policy. Any material changes to this Online Privacy Policy will be effective 10 days after our posting of notice of the changes on the websites covered by this Online Privacy Policy.
MetLife Total Control Account and Individual Life and Annuity Annual Customer Privacy Notice
We know that you buy our products and services because you trust us. This notice explains how we protect your privacy and treat your personal information. It applies to current and former customers. "Personal information" here means anything we know about you personally.
Protecting Your Information:
We take important steps to protect your personal information. We treat it as confidential. We tell our employees to take care in handling it. We limit access to those who need it to perform their jobs. Our outside service providers must also protect it, and use it only to meet our business needs. We also take steps to protect our systems from unauthorized access. We comply with all laws that apply to us.
Collecting Your Information:
We typically collect your name, address, age, and other relevant information. For example, we may ask about your:
- finances
- creditworthiness
- employment
- health (if you apply for life, disability or certain other types of insurance)
We may also collect information about any business you have with us, our affiliates, or other companies. Our affiliates include life, car, and home insurers. They also include a bank, a legal plans company, and securities broker-dealers. In the future, we may also have affiliates in other businesses.
How We Get Your Information:
We get your personal information mostly from you. We may also use outside sources to help ensure our records are correct and complete. These sources may include consumer reporting agencies, employers, other financial institutions, adult relatives, and others. These sources may give us reports or share what they know with others. We don't control the accuracy of information outside sources give us. If you want to make any changes to information we receive from others about you, you must contact those sources.
Using Your Information:
We collect your personal information to help us decide if you're eligible for our products or services. We may also need it to verify identities to help deter fraud, money laundering, or other crimes. How we use this information depends on what products and services you have or want from us. It also depends on what laws apply to those products and services. For example, we may also use your information to:
- administer your products and services
- process claims and other transactions
- perform business research
- confirm or correct your information
- market new products to you
- help us run our business
- comply with applicable laws
Sharing Your Information With Others:
We may share your personal information with your consent or as permitted or required by law. For example, we may share your information with businesses hired to carry out services for us. We may also share it with our affiliated or unaffiliated business partners through joint marketing agreements. In those situations, we share your information to jointly offer you products and services or have others offer you products and services we endorse or sponsor.
Other reasons we may share your information include:
- doing what a court, law enforcement, or government agency requires us to do (for example, complying with search warrants or subpoenas)
- telling another company what we know about you if we are selling or merging any part of our business
- giving information to a governmental agency so it can decide if you are eligible for public benefits
- giving your information to someone with a legal interest in your assets (for example, creditor with a lien on your account)
- those listed in our "Using Your Information" section above
Opting Out:
You may tell us not to share your information with our affiliates for their own marketing purposes or unaffiliated business partners as part of a joint marketing arrangement. Even if you don't "opt out," we will not share your information with unaffiliated companies for their own marketing purposes without a joint marketing arrangement. Before sharing your information with an affiliate for its own marketing purposes or a joint marketing partner, we will notify you and give you an opportunity to "opt out." Depending on your product or service, we may give the "opt-out" form when we first issue your policy or open your account. You can also "opt out" anytime by contacting your Agent directly or contacting us at:
MetLife Privacy Office P. O. Box 489 Warwick, Rhode Island 02887-9954 (877) 638-7684 www.metlife.com/optout
If you hold a policy or account jointly with someone else, we will accept instructions from either of you, and apply them to the entire policy or account
Accessing and Correcting Your Information:
You may ask us for a copy of the personal information we have about you. Generally, we will provide it as long as it is reasonably retrievable and within our control. You must make your request in writing listing the account or policy numbers with the information you want to access. For legal reasons, we may not show you anything we learned as part of a claim or lawsuit, unless required by law.
If you tell us that what we know about you is incorrect, we will review it. If we agree, we will update our records. Otherwise, you may dispute our findings in writing, and we will include your statement whenever we give your disputed information to anyone outside MetLife.
Questions:
We want you to understand how we protect your privacy. If you have any questions about this notice, please contact us. When you write, include your name, address, and policy or account number.
Send privacy questions to:
MetLife Privacy Office P. O. Box 489 Warwick, RI 02887-9954 privacy@metlife.com
We may revise this privacy notice. If we make any material changes, we will notify you as required by law. We provide this privacy notice to you on behalf of these MetLife companies:
| Metropolitan Life Insurance Company | Metropolitan Tower Life Insurance Company |
MetLife Customer Privacy Policy
The companies in the MetLife, Inc. family ("MetLife") strongly believe in protecting the confidentiality and security of information we collect about individuals. The material below describes our privacy policy and describes how we treat the information we receive about you if you become a current or former MetLife customer, or apply for any of our products or services.
How We Protect What We Know About You
How We Use and Disclose What We Know About You
How You Can See and Correct Your Information
How You Can Get Other Material From Us
You May Have Additional Rights Under Other Privacy Laws
Sources We May Use to Get More Information
Why We Need to Know About You
We need to know about you so that we can provide you with the insurance and other products and services you've asked for. We may also need information from you and others to help us verify your identity in order to prevent money laundering and terrorism.
What we need to know about you includes your address, age and other basic information. But we may have to know more about you, including your finances, employment, health, hobbies or business you conduct with us, with other MetLife companies (our "affiliates") or with other companies.
How We Learn About You
What we know about you we get mostly from you. But we may also have to find out more about you from other sources in order to make sure that what we know about you is correct and complete. Those sources may include your adult relatives, employers, consumer reporting agencies, health care providers and others. Some of our sources may give us reports, and they may disclose what they know about you to others.
How We Protect What We Know About You
We treat what we know about you confidentially. Our employees are told to take care in handling your information. They may get information about you only when there is a good reason to do so. We take steps to make our computer data bases secure and to safeguard the information we have about you.
How We Use and Disclose What We Know About You
We may use anything we know about you to help us serve you better. We may use it, and disclose it to our affiliates and others, for any purpose allowed by law. For instance, we may use your information, and disclose it to others, in order to:
- Help us evaluate your request for a MetLife product or service
- Help us process claims and other transactions
- Confirm or correct what we know about you
- Help us prevent fraud, money laundering, terrorism and other crimes by verifying what we know about you
- Help us run our business
- Process data for us
- Perform research for us
- Help us comply with the law
- Audit our business
Other reasons we may disclose what we know about you include:
- Doing what a court or government agency requires us to do; for example, complying with a search warrant or subpoena
- Telling another company what we know about you, if we are or may be selling all or any part of our business or merging with another company
- Giving information to the government so that it can decide whether you may get benefits that it will have to pay for
- Telling your health care provider about a medical problem that you have but may not be aware of
- Giving your information to a peer review organization if you have health insurance with us
- Giving your information to someone who has a legal interest in your insurance, such as someone who lent you money and holds a lien on your policy
When we disclose information to others to perform business services for us, they are required to take appropriate steps to protect this information. And they may use the information only for the purposes of performing those business services.
We may use what we know about you in order to offer you our other products and services. We may share your information with other companies to help us. Here are our other rules on using your information to market products and services:
- We will not share information about you with any of our affiliates for use in marketing its products to you, unless we first notify you. You will then have an opportunity to tell us not to share your information by "opting out".
- Before we share what we know about you with another financial services company to offer you products or services through a joint marketing arrangement, we will let you "opt-out."
- We will not disclose information to unaffiliated companies for use in selling their products to you, except through such joint marketing arrangements.
- We will not share your health information with any other company, even one of our affiliates, to permit it to market its products and services to you.
How You Can See and Correct Your Information
Generally, we will let you review what we know about you if you ask us in writing. (Because of its legal sensitivity, we will not show you anything that we learned in connection with a claim or lawsuit.) If you tell us that what we know about you is incorrect, we will review it. If we agree with you, we will correct our records. If we do not agree with you, you may tell us in writing, and we will include your statement when we give your information to anyone outside MetLife.
You May Have Additional Rights Under Other Privacy Laws
In addition to any other privacy notice we may provide, federal law has established privacy standards and requires us to provide a summary of our privacy policy to our customers once each year. Individuals may have additional rights under other applicable laws.
How You Can Get Other Material From Us
If you want to know more about our privacy policy generally, please contact us through our Ask a Privacy Policy Question form, or write to your MetLife insurance company, c/o MetLife Privacy Office, P.O. Box 489, Warwick, Rhode Island 02887-9954.
Sources We May Use to Get More Information
To learn how and why we collect information regarding Individuals, click here.
Frequently Asked Questions
For (FAQs) about our privacy policies, click here.
Online Privacy Policy
For information about our Online Privacy Policy, click here.
Effective Date: 03/03/2017