Privacy Policy
Privacy Policy

Sofishare will not sell or share your account information with anyone unless required to do so by law. We ask for what we believe is the minimum of personal information necessary to make it possible for our Members to have faith that they are interacting with bona fide people, and not just aliases of people who wish to conceal their identities or their motives. We recommend that Members consider setting up a special email account that is only for their Sofishare interactions.

All personal information that we request in the application process is via secure, encrypted web pages, and is securely stored on servers belonging to and maintained by a leading web hosting company. We would like to think that it is impregnable to all attacks, but we cannot and do not guarantee this. Events in recent years demonstrate that there is no such thing as an invulnerable website.

Members have the option to conceal their email addresses from other Members and to communicate via our private messaging page which lets you send messages to any Member (who has not blocked you) without revealing your email address. Including a telephone number to permit other Members to call you is optional. If you include your telephone number, Sofishare will not call you for any reason. All account management communications will take place via email. If your registered email is or becomes invalid or you do not respond to account management emails which indicate that a response is required, Sofishare will terminate your account, and will not call you in order to warn of such termination. Consequently, it is important that you maintain your email address information on the My Account page so that Sofishare always has a current, functional email address with which to communicate with you.

Member Profiles and Vehicle Profiles: Sofishare includes two kinds of profiles that include information about its Members: "member profiles" and "vehicle profiles". Contributing and Commercial Members have both vehicle profiles and member profiles. Participating Members (i.e., Members who have not listed any vehicle with Sofishare) only have member profiles.

Privacy of Member Profile information: The member profile of any Member (let's say, Member "A") is only visible to another Member of Sofishare after Member "A" has requested a reservation from the other Member. Member profiles are never visible to visitors of Sofishare who are not Members of Sofishare. Member profiles include the following information: Sofishare username, Membership type (i.e., Participating, Contributing, Commercial), number of vehicles listed by the Member with Sofishare, participating-since date, the Member's feedback scores (as a renter and, if applicable, as an owner), email address (if owner has not specified this to be hidden), telephone number (if owner has included one, and not specified it to be hidden), driver's license verification status (i.e., has another Member recently checked the license and indicated in the feedback process that it looked valid), and optional personal greeting. A Member may elect to include or not to include a photo in their member profile. If included, it may be turned on or off, according to the Member's preference, from the My Account page.

Privacy of Vehicle Profile information: Vehicle profile information is public. Anyone visiting the Sofishare site, whether a Member of Sofishare or not, may browse the vehicle profiles of the site, unless the owner of the vehicle has set its status to "Offline" (via My Account page) or unless, in the case of visibility to other Sofishare Members, the owner of the vehicle has blocked a particular Member. Vehicle profiles include all the information submitted about the vehicle in the registration process. Since vehicle profile information is public, we encourage non-commercial Members to include approximate descriptions of vehicle locations rather than precise addresses. Vehicle profiles also include selected information about their owners: the owner's Sofishare username, feedback scores and a link permitting visitors to read feedback left about the owner/Member (as an owner and as a renter), participating-since date, email address (if owner has not specified this to be hidden), telephone number (if owner has included one, and not specified it to be hidden), owner's optional greeting to potential renters', owner's optional "additional notes" and list of any other vehicles currently registered with Sofishare and whose vehicle status has been set by owner (via My Account page) to be "online" rather than "offline". A Member may elect to include or not to include a photo for their vehicle profile(s). If included, it may be turned on or off, according to the Member's preference, from the My Account page.

We recommend that applicants and Members select their passwords carefully and in accordance with industry recommendations. To read about what makes good or bad passwords, one source among many are Wikipedia articles on password policy and password strength. As a precaution, we recommend that Members not use the same passwords for their Sofishare accounts that they use for accounts relating to their personal finances or other online accounts with sensitive information.