Privacy Notice

Reviewed September 12, 2023

Trellis (“We”) takes the privacy of your personal information very seriously. This Privacy Notice describes the ways we gather, use, and protect the personal information of visitors to our sites, as well as how we treat personal information obtained from other sources.

Technical Collection

We use cookies to enhance and personalize your visits to our websites, to measure the effectiveness of our sites and email messages, and to provide a more robust visitor experience for you. We do not use flash cookies or Locally Stored Objects. We do not store any personally identifying information in cookies. We do collect information through cookies about visitors to our websites that is not personally identifying, including domain name, pages visited, and length of user session. This information is used to analyze the usage of our websites so that we may improve the usefulness of the sites. You may reject cookies by setting your browser options to inform you when cookies are set or to prevent cookies from being set. If you set your browser to reject or prevent cookies, you may limit the functionality we can provide when you visit our site.

When you enter one of our sites, you pass through a firewall we use for security purposes. As you pass through, we may identify your Internet Protocol (IP) address to track the origin of your Internet connection. We store IP addresses in case we ever need to track a connection to its point of origin for security troubleshooting and analysis. Trellis does not use the IP address to identify you personally.

If you use a mobile device to access our site(s), we collect basic information such as type of device (manufacturer and model) in order to present the information to you in a way that is readable. We do not collect information that could identify the specific device (such as UDID) or the user, or any personal information from the mobile device. We do not collect location information from devices or users of mobile-enabled sites.

Collection Through Browsing

We do not collect personally identifying information from you unless you expressly provide it to us through your use of one of the services we offer on our Internet sites or through signing up for subscriptions to our publications. (See also the paragraph on Information on Borrowers.) We do not voluntarily share personally identifying information with third-party marketers.

When you contact our online financial consultants, we may collect different kinds of information depending on your financial situation. We may also collect information about you from other sources, such as your school or community group, in order to help associate you with the proper content. We do not voluntarily share this information with third parties. In order to access some of our online tools or services, such as certain areas of the myTrellis℠ portal, you must provide your Social Security number. This information is used to verify loan status and for administrative purposes only. We do not voluntarily share this information with third parties, except as needed to administer your loan. For more information about the use of borrower information to administer loans, please see Information for Trellis Company Borrowers below.

California Online Privacy Protection Act

We do not collect personally identifiable information about your online activities over time or across third-party Web sites or online services. We do collect information as described above when you view our sites. We do not permit others to collect personally identifiable information about your online activities over time or across different Web sites when you use our Web sites or services.

Some browsers have a “do not track” feature that lets you tell websites that you do not want to have your online activities tracked. Because we do not track across websites or over time, and because these features are not yet uniform, we are not currently set up to respond to those signals.

Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act

We do not intend to collect information from children under 13 years of age. You must be over 13 to receive our newsletters or use our online tools. If we learn that we have inadvertently collected personally identifying information from a child under the age of 13, we will promptly take all reasonable measures to delete the data from our system.

Third-Party Sites

We provide links from our websites to sites of business associates, such as the U.S. Department of Education; student loan industry participants; and other external parties. It is important to remember that, if you click a link to any non-Trellis Company site, the privacy statement and conditions or terms of use for that site apply to you. You are encouraged to become familiar with any external party’s privacy statement or policy before disclosing personal information at their site, because their privacy statement and terms of use may differ from ours. We are not responsible for the content and performance of these sites or for your transactions with them.

Information for Borrowers

Our activities in connection with your education loans require our employees to access information regarding you and your account. We may have collected this information from a number of sources, such as applications, transactions, or credit reports. Your loan documents and the governing laws and regulations, including the Federal Family Education Loan Program, set forth ways in which we may, or are required to, use and share information about you. In certain circumstances when carrying out our duties, we are required to disclose your information, including personally identifying information, in connection with the administration of your education loan. We do not share your personally identifying information with third-party marketers.

Cookies

A “cookie” is a small text file saved on your computer that is used to store information that a website may need, for example, a shopping cart ID. Normally, each time a browser requests the URL of a page from a Web server, the request is treated as a completely new interaction. The fact that the request may be just the most recent in a series of requests as the user browses methodically through the site is lost. Although this makes the Web more efficient, this behavior makes it difficult to create things like shopping carts that must remember the user’s actions over an extended period of time. Cookies cannot be used to “steal” information about you or your computer system. They can only be used to store information that you have provided at some point. For example, if you fill out a form giving your favorite color, a server can turn this information into a cookie and send it to your browser. The next time you contact the site, your browser will return the cookie, allowing the server to alter background color of its pages to suit your preferences.

Contacting us

If you have any questions or comments regarding Privacy, please email the Privacy Officer or contact us using the information below:

Privacy Officer
Trellis Company
P.O. Box 83100
Round Rock, TX 78683-3100
privacy@trelliscompany.org

We engage in routine reviews of our Privacy Notice. This version is effective as of the review date. It replaces all prior online Privacy Notices or policies issued by us and our affiliates. We reserve the right to change how we approach privacy and use and collect information.