Online Privacy Policy
Effective date: 12/10/2012
Parnassus Investments or Parnassus Funds (Parnassus) is committed to
maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and security of personal information
entrusted to us by current and potential financial service customers. We have always
treated personal information as confidential and want you to be aware of our privacy
policies.
We obtain non-public personal information about you from the following sources:
information we receive from you on applications or other forms and information about
your transactions with us, our affiliates or others.
We restrict access to non-public personal information about you to those employees
who need to know that information to provide products or services to you. Parnassus
employees are subject to a strict employment policy regarding confidentiality.
We do not disclose any non-public personal information about our customers or former
customers to anyone except as required by law. However, we may provide such information
to third parties in the course of servicing your account, such as identity-verification
service providers. Relationships with these parties shall be pursuant to a non-disclosure
agreement, protecting the release of shareholder information. We may disclose information
to nonaffiliated parties if compelled by law, such as responding to a subpoena,
preventing fraud or complying with an inquiry by a government agency or regulator.
Parnassus may use personal information for the purpose of offering or furnishing
products and services. Third parties may be used to help prepare notices of these
offerings. However, names and addresses are never given or sold to third parties
for any outside use.
We maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards that comply with federal
standards to guard your non-public personal information. Under strict confidence,
a backup database of Parnassus customers and accounts is maintained at an outside
facility.
Please call us if you have any questions regarding our privacy policy. You can reach
us by phone at (800) 999-3505. We’re open 8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Pacific time,
Monday through Friday.
The above privacy policy is applicable to Parnassus.
Online Privacy Practices
How we collect and use your nonpublic personal information online
We obtain nonpublic personal information, such as but not limited to name, email
address, social security number, and mailing address, about you from the following
sources: information we receive from you on online applications or other forms and
information about your transactions with us, our affiliates or others.
We allow the ability to opt-out of all subscribed, promotional postal and email
mailings by contacting us by email or phone. For email messages, there is a hyperlink
at the bottom to unsubscribe.
How your information is not shared with others
We do not disclose any nonpublic personal information about our customers or former
customers to anyone except as required by law. However, we may provide such information
to third parties in the course of servicing your account, such as identity-verification
service providers. Relationships with these parties shall be pursuant to a non-disclosure
agreement, protecting the release of shareholder information.
We may disclose information to nonaffiliated parties if compelled by law, such as
responding to a subpoena, preventing fraud or complying with an inquiry by a government
agency or regulator. Parnassus may use personal information for the purpose of offering
or furnishing products and services. Third parties may be used to help prepare notices
of these offerings. However, any nonpublic personal information are never given,
shared, rented, traded or sold to third parties for their own promotional and outside
use.
How you can update your information
You can change your
address online by first logging into your online account, and then selecting
Update Your Mailing Address under the Update Your Info link. You can also change
your address by downloading the Change of Address Request Form and mailing it back to Parnassus
or faxing it to (415) 778-0228 or by calling us at (800) 999-3505 between
8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Pacific Time, Monday through Friday.
You can change your name on your account by mailing Parnassus a letter
of instruction and a copy of your driver license, marriage certificate, name change
certificate, or Social Security Card that reflects your new name, for verification
purposes.
You can change your web user’s email address by logging in, then selecting
update email address
under the Update Your Info tab.
If you wish to cancel your account or request that we no longer use your information
to provide you services contact us at
.
We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed
to provide you services and comply with our compliance regulatory requirements, legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.
How we protect and secure your privacy online
The security of your personal information is important to us. When you enter sensitive
information (such as address and/or social security number) online on our registration
or other forms, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology,
SSL, so unauthorized parties cannot view the information during secure transmission
(look for the padlock icon on your browser). Find out more about SSL certificates and technology. Also,
your protected online account information resides on the secure portion of our website,
and to access your account information online, a unique user name and password is
required.
In addition to the secure practices in the above section for our mutual funds, we
use firewalls and other security technology at all times to protect our network
and systems from external attacks.
We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information
submitted to us, both during transmission and once we receive it. No method of transmission
over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure, however. Therefore,
while we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information,
we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
How we use cookies and frames
A cookie is small amount of data that is transferred to your browser by a web server
and can only be read by the server that gave it to you. It is commonly used for
user behavior record keeping, and it cannot be executed as code or deliver viruses.
We use both session cookies and persistent cookies on our website. On our website,
a session cookie is used to identify the active web browser session, and persistent
cookies are used for web site tracking analytics. No nonpublic, personal information is within any of our web site cookies usage. Our tracking analytics
cookies provided by Google Analytics enable us to learn how our visitors navigate
our website, so we can improve the users’ experience.
Inline frames are a text area that can hold content from outside the webpage. We
have partnered with RiskMetrics Group Institutional Shareholder Services, ISS, for
our online proxy voting search and information, and our proxy voting page has an
inline browser frame with the ISS website embedded within it. This gives the user
a more seamless experience when visiting ISS from our proxy voting page. No personal
information is exchanged with ISS at any time. We are also using Google Apps, an
online suite of services for collaboration and information gathering, to collect
personal contact information for correspondence and surveys by external links and
inline frames.
Links to 3rd Party Sites
Our Site includes links to other Web sites whose privacy practices may differ from
those of Parnassus. If you submit personal information to any of those
sites, your information is governed by their privacy policies. We encourage you
to carefully read the privacy policy of any Web site you visit.
How we notify you of changes to this privacy policy
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy
policy, the home page, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware
of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if
any, we disclose it.
We reserve the right to modify this privacy policy at any time, so please review
it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here,
by email, or by means of a notice on our home page prior to the change becoming effective.
How you can contact us
Please contact us by email or call us if you have any questions regarding our privacy
policy. You can email to
or call by phone at (800) 999-3505. We’re open 8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Pacific
time, Monday through Friday. Our office is located at 1 Market Street, Suite 1600, San Francisco, CA 94105.
About our TRUSTe Web Privacy Seal License
Parnassus has been awarded TRUSTe’s Privacy Seal signifying that this
privacy policy and practices have been reviewed by TRUSTe for compliance with TRUSTe’s
program requirements including transparency, accountability and choice regarding
the collection and use of your personal information. The TRUSTe program does not
cover information that may be collected through downloadable software. The TRUSTe
program covers only information that is collected through this Web site, www.parnassus.com.
TRUSTe's mission, as an independent third party, is to accelerate online trust among
consumers and organizations globally through its leading privacy Trustmark and innovative
trust solutions. If you have questions or complaints regarding our privacy policy
or practices, please contact our shareholder services department at
or (800) 999-3505. If you are not satisfied with our response you can contact TRUSTe
here.