About
MARTA

Privacy and Legal

Summary 

Effective Date: March 20, 2023
Last Revised: March 20, 2023

The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (“MARTA,” “us,” “we” or “our”) respects your privacy.   This Privacy Policy specifies the personal information (defined below) we collect through your interactions with the MARTA website ( http://www.itsmarta.com) (the “Site”), and how we collect, use, safeguard, and disclose that information.  This Privacy Policy also applies through your use of our product and services offerings (“Services”), as well as when we collect personal information in connection with recruitment and pre-employment activities.

By using the Site and Services, you acknowledge and agree that you have read and understand the data practices described in this Privacy Policy.

For the purposes of this Privacy Policy, MARTA is a controller (i.e., responsible party) of your personal information when we administer the Site and Services directly on our own behalf.  

You can access specific topics in this Privacy Policy by clicking on the relevant links below:

Personal Information We Collect  

The types of personal information we collect or receive about you depends on how you interact with us. “Personal information” is defined as information that identifies, relates to, describes or can be associated with you. We collect or receive the following types of personal information about users of the Site and the Services:

  • Contact Information/Identifiers, including first and last name, postal address, business contact information, telephone number, email address or other similar identifiers.
  • Government Identifiers, including driver’s license and Social Security number, where necessary.
  • Commercial Information, including order history, billing address, shipping address, and product/service preferences.
  • Demographic Information, including age and gender, some of which may include characteristics of protected classifications under state or federal law.
  • Device Information and Other Unique Identifiers, including device identifiers, the Internet domain and the internet protocol (IP) address from which you access our website, or other similar unique identifiers.
  • Information from Reports Made Via MARTA’s See and Say App, including photographs or descriptions of the incident that is being reported (which may include personal information), personal information from the individual who is making the report, geolocation data, and device information from the device used to make the report.
  • Internet or Other Network Activity, including the type of browser and operating system used to access our site, the date and time of your visit, the pages you visit, information collected through cookies (please see the Cookies and Other Online Interactions section of the Privacy Policy), and information regarding your interactions with our Site, mobile applications, emails, or advertisements.
  • Geolocation Data, including information that permits us to determine your location, such as if you manually provide location information or enable your mobile device to send us precise location information.
  • Payment Information, including credit or debit card number, or other financial information.
  • Job Applicant Data, including name, gender, age, date of birth, email address, mailing address, telephone number, social media profiles, and in certain instances, identification documents, residency and work permit status, social security number (which may also be considered sensitive personal information) or other taxpayer/government identification number.  This data also includes any professional qualifications, prior employment history, education history, additional information included in curriculum vitae, and references, as well as notes collected by interviewers and other professional assessment information. If we offer you a job, we may collect additional background information, such as credit history and eligibility information (as permitted by law).  

The provision of the personal information outlined above is generally voluntary, but in certain instances, we will not be able to process your request for our Services or, where applicable, consider you for employment without the requested information.  

Sources of Personal Information

We collect your personal information in the following ways, pursuant to applicable law:

  • Directly from You, when you use our Site or Services, contact us, sign up to receive emails, text messages, and/or postal mailings.
  • Through Our Use of Cookies and Other Automatic Data Collection Technologies, when you visit our Site, open or click on emails we send you, or interact with us.  We or third parties we work with automatically collect certain information using technologies such as cookies, web beacons, clear GIF, pixels, internet tags, web server logs, and other data collection tools.  For more information, please visit the Cookies and Other Online Interactions section of this Policy.
  • From Our Third‑Party Partners, including from third parties that we have partnered with to provide you the Services that you have requested from us. 
  • From Reports Made Via MARTA’s See and Say App, including personal information from the individual making the report via the See and Say App, geolocation data, and personal information relating to individuals about whom the report is being made.
  • Other Sources, including publicly available sources.  

Use of Personal Information

MARTA collects and uses your personal information to operate the Site and deliver the Services you have requested. 

More specifically, we use personal information collected for the following business purposes:

  • To communicate with you and respond to your questions and feedback;
  • To provide the goods and Services you select through the Site;
  • To enable you to access and use our Site;
  • To send marketing and promotional materials, including information relating to the Services; for example, email about upcoming MARTA events and promotions.
  • To administer surveys and generally to conduct research and analytics related to our Sites and Services;
  • To manage our business operations, perform our obligations, and exercise our rights under any agreement with your organization;
  • For other purposes with your consent, or as otherwise permitted or required by applicable law;
  • To comply with our legal and regulatory obligations, to establish or exercise our rights, and to defend against a legal claim; 
  • To consider individuals for employment and contractor opportunities and manage onboarding procedures, as well as to administer and improve our recruitment process;
  • To evaluate our progress in achieving our diversity hiring goals, to ensure equal opportunity monitoring and reporting, to meet obligations, including providing workforce accommodations and for disability and workplace safety tracking administration;
  • To ensuring the technical functions of our network, including to detect, investigate, prevent, or take action regarding possible malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity, including fraudulent transactions, attempts to manipulate or violate our policies, procedures, and terms and conditions, security incidents, and harm to the rights, property, or safety of MARTA and our users, customers, employees, or others;
  • To improve and customize the content and layout of the Site; or
  • To develop new Services.

Personal Information We Disclose

In addition to the specific situations discussed elsewhere in this Privacy Policy, we may disclose information in the following situations, as permitted by applicable law:  

  • MARTA Regional Partners. We may disclose information to other transit systems in the region (“Regional Partners”) to make it easy for you to travel in and out of the city. These Regional Partners may include Gwinnett County Transit, Cobb County Transit, and the Atlanta-Region Transit Link Authority
  • Service Providers. We work with third parties that provide services on our behalf.  Such services may include website hosting, marketing, and website usage analytics.  We may disclose personal information and non-personal information with these third parties for the purpose of enabling them to provide these services. These Service Providers are contractually bound to abide by this policy and are prohibited from using the information except to fulfill the services for which MARTA has contracted.
  • Consent. We may disclose personal information in accordance with any consent you provide.
  • Government agencies, regulators, and professional advisors. We may disclose personal information or any information collected through this Site or Services if we are required to do so by law or pursuant to legal process, in response to a request from government officials or law enforcement authorities, as necessary or appropriate in connection with an investigation of illegal activity, to comply with our legal obligations, and defend our legal interests. We may be required to provide personal information in response to a request under the Georgia Open Records Act, OCGA §50-18-70, et.seq., unless the information requested is exempt from disclosure under the Act. We may also provide statistics based on the information automatically collected from your visit to federal, state, and city officials.
  • Certain Transactions. We may disclose or transfer personal information or any information collected through the Site or Services to third parties who acquire all or a portion of our business, whether such acquisition is by way of merger, consolidation, or purchase of all or a portion of our assets, or in connection with any bankruptcy or reorganization proceeding brought by or against us.
  • Social Media Platforms and Networks: Our Site may have features such as plugins, widgets, or and other tools made available by third parties that may result in information being collected or disclosed between us and the third party.  The third party’s use of your information is not governed by this Privacy Policy. 
  • De-identified or Aggregate Information. We may aggregate and anonymize information you provide to us in such a way as to ensure it will no longer be identifiable to you.  This data may be used for statistical, analytic, and administrative purposes, including analyzing our website traffic and trends, tailoring our Services, or conducting product analysis.  We may disclose anonymized or aggregated data at our discretion, in accordance with applicable laws.

Cookies and Other Online Interactions

Cookies are small files that can be placed on your computer by Web servers when you visit a site. These files may contain information such as ID's and passwords, personal information or preferences. Cookies are typically assigned to one of three categories, depending on their function and intended purpose: Essential Cookies, Analytics Cookies, and Advertising Cookies. We use the following types of cookies on the Site:

Cookie Type Description
Essential Cookies These are cookies that the Sites need in order to function, and that enable you to move around and use the Sites and features. Without these essential cookies, the Sites will not perform as smoothly for you as we would like them to and we may not be able to provide the Sites or certain features you request. Examples of where these cookies are used include: to determine when you are signed in; to determine when your account has been inactive; and for other troubleshooting and security purposes.
Analytics Cookies Analytics cookies allow us to understand more about how many visitors we have to our Sites, how many times they visit us and how many times a user viewed specific pages within our Sites. Although analytics cookies allow us to gather specific information about the pages that you visit and whether you have visited our Sites multiple times, we cannot use them to find out details such as your name or address. We use Google Analytics. For more information about Google Analytics, please refer to "How Google Uses Information From Sites or Apps that Use Our Services", which can be found at www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/, or any other URL Google may provide from time to time.
Advertising  Cookies Depending on your location and in certain circumstances, MARTA may work with third-party online or mobile advertising providers that use cookies to help us manage our online and mobile advertising. We (or an advertising provider acting on our behalf) may place these cookies on your computer or device to display our ads on these providers’ platforms. The information collected from these cookies may also allow us to analyze the effectiveness of our advertising.

If you are concerned about privacy, you may set up your browser not to accept cookies or you can delete them from your hard drive once you leave the section. If you choose to change your settings, you may find that certain functions and features will not work as intended on the Sites.  Cookie settings are slightly different depending on the browser used, so to manage Cookies, you should refer to the program documentation and the relevant settings within your particular browser.

We understand that you may want to know more about Cookies.  Here are some useful resources that provide detailed information about types of Cookies, how they are used, and how you can manage your Cookie preferences:  www.aboutcookies.org or  www.allaboutcookies.org.

Do Not Track Signals

Do Not Track (“DNT”) is a privacy preference that visitors can set in their web browsers.  When a visitor turns on DNT, the browser sends a message to websites requesting that they do not track the visitor.  At this time, we do not respond to these signals.

Your Choices

You may be able to make the following choices regarding your personal information:

  1. Emails. You may choose to provide us with your email address for the purpose of allowing us to send free newsletters and bulletins, surveys, and other news and information materials to you.  You have the right to opt out of any service or information you receive via a single Web or email command. Instructions for doing this are included in all MARTA email communications. If you decide not to receive emails, we may still send you service-related communications.
  2. Mailings.  If at any time you do not want to receive updates, newsletters, bulletins, or information from us, you can remove yourself from our mailing lists by emailing us (our contact information is below) with “NO SNAIL MAIL” in the subject line, along with your name, address and zip code.  Please note that our mailings are prepared in advance of their being sent.  Although we will remove your name from our mailing list after receiving your request, you may still receive mailings from us that had been initiated prior to your name being removed.

Please address requests and questions about your choices to the information detailed in the Contact Information section of this Privacy Policy. 

Information Storage and Security

We employ reasonable security precautions to help protect against the loss, misuse, and alteration of personal information provided on or through the Site.  However, no method of transmitting or storing data is completely secure.  As a result, although we strive to protect personal information about you, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you transmit to us through or in connection with the Site.  If you have reason to believe that personal information is no longer secure, please notify us immediately by contacting us using the Contact Information provided below.  In the event of a breach that we are required by law to inform you of, we may notify you electronically, in writing, or by telephone, if permitted to do so by law.

Data Retention

We retain information about you and your use of our Sites for as long as is needed to fulfill our legitimate business purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy.  The specific periods for which we keep information about you vary depending on the nature of the information, why we need it, and whether the personal information is de-identified.  We also consider the minimum necessary retention period prescribed by applicable laws, recommended by industry standards, and stated in contracts and other legal obligations. 

Children’s Privacy

Our Sites are not intended for persons under 13 years of age.  If we learn that we have collected personal information from persons under 13 through our Site, we will take appropriate steps to delete this information.    

External Links

The Site may contain links to other web sites that MARTA does not control. If you follow these links, you are leaving the MARTA site and are subject to the privacy policies of those sites. If you visit a website that is linked to the Site, you should consult that website’s privacy policy before providing any personal information. Note that the links we provide to outside sites are offered for your convenience. MARTA takes no responsibility for outside sites' content or policies.

Link to breezecard.com 

You may link to our fare media website  breezecard.com  from this site.  The terms of the privacy policy posted at  breezecard.com  applies to any activity including e-commerce conducted at that site.

Updates to this Policy 

MARTA reserves the right to make changes, additions or deletions to this policy as needed to reflect changes to our practices, technology, legal requirements, and other factors. Changes will be posted to this site and will become effective immediately upon posting. This Privacy Policy includes an “Effective” and “Last Updated” date. The Effective date refers to the date that the current version took effect. The last updated date refers to the date that the current version was last substantively modified. 

We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically for the latest information on our information processing practices.  To the extent that our Privacy Policy changes in a material way, the Privacy Policy that was in place at the time that you submitted personal information to us will generally govern that information unless we receive your consent (express or implied) to the new Privacy Policy where and as required by applicable law.

Contact Information

If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy policy, please contact customer service at  custserv@itsmarta.com or 404-848-5000.

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