Customer Privacy Policy
The companies in the MetLife, Inc. family ("MetLife") strongly believe in protecting the confidentiality and security of information we collect about individuals. The material below describes our privacy policy and describes how we treat the information we receive about you if you become a current or former MetLife customer, or apply for any of our products or services.
We need to know about you so that we can provide you with the insurance and other products and services you’ve asked for. We may also need information from you and others to help us verify your identity in order to prevent money laundering and terrorism.
What we need to know about you includes your address, age and other basic information. But we may have to know more about you, including your finances, employment, health, hobbies or business you conduct with us, with other MetLife companies (our “affiliates”) or with other companies.
What we know about you we get mostly from you. But we may also have to find out more about you from other sources in order to make sure that what we know about you is correct and complete. Those sources may include your adult relatives, employers, consumer reporting agencies, health care providers and others. Some of our sources may give us reports, and they may disclose what they know about you to others.
We treat what we know about you confidentially. Our employees are told to take care in handling your information. They may get information about you only when there is a good reason to do so. We take steps to make our computer data bases secure and to safeguard the information we have about you.
We may use anything we know about you to help us serve you better. We may use it, and disclose it to our affiliates and others, for any purpose allowed by law. For instance, we may use your information, and disclose it to others, in order to:
- Help us evaluate your request for a MetLife product or service
- Help us process claims and other transactions
- Confirm or correct what we know about you
- Help us prevent fraud, money laundering, terrorism and other crimes by verifying what we know about you
- Help us run our business
- Process data for us
- Perform research for us
- Help us comply with the law
- Audit our business
Other reasons we may disclose what we know about you include:
- Doing what a court or government agency requires us to do; for example, complying with a search warrant or subpoena
- Telling another company what we know about you, if we are or may be selling all or any part of our business or merging with another company
- Giving information to the government so that it can decide whether you may get benefits that it will have to pay for
- Telling your health care provider about a medical problem that you have but may not be aware of
- Giving your information to a peer review organization if you have health insurance with us
- Giving your information to someone who has a legal interest in your insurance, such as someone who lent you money and holds a lien on your policy
When we disclose information to others to perform business services for us, they are required to take appropriate steps to protect this information. And they may use the information only for the purposes of performing those business services.
We may use what we know about you in order to offer you our other products and services. We may share your information with other companies to help us. Here are our other rules on using your information to market products and services:
- We will not share information about you with any of our affiliates for use in marketing its products to you, unless we first notify you. You will then have an opportunity to tell us not to share your information by “opting out”.
- Before we share what we know about you with another financial services company to offer you products or services through a joint marketing arrangement, we will let you "opt-out."
- We will not disclose information to unaffiliated companies for use in selling their products to you, except through such joint marketing arrangements.
- We will not share your health information with any other company, even one of our affiliates, to permit it to market its products and services to you.
Generally, we will let you review what we know about you if you ask us in writing. (Because of its legal sensitivity, we will not show you anything that we learned in connection with a claim or lawsuit.) If you tell us that what we know about you is incorrect, we will review it. If we agree with you, we will correct our records. If we do not agree with you, you may tell us in writing, and we will include your statement when we give your information to anyone outside MetLife.
In addition to any other privacy notice we may provide, federal law has established privacy standards and requires us to provide a summary of our privacy policy to our customers once each year. Individuals may have additional rights under other applicable laws.
If you want to know more about our privacy policy generally, please contact us through our Ask a Privacy Policy Question form, or write to your MetLife insurance company, c/o MetLife Privacy Office, P.O. Box 489, Warwick, Rhode Island 02887-9954.