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Last modified: March 24, 2025

Introduction

First Electric Cooperative Corporation ("Company," "we," "us," or "our") respects your privacy and are committed to protecting it through our compliance with this policy.

This policy describes the types of information we may collect from you or that you may provide when you visit the website www.firstelectric.coop (our "Website") and our practices for collecting, using, maintaining, protecting, and disclosing that information.

This policy applies to information we collect:

• On this Website,
• In email, text, and other electronic messages between you and this Website, and
• Through our mobile application.

It does not apply to information collected by:

• Us offline or through any other means, including on any other website operated by Company or any third party (including our affiliates and subsidiaries); or
• Any third party, including through any application or content (including advertising) that may link to or be accessible from or through the Website.

Please read this policy carefully to understand our policies and practices regarding your information and how we will treat it. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, your choice is not to use our Website. By accessing or using this Website, you agree to this privacy policy. This policy may change from time to time (see Changes to Our Privacy Policy). Your continued use of this Website after we make changes is deemed to be acceptance of those changes, so please check the policy periodically for updates.

This Website is offered and available only to users who reside in the United States. If you reside outside of the United States, you must not access or use the Website.

Children Under the Age of 18

Our Website is not intended for children under 18 years of age. No one under age 18 may provide any information to or on the Website. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 18. If you are under 18, do not use or provide any information on this Website or provide any information about yourself to us, including your name, address, telephone number, or email address. If we learn we have collected or received personal information from a child under 18 without verification of parental consent, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have any information from or about a child under 18, please contact us at 1000 South JP Wright Loop Road, Jacksonville, AR 72076.

Information We Collect About You and How We Collect It

We collect several types of information from and about users of our Website, including information:

• By which you may be personally identified, such as name, postal address, email address, telephone number, social security number, income information to determine eligibility for government and private financial assistance programs, political affiliation, or any other identifier by which you may be contacted online or offline ("personal information"); and/or
• About your internet connection, the equipment you use to access our Website, and usage details.

We collect this information:

• Directly from you when you provide it to us.
• Automatically as you navigate through the site. Information collected automatically may include usage details, IP addresses, and information collected through cookies, web beacons, and other tracking technologies.
• From third parties, for example, our affiliates and subsidiaries.

Information You Provide to Us 

The information we collect on or through our Website may include:

• Information that you provide by filling in forms on our Website. This includes information provided at the time of registering to use our Website, subscribing to our service, or requesting further services. We may also ask you for information when you report a problem with our Website.
• Records and copies of your correspondence (including email addresses), if you contact us.
• Your responses to surveys that we might ask you to complete for research purposes.
• Details of transactions you carry out through our Website and of the fulfillment of your orders. Some transactions may require that you provide financial information.
• Any other type of information you may provide.

Information We Collect Through Automatic Data Collection Technologies 

As you navigate through and interact with our Website, we may use automatic data collection technologies to collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns, including:

• Details of your visits to our Website, including location data, failed logins, and other communication data and the resources that you access and use on the Website.
• Information about your computer and internet connection, including your IP address, operating system, and browser type.

We also may use these technologies to collect information about your online activities over time (behavioral tracking). The information we collect automatically may include personal information, like your IP Address. This helps us to improve our Website and to deliver a better and more personalized service, including 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.
• Recognize you when you return to our Website.
• Detect and respond to suspicious activity.

The technologies we use for this automatic data 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. For information about managing your privacy and security settings for cookies, see Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information.
• Web Beacons. Pages of our Website and our emails may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs, pixel tags, and single-pixel gifs) that permit the Company, for example, to count users who have visited those pages or opened an email and for other related website statistics (for example, recording the popularity of certain website content and verifying system and server integrity).

We do not collect personal information automatically, but we may tie non-personal information collected automatically to personal information about you that we collect from other sources or that you provide to us, including that received from our affiliate Connect2First Internet, LLC.

How We Use Your Information

We use information that we collect about you or that you provide to us, including any personal information:

• To present our Website and its contents to you, including but not limited to the purposes of delivery of our services and platform functionality, security and access control, customer support and troubleshooting, compliance and retention requirements, and system performance and improvements.
• To provide you with information, products, or services that you request from us, or that we believe may be of interest to you.
• To fulfill any other purpose for which you provide it.
• To provide you with notices about your account.
• To carry out our obligations and enforce our rights arising from any contracts entered into between you and us, including for billing and collection.
• To notify you about changes to our Website or any products or services we offer or provide though it, including changes in law or regulation that may affect same.
• In any other way we may describe when you provide the information.
• For any other purpose with your consent.

We may also use your information to contact you about our own and our affiliates and subsidiaries goods and services that may be of interest to you. If you do not want us to use your information in this way, please click unsubscribe at the bottom of the email or respond Stop to the text. For more information, see Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information.

We may use the information we have collected from you to enable us to display advertisements to our advertisers' target audiences. Even though we do not disclose your personal information for these purposes without your consent, if you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement, the advertiser may assume that you meet its target criteria.

Disclosure of Your Information

We may disclose aggregated information about our users, and information that does not identify any individual, without restriction.

We may disclose personal information that we collect or you provide as described in this privacy policy:

• To our subsidiaries and affiliates.
• To contractors, service providers, and other third parties we use to support our business, including service providers Inside Information, Inc. and VortexCRM.
• 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.
• To fulfill the purpose for which you provide it.
• For any other purpose disclosed by us when you provide the information.
• With your consent.

We may also disclose your personal information:

• To comply with any court order, law, or legal process, including to respond to any government or regulatory request.
• To enforce or apply our Terms of Service and other agreements, including for billing and collection purposes.
• If we believe disclosure is necessary or appropriate to protect our rights, property, or safety or those of our customers or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction.

Choices About How We Use and Disclose Your Information

We strive to provide you with choices regarding the personal information you provide to us. We have created mechanisms to provide you with the following control over your information:

• Tracking Technologies and Advertising. You can set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies, or to alert you when cookies are being sent. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this site may then be inaccessible or not function properly.
• Promotional Offers from the Company. If you do not wish to have your contact information used by the Company to promote our own or third parties' products or services, you can opt-out by clicking unsubscribe at the bottom of the email or responding Stop to the text.  If we have sent you a promotional email, you may send us a return email asking to be omitted from future email distributions. This opt out does not apply to information provided to the Company as a result of a product purchase, warranty registration, product service experience or other transactions.

Accessing and Correcting Your Information

You can review and change your personal information by logging into the Website and visiting your account profile page.

You may also send us an email at compliance@fecc.coop to request access to, correct, or delete any personal information that you have provided to us. 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, exercise or defend legal claims, or cause the information to be incorrect. A request to delete information also does not apply to information reasonably necessary for us to complete the transaction for which the information was collected, to provide a good or service requested by you or reasonably anticipated by you within the context of our ongoing business relationship with you, or to perform a contract between us and you.

Text Message Privacy Policy

We respect your privacy. By opting into our SMS/MMS messaging service, you are acknowledging and agreeing that we, our representative(s), or our agent(s) may contact you for the purposes of:

• Contacting you regarding your service or request about our service, including but not limited to payment-related information;
• Confirming and validating service requests including outages related to your service;
• Providing emergency, informational or other notifications to you related to your service and account; and
• Providing marketing offers to you.

We may contact you using any contact information we have for you, including any number:

• You have provided to us;
• From which you called us; or
• Which we obtained and through which we reasonably believe we can reach you.

You agree we may use any means to contact you. This may include calls made to your cellular telephone including through using an automatic telephone dialing system, artificial or prerecorded voice messages, SMS/MMS text messages, mail, email, and calls to your phone over Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, or communications by use of any other data or voice transmission technology. You agree to promptly notify us if you change any contact information you provide to us.

You may opt-out of receiving these automated communications by unsubscribing. Message and data rates apply. Granting this consent is not required to obtain any goods or services from us. Calls and texts may be recorded for quality assurance. We do not share your data with third parties for marketing purposes. Your information is shared with our SMS/MMS service provider to enable messaging.

At any point in time, if you desire to stop receiving text messages from us, simply respond with the word STOP and you will be unsubscribed from further such communications. If you would like to opt-in again, this can be done from within your account page.

Data Security

We have implemented measures designed to secure your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers behind firewalls, using SSL/TLS encryption, VPN restrictions, and two-factor authentication. Any payment transactions will be encrypted using SSL technology.

The safety and security of your information also depends on you. Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password for access to certain parts of our Website, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share your password with anyone.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. 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 contained on the Website.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

It is our policy to post any changes we make to our privacy policy on this page. If we make material changes to how we treat our users' personal information, we will notify through a notice on the Website home page. The date the privacy policy was last revised is identified at the top of the page. You are responsible for ensuring we have an up-to-date active and deliverable email address for you, and for periodically visiting our Website and this privacy policy to check for any changes.

Contact Information

To ask questions or comment about this privacy policy and our privacy practices, contact us at:

compliance@fecc.coop

Or by U.S. mail to:

Privacy Compliance Officer

First Electric Cooperative Corporation

1000 South J.P. Wright Loop Road

Jacksonville, AR 72076