Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy


Revision Date: October 30, 2018  
The Cato Corporation (“Cato,” “we” or "us") respects your privacy. We are committed to making your shopping experience as comfortable as possible. Please read our Privacy Policy carefully to understand our policies and practices regarding how we collect, use, protect and share information about you. This Privacy Policy applies to information we collect when you visit our websites that display or link to this Privacy Policy (including catofashions.com) (our "Website"), register to receive communications from us, visit our stores or otherwise interact with us as described below.

By accessing or using this Website, or otherwise providing us with Personal Information (as defined below), you agree to this Privacy Policy and consent to our use of your information as set forth herein and as permitted by law. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, you may not use our Website. Providing your Personal Information is always voluntary; however, certain areas of our Website are only accessible upon disclosure of Personal Information. Therefore, if you do not wish to provide your Personal Information, access to these areas will be denied and you may be unable to receive certain merchandise or services. We will respect your preferences as to whether and how you'd like us to communicate with you and you may modify your preferences online or by contacting a Customer Service representative.

PRIVACY POLICY CHANGES
We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the date at the top of this Privacy Policy, an in some cases, we may provide you with additional notice (such as adding a statement on our Website or sending you an email notification). We encourage you to review the Privacy Policy whenever you interact with us to stay informed about our information practices and the ways you can help protect your privacy. Your continued use of our Website following the posting of changes to this Privacy Policy means you accept these changes.

CHILDREN’S PRIVACY
Our Website is not intended for use by children.  We do not knowingly collect information from children under the age of 13.  If you are under 13, do not: (i) use or provide any information on this Website or on or through any of its features, (ii) register on this Website, (iii) make any purchases through this Website, or (iv) use any of the interactive or public comment features on this Website. We will never knowingly request Personal Information from anyone under the age of 13, consistent with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998. If we become aware that a subscriber is under the age of 13, we will remove his or her personally identifiable registration information from our files. Please note: we may maintain record of the person’s name and address in a “do not register” file to avoid subsequent registration by a child under 13.

INFORMATION COLLECTION AND USE
We collect two types of information about users:  “Personal Information” (such as name, email address, mailing address, billing address, telephone number, credit card or debit card information, transaction information, order fulfillment information, and other account-related information) and “Aggregate Information” (such as how many users log on to the Website on a daily basis, information about your internet connection, the equipment you use to access our Website, and other usage details).

Personal Information:
We collect Personal Information you provide directly to us.  For example, we collect information when you use our Website, shop in our retail stores, call us on the phone, create an online account, sign up to receive our emails or subscribe to any services, participate in sweepstakes, contests, promotions or surveys, are referred to us through a third-party marketing promotion, communicate with us via third party social media sites, communicate with us via email, make inquiries or requests concerning our merchandise or services, request customer support, or otherwise communicate with us. We may also collect information through mobile and desktop applications you download which provide dedicated non-browser interaction between you and the Website, and when you interact with our advertising and applications on third-party websites and services. By entering Personal Information on our Website or otherwise providing us with your Personal Information, you grant us permission to contact you about select products, companies, and events we think may interest you.

We may use the Personal Information we collect to:  present our Website and contents to you, process, track and fulfill your order and contact you about the status of your order, inform you of and administer contests, sweepstakes and promotions, allow you to participate in interactive features on our Website, send you surveys about our merchandise or services, respond to your inquiries regarding our merchandise or services, provide you with information, products or services, provide you with notices about your account, learn about your shopping preferences and improve your shopping experience, help us address issues and improve our Website, merchandise and services, protect the security and integrity of our Website, notify you about changes to our Website or any products or services we offer or provide through our Website, carry out our obligations and enforce our rights arising from any contracts entered into between you and us including for billing and collection, to fulfill any other purpose for which you provide it, and in any other way we may describe when you provide the information, or for any other purpose with your consent.

We may disclose Personal Information that we collect or you provide as described in this Privacy Policy: (i) to our subsidiaries and affiliates, (ii) to contractors, service providers and other third parties we use to support our business and who are bound by contractual obligations to keep Personal Information confidential and use it only for the purposes for which we disclose it to them, (iii) to a buyer or other successor in the event of a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution or other sale or transfer of some or all of our assets, whether as a going concern or as part of bankruptcy, liquidation or similar proceeding, in which Personal Information held by us about our Website users is among the assets transferred, (iv) to fulfill the purpose for which you provide it (for example, if you give us an e-mail address to use an “e-mail a friend” feature of our Website, we will transmit the contents of that e-mail and your e-mail address to the recipients), (v) for any other purpose disclosed by us when you provide the information, and/or (vii) otherwise with your consent.  We may also disclose your Personal Information: (a) to comply with any court order, law or legal process, including to respond to any government or regulatory request, (b) to enforce or apply our Terms of Use and other agreements, including for billing and collection purposes, and (c) if we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to protect the rights, property, or safety of us, our affiliates, our customers, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

Personal Information does NOT include any information posted, shared, or sent by or to you in any public forum (such as a message board) or any page on the Website that specifically provides that the content may be used in a public manner (collectively, “User Contributions”).  Your User Contributions are posted and transmitted to others at your own risk.  We cannot control the actions of others with whom you may choose to share your User Contributions. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that your User Contributions will not be viewed by unauthorized parties. If you delete your User Contributions from the Website, copies of your User Contributions may remain viewable in cached and archived pages, or might have been copied or stored by other Website users. Proper access and use of information provided on the Website, including User Contributions, is governed by our Terms of Use.

If you purchase merchandise or a gift card for someone else, we may also collect Personal Information concerning the recipient in order to fulfill your request. We will assume that you have the recipient’s permission to use his or her Personal Information for this limited purpose.

Aggregate Information:
When you visit the Website, we automatically collect Aggregate Information about your visit. Collecting this information helps us to improve the Website to enhance your experience while on our Website.  Aggregate Information is non-personally identifiable/anonymous information about you, such as pages most frequently accessed by you, time spent on a page or area of the Website, the number of visits to the Website by you, types of browser used by you, cookie preferences, or search terms entered by you. We can tell the type of computer and web service that you are using, as well as the date, time, and pages that you visit. Aggregate Information is used in a collective manner, and no single person can be identified by that compiled information (for example, the number of people who logged into the Website in a particular day).

We may use Aggregate Information for internal purposes, such as tracking demographic data and providing targeted content to make the Website more useful to our visitors. The gathering of this Aggregate Information may be accomplished by the use of cookies or web beacons by us and our third party service providers. In particular, we will collect an IP address from all visitors to the Website. An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer when you use the Internet. We may share Aggregate Information with our content providers, service providers or other third parties without restriction. We use IP addresses to help diagnose problems with our server, administer our Website, analyze trends, track users’ movement on the Website, gather broad demographic information for aggregate use in order for us to improve the Website, and deliver customized, personalized content. IP addresses, however, are not linked to Personal Information. We also may use a unique assigned number located with the Website’s URL to determine the website from which you navigated to get to the Website. While this number may not be apparent to you, it does not contain your Personal Information.

USE OF THIRD PARTIES SERVICE PROVIDERS
In certain cases, we may use third parties to fulfill orders, including shipping, name and address verification, process payments, monitor Website activity, conduct surveys, and administer emails, sweepstakes, and contests. We only share information needed in order for these companies to perform the services requested and they are contractually obligated to protect this information and use it for no other purpose. If you do not want your information collected by us or by third parties for these purposes, you can decide not to participate in these activities. We do not authorize third parties to make additional use of your information. Except as described above, we do not share, rent, or sell information that is collected online to any non-affiliated third party.

USE OF COOKIES AND OTHER TECHNOLOGY
As you navigate through and interact with our Website, we may automatically collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns, including: details of your visits to our Website, traffic data, location data, logs and other communication data and the resources that you access and use on the Website, as well as information about your computer and internet connection, including your IP address, operating system and browser type.  The information we collect automatically is statistical data. It helps us to improve our Website and to deliver a better and more personalized service by enabling us to estimate our audience size and usage patterns, store information about your preferences allowing us to customize our Website according to your individual interests, speed up your searches and recognize when you return to our Website.  The technologies we use for this automatic collection may include:
  • Cookies (or browser cookies). A cookie is a small file placed on the hard drive of your computer. You may refuse to accept browser cookies by activating the appropriate setting on your browser. However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our Website. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you direct your browser to our Website. Please note that if you choose to remove or reject cookies, this could affect the availability and functionality of our Website.
  • Flash Cookies. Certain features of our Website may use local stored objects (or Flash cookies) to collect and store information about your preferences and navigation to, from and on our Website. Flash cookies are not managed by the same browser settings as are used for browser cookies.
  • Web Beacons. Pages of our the Website and our e-mails may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs. pixel tags and single-pixel gifs) that permit us, for example, to count users who have visited those pages or opened an e-mail and for other related Website statistics (for example, recording the popularity of certain Website content and verifying system and server integrity).

THIRD PARTY ADS
We may use a third party provider to place our internet ads and to provide analytics services. The provider may collect anonymous information about your visits to our Website and your interaction with our products and services.  The provider may also use information about your visits to this Website and other websites to target advertisements for merchandise and services. This anonymous information (such as your IP address, web browser, pages viewed, time spent on pages, links clicked and conversion information) may be collected through the use of pixel tags, cookies, web beacons and other technologies, which are all industry standard technologies used by most major websites. No personally identifiable information is collected or used in this process. The provider does not know your name, address, phone number, email address or any of your other personally identifiable information. This may include information about users’ behavior on this Website and other websites to serve them interested-based (behavioral) advertising. This information may be used by us and others to, among other things, analyze and track data, determine the popularity of certain content, deliver advertising and content targeted to your interests on our Website and other websites and better understand your online or offline activity. We do not control these third parties’ tracking technologies or how they may be used. If you have any questions about an advertisement, you should contact the responsible advertiser directly. For more information about interest-based ads, or to opt out of having your web browsing information used for behavioral advertising purposes, please visit www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp and www.aboutads.info/choices. Some browsers have a “Do Not Track” feature that lets you tell websites that you do not want to have your online activities tracked. These features are not yet uniform, so we are not currently set up to respond to those signals.

CEDAR HILL NATIONAL BANK PRIVACY POLICY
Our credit card program is administered through Cedar Hill National Bank. Cedar Hill National Bank is committed to providing you with top-quality service while keeping your personal and account information secure. A major objective is to maintain customer confidence and trust. Click here for additional disclosers regarding Cedar Hill National Bank's treatment and handling of nonpublic Personal Information.

LINKS TO OTHER WEBSITES
Our Website may link to other websites that may be of interest to you. These websites have their own privacy policies and terms of use. We are not responsible for the policies or content of linked websites and we encourage you to review policies before providing Personal Information. Any Privacy Policy or Terms of Use contained in or referred to in this Website do not apply to linked websites.

DATA SECURITY
We are committed to providing reasonable and appropriate technical, administrative and physical safeguards to protect against foreseeable hazards such as data loss, destruction, misuse and improper disclosure. We have implemented reasonable measures designated to secure your Personal Information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration and disclosure.

Online information such as your credit or debit card account number is transmitted through a secure server using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption technology. You can check the security of your connection by looking at the lower left-hand corner of your browser window after accessing the server. An unbroken key or a closed lock (depending on your browser) means the SSL is active and the server is secure. You can also look at the URL address. If the first characters of the website address change from “http” to “https,” then you have accessed a secure server. Note, however, that absolute security can never be guaranteed. Although we do our best to protect your Personal Information, we cannot guarantee the security of your Personal Information transmitted to our Website. Any transmission of Personal Information is at your own risk. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures utilized in connection with the Website.

We will never request your credit card or other Personal Information by email. If you receive an email that appears to be a request from us for Personal Information, do not respond, as this may be a “phishing” scam designed to steal your information. Never include your credit or debit card number or other sensitive information in an email, as it is not a secure means of transmitting information. We will only request such information during secure transactions through our Website. It is your responsibility to safeguard any password you create to access “My Account” and to sign-out when your visit is complete.

YOUR CALIFORNIA PRIVACY RIGHTS
California Civil Code Section § 1798.83 permits users of our Website that are California residents to request certain information regarding our disclosure of Personal Information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. To make such a request, please send an e-mail to general1@catocorp.com or write us at: 8100 Denmark Road, Charlotte, NC 28273, Attn: eCommerce Department.

RIGHT TO OPT-OUT
We adhere to the requirements established under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 for broadcast customer email correspondence. If you are already on our email address list and would like to be removed, please click here.

When you register with us, or if you provide additional Personal Information through our Website, we provide you with the right to “opt out” of receiving future communications from us for direct marketing purposes by indicating that you decline such communications.

If you’ve subscribed and later change your mind, you may withdraw your consent simply by clicking the link to “unsubscribe.”  You may choose to have your name taken off of our email list after you have registered or provided additional information by general1@catocorp.com.   If you opt-out of receiving marketing information from us, we may still contact you concerning your specific transactions and communications with us. If you later decide you do not want to be contacted, please let us know by mail, phone or email. If you have created an account on the Website, you may review or update Personal Information you’ve provided previously by signing into your account and clicking “My Account.”  Be sure to click “Save” once you’ve completed your changes. You may also call or email Customer Service at 1-800-758-CATO (2286) or general1@catocorp.com. We cannot delete your Personal Information except by also deleting your user account.  We may not accommodate a request to change information if we believe the change would violate any law or legal requirement or cause the information to be incorrect.

NOTE TO INTERNATIONAL USERS
The Website is hosted in the United States. If you are accessing the Website from the European Union, Asia, or any other region with laws or regulations governing personal data collection, use, and disclosure, that differ from United States laws, please be advised that through your continued use of the Website, which is governed by U.S. law (which may not afford the same level of protection as those in your country), you are transferring your Personal Information to the United States and you consent to that transfer.

For purposes described in this Privacy Policy, Personal Information may be transferred to, processed, stored, and accessed by us, our affiliates, and our service providers in the United States and in jurisdictions where any of us may operate. Courts and other authorities in these jurisdictions may, in certain circumstances, be entitled to access your Personal Information. By using the Website, you consent to this transfer, processing, storage, and access of your Personal Information in and/or outside of the jurisdiction in which you reside.

CONTACT US
The Cato Corporation
8100 Denmark Road
Charlotte, NC 28273-5975
(704) 554-8510
1-800-758-CATO (2286)
general1@catocorp.com