Protecting Your Financial Privacy
OneWest Bank will protect the privacy of your personal and financial information. To guard your nonpublic personal information, we maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations.
Specifically, we have designed our systems to ensure that your Personal Identification Number (PIN), password and other access codes are always private and confidential. For your protection, only you know your access codes - our employees cannot gain access to them and they will not ask you to reveal them.
The length of time we retain information varies depending on the product or service and the nature of the information. This period may extend beyond the end of your relationship with us but only for so long as it is legally necessary for us to have sufficient information to respond to any issue that may arise at a later date or as required by other regulatory agencies. When your information is no longer needed for the purposes explained to you, we have procedures to destroy, delete, erase or convert it to an anonymous form.
We update and test our technology regularly to ensure we maintain commercially reasonable standards in securing your financial privacy.
Regarding Cookies
To provide better service and a more effective website, we use "cookies" as part of our interaction with your browsers. A "cookie" is a small text file placed on your hard drive by our webpage server. Our cookies cannot retrieve any other data from your hard drive, pass on computer viruses, or capture your e-mail address. Cookies are commonly used on websites and do not harm your system.
We may use cookies to record information about:
- Visitors' preferences
- User sessions on our websites
- What pages users access or visit on our websites
- Past activity at a site in order to provide better service when visitors return to our site, or to accomplish the following purposes:
- Alert visitors to new areas that we think might be of interest to them when they return to our site
- Ensure that visitors are not repeatedly sent the same banner ads
- Customize webpage content based on visitors' browser type or other information that the visitor sends
We use cookies in places where you need to register, such as Internet banking, or where you are able to customize the information you see. Recording a cookie at such points makes your online experience easier and more personalized.
Our cookies do not collect personally identifiable information and we do not combine information collected through cookies with other personal information to determine who you are or your e-mail address. By configuring your preferences or options in your browser, you determine if and how a cookie will be accepted. However, if you configure your web browser so that "cookies" are turned off, our website will not be able to process your transaction. If this happens, please turn your cookies back on and log onto our site again.
Encryption
Your password as well as all information relating to your accounts and your enrollment are scrambled using some of the strongest forms of encryption commercially available for use over the World Wide Web.
How does encryption work?
Everything that travels through the Internet during your online banking session - from your password to your instructions to pay a bill - becomes a string of unrecognizable numbers before entering the Internet. Both OneWest Bank's computers and the browser you use to surf the Web understand the mathematical formulas, called algorithms, that turn your banking session into numeric code and back again into meaningful information.
These algorithms serve as locks on the doors of your account information. And while OneWest Bank and your computer can easily translate this code back to meaningful language, this process would be a daunting, almost impossible task for unauthorized intruders. That's because there are billions of possible keys that could potentially solve each formula - but only one that will work. Every time you begin an online banking session, your computer and OneWest Bank's systems agree on a random number that serves as the key for the rest of the conversation. What that random number is depends largely on the strength of encryption used by your browser.
OneWest Bank ensures that all OneWest Bank Online Banking sessions via the Internet are encrypted. If for any reason your secure session ends, your Online Banking session terminates.
Standard encryption is 40-bit or 56-bit and meets the bank's security requirements for all Online Banking activities except our Bill Pay service. For maximum protection, OneWest Bank encourages you to use browsers offering 128-bit encryption. This is also known as high or strong encryption. It means there are 2 to the 128th power possible keys that could fit into the lock that holds your account information. In other words, a hacker attempting to get to your account information would need to use a computer with exponentially more processing power than for 40-bit or 56-bit encryption to find the correct key.
Note: Currently, browsers that offer 128-bit encryption can only be used by citizens and permanent residents of the United States and citizens of Canada, and can only be downloaded to locations in the United States or Canada.
All browsers provide detailed information on security levels. See your browser's help or documentation for more information.
How do I know if my banking session is encrypted?
You can determine if encryption is being used on a given webpage by looking for the following icons in the lower portion of your browser:
Both Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer display the icon in the lower right corner of the browser.
Neither Mozilla Firefox nor Microsoft Internet Explorer display any icon that distinguishes between 40-bit or 56-bit and 128-bit encryption. But if you use Firefox, you can double-click on the icon displayed to determine what level of encryption is being used for a particular webpage. IE5 will display the encryption level in a pop-up window when you place your cursor on the encryption icon in the lower right corner of the browser.
If you use WebTV, you need to press the info button on the keyboard (or, if using the remote control, select the options button and then select info). If a "Security Details" button displays on the screen, the page is secure. Select this button for more information about security.