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Online Security Policy

In the information age, Wells Fargo's commitment to protect your information and your privacy extends to your online banking. While our privacy policies are the same whether you are online or not, we have extra measures in place to protect your privacy when you bank online with Wells Fargo.


Wells Fargo Message: Online Security
  • Satisfying our customers' financial needs in a secure manner and helping them succeed financially has been a cornerstone of Wells Fargo for more than 150 years.
  • At Wells Fargo, protecting our customers and their information is a top priority – one that we take very seriously.
  • We continue to enhance our systems and processes as online services evolve. Because no single solution can ensure online security, we have developed a layered security approach with industry-leading solutions.
  • We have two major objectives in selecting the right electronic safeguards:
    • Protecting our customers' information
    • Minimizing customer impact while providing multiple layers of protection wherever customer transactions call for added security
  • As part of this effort, Wells Fargo Financial has chosen to remove all sensitive customer information from online access, including account numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth and other sensitive information.
  • At Wells Fargo, we are committed to educating our customers about fraud and identify theft protection. We encourage them to visit our Fraud Information Centers at:https://www.wellsfargo.com/privacy_security/fraud_prevention/

We are continually looking for ways to help our customers succeed financially and remain committed to providing superior online services that are safe and secure.

Are You a Visitor or a Registered User?

Wells Fargo Financial provides various tools designed to help you make financial decisions and choose the products and services that are right for you. For example, our Home Equity Calculator allows you to determine the available equity in your home.

When you are just browsing and testing these scenarios, we do not collect, capture, or retain your personal information. By offering you this level of privacy during our demos, we believe you will more likely try the "what if" scenarios. This means you may be more likely to find the products and services that fulfill your financial needs and goals.

When you request an online application for one of our financial products or services, our Web site may request information such as your email address or your account number, via an online form. This information allows you to perform certain tasks (for example, correspond with us). And, it allows us to provide the information you requested. In these cases, we collect only the information necessary to interact with you. If you do not interact with us as you browse our Web site anonymously, any personal information, such as your email address, is not collected. We gather data that is not personally identifiable to you to track Web site usage, such as number of hits, pages visited, and the length of user sessions in order to evaluate the usefulness of our sites.

About Cookies

Cookies are pieces of data assigned by a Web server to the browser on your PC. Cookies help Web sites recognize return visitors. So, when you return to a Web site you've visited before, your browser gives this data back to the server. Contrary to reports about cookies and online privacy, cookies do not contain viruses and most cannot reveal any personally identifiable information about you unless you willingly provide it as a user on a site.

Wells Fargo Financial uses cookies to make your online experience with us richer and more personalized. As a matter of security, we do not embed your social security number, password, or other personal information in our cookies.

We recommend that you complete your online transactions and Log off before surfing to other sites or turning off your PC. We also suggest that you do not surf to other sites during your online banking session.

When browsing the Internet, you may see a banner ad for a Wells Fargo product or service such as an auto loan or a credit card. These ads may appear on Yahoo, America Online, or other non-Wells Fargo Web sites. We use third party ad serving companies to serve our ad banners to sites on which we've paid to advertise. If you click on one of our ads, you go to the Wells Fargo site offering that particular product or service.

Sometimes, these ads may contain small graphics with "tags" in them. These tags tell us how many people respond to our ads. They do not identify you personally. Instead, these tags are used only to measure the effectiveness of our ads. The companies that distribute our ads are prohibited by contract from using information other than for the agreed upon purpose – to help us market our products and services and to measure response rates.

We Work to Ensure Privacy and Security During Your Online Sessions

The information you provide to us online is protected by Secure Socket Layer (SSL technology). SSL is the leading security protocol for data transfer on the Internet. This technology scrambles your account information as it moves between your PC's browser and Wells Fargo's computer systems. When information is scrambled, or encrypted in this way, it becomes nearly impossible for anyone other than Wells Fargo Financial to read it. This secure session helps protect the safety and confidentiality of your information when you bank with us online.

Protecting Children's Privacy Online

From our web sites, we do not knowingly collect or use personal information from children under 13 without containing verifiable consent from their parents. Should a child whom we know to be under 13 send personal information to us, we will only use that information to respond directly to that child, seek parental consent, or provide parental notice. We are not responsible for the data collection and use practices of nonaffiliated third parties to which our web sites may link.

For more information about the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), visit the FTC web site: www.ftc.gov

We are not responsible for the information collection practices of the non-Wells Fargo links you click to from our Web pages. We cannot guarantee how these third parties use cookies or whether they place on your computer cookies that may identify you personally. We urge you to review the privacy policies of each of the linked Web sites you visit – before you provide them with any personally identifiable information.

Policy Changes

If it is necessary to make changes to our online privacy policies, we will update the Wells Fargo Online Security Policy with the changes and new effective date.

Effective Date: 9/23/09