The Washington Health Benefit Exchange is committed to protecting your privacy. We collect personal information through Washington Healthplanfinder to help you find, apply, and determine eligibility for health insurance, including both public and private health insurance products. We do not sell, trade, or give away your personal information to any unauthorized parties. "Personal information" refers to identifying information of an individual, such as name, phone number, address, date of birth, email address, Social Security Number, etc. We use industry-leading technologies to ensure that your personal information is protected.

This Washington Healthplanfinder Privacy Policy describes the information privacy practices for the website (with the URL of either http://www.WAHealthplanfinder.org or http://www.wahbexchange.org) that you are currently visiting.

1. The personal information that we collect is used only for authorized purposes.

2. Your personal information is not disclosed to unauthorized third parties, and may be disclosed in the following authorized situations.

Outside of these exceptions, we will not share your personal information with any third parties.

3. We collect personal information in the normal course of business in order to process your insurance application and to serve you better.

4. We gather anonymous information that may be shared with third parties.

5. We protect the confidentiality and security of your personal information.

6. We continue to evaluate our efforts to protect your personal information.

7. We will provide notice of changes in our information privacy practices. A notice will be posted on Washington Healthplanfinder and all printed materials will be updated to include the new privacy practice information.

8. You will be notified via email if your personal information is to be used in a different manner than stated at the time of collection, and you will have a choice to opt out.

9. We are available to answer any questions you may have about our privacy policy or our information privacy practices. Please email us at [email protected].

"Cookies" and "Clear Gifs"

"Cookies" are small files that are stored by your web browser to help a particular system recognize the pages you have recently visited through Washington Healthplanfinder. Our website uses cookies to make your online experience more convenient. For example, we may use cookies to store your account information between sessions or to maintain information about the quotes you've requested during your session. Additionally, we may use data from cookies for a variety of internal purposes, such as studying how users navigate Washington Healthplanfinder. We do not collect any personal information from cookies. Further, no other information we collect from cookies can be linked back to your personal information. Most browsers automatically accept cookies, but if you prefer, you can set yours to refuse cookies. Even without cookies being enabled, you can still use most of the features on Washington Healthplanfinder, including obtaining quotes and applying for an insurance policy.

"Clear gifs" are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies that are used to track the online movements of website users. The main difference between the two is that clear gifs are invisible on the page and are much smaller than cookies. We do not collect any personal information from clear gifs, and no information we collect from clear gifs can be linked back to your personal information.

We use third party web analytics services to track and analyze anonymous usage and volume statistical information from visitors to help us administer Washington Healthplanfinder, analyze trends, improve the performance of Washington Healthplanfinder, and report website traffic. These web analytics services use cookies, clear gifs, log files and other web monitoring technologies to help track visitor behavior on our behalf. These services do not use these technologies to collect any personally identifiable information from website visitors.

Your Password and Other Security Issues

The password you enter when you begin an application on our website is your private entry key into your application and should not be shared with anyone.

Your password must contain:

8-20 characters with at least one letter, one number and one special character. Please use:

• At least 1 UPPERCASE letter A - Z
• At least 1 lowercase letter a - z
• At least 1 of these special characters ! $ # ^

If you forget your password, we can send your password through email (provided that you gave us your email address and your Username when you created an account on Washington Healthplanfinder) or we can help you retrieve your password by calling us toll free at 1-855-WAFINDER (1-855-923-4633).

Washington Healthplanfinder account passwords expire after 90 days. Before the expiration of a password, you will receive a notification 14 days before expiration and 7 days before expiration. After expiration, youll be prompted by Washington Healthplanfinder to set up a new password.

Experian Identity Verification
To protect your privacy, you will need to complete Identity Verification successfully, before completing an application for eligibility. You are providing consent to Experian to access your personal information to conduct ID Verification on behalf of CMS. Below are a few items to keep in mind.

• Ensure that you have entered your legal name, current home address, primary phone number, date of birth and email address correctly. We will only collect personal information to verify your identity with Experian, an external identity verification provider.
• Identity Verification involves Experian using information from your consumer report profile to help confirm your identity. As a result, you may see an entry called a “soft inquiry” on your Experian consumer report. Soft inquiries are only visible to you, will never be presented to third parties, and do not affect your credit score. The soft inquiry will be titled “CMS Proofing Services” and will be removed from your Experian consumer report after 25 months.
• You may need to have access to your personal and consumer report information, as the Experian application will pose questions to you, based on data in their files.

Links to Other Websites

Please note that Washington Healthplanfinder has a lock icon displayed in your internet browser that communicates to you that our site is secure. Washington Healthplanfinder may contain links to other websites. Please note that when you click on one of these links you are transferring to another website. Washington Healthplanfinder is not responsible for the information privacy practices or the content of such websites. We encourage you to read the privacy policies of these linked websites as their information privacy practices may differ from ours.