At Friends
Reunited,
we believe strongly in protecting the privacy of our Members' personal
information. This is a legal document that sets out how Friends Reunited
handles data which identifies you. You should read it in conjunction with the Friends
Reunited Terms and Conditions, of which this Privacy Policy forms part.
1.
Emails and communications.
You
are probably most interested in how we will use your email address to
communicate with you, so here's our email promise, in plain English:
Service Emails. The team at Friends
Reunited hates spam and will never ever send you unsolicited emails. But there
are some emails that we will need to send you to provide you with a good
Friends Reunited service. These include notifications that you have a message
from an old friend, reminders about your membership and guides on how to use
the site. A full list of the types of emails you will receive to help you use
the service most effectively (which we call Service Emails) are shown below:
- Validation email – the email we use to verify your email address
when you first register
- Welcome emails - emails which explain how to use the site when you
first join
- Key service messages – if we need to notify you about changes to
the service
- New message notification and reminders – when you receive messages
from old friends
- Request emails to join your friend’s/groups’ list or event(s)
- Notes/profile/comments/photo and video approval notification
- Service suspension notices – if you break the house rules
As
well as these Service Emails, you will also receive New People Alerts and our occasional newsletters (if you have opted to
receive them). These emails genuinely help you make the most of the website and
let you know when there's new fun and interesting stuff to do. Here's a bit
more about them…
New People
Alerts. We
automatically send you our New People Alerts. They are an essential part of the
Friends Reunited service because they tell you when people you may know have
joined the site or have added more information. The good thing about this email
is it lets you know when you should pop back to the site. Without it you would
never know there was new stuff to read.
If
at anytime you decide you don't want to receive the New People Alert, all you
need to do is uncheck the “New People Alert” box in your email preferences.
You'll
find this in the “My account” page which can be accessed from the link on the
website once you're logged in. Instructions on this can be found at the bottom
of every New People Alert.
Newsletters. When registering, you
are given the option to receive our occasional newsletters. We use these to notify
you about new features on the site, ask your opinion, and tell you about
services you might not be using yet. Newsletters may also contain advertising
from companies we like.
We
only send a newsletter when there is something worthwhile to tell you about, so
your inbox will never be overflowing with guff from us. Generally you'll get a
newsletter about once every six weeks.
If
you sign up to receive our newsletters, we may also email you information and
news about our sister sites, Genes Reunited and Friends Reunited Dating.
If
you decide you no longer want to receive these newsletters – or if you aren't
currently receiving it and want to – all you need to do is change your email
preferences. You'll find this in the “My account” area once you're logged in.
Offers,
competitions and services from third party companies. When registering, you
are also given the option to receive occasional information, offers and
services from third party companies that we like. If you decide you no longer
want to receive these communications – or if you aren't currently receiving
them and want to – all you need to do is change your email preferences. You'll
find this in the “My account” area once you're logged in.
Emailing
through the Friends Reunited Service. We do not directly make your email address available to
anyone on any screen of the Friends Reunited Service. The only legitimate way
of making contact with a friend found on the Friends Reunited Service is for a
Member to enter a message that we will send on the Member's behalf. We will
notify the addressee Member, using the email address he/she has provided to us
that Friends Reunited is holding an email for him/her, and the Member can
collect the email when logged in to the Friends Reunited Service. Members may check and
(if required) change the email address we hold for them at any time through “My
account”. Sent and received email may appear in a Member's Inbox on the Friends
Reunited Service for an indefinite period - we do not delete it after any
specific period. However, this does not mean that we will retain your email
forever; there may come a time when we will need to delete some or all of it,
for technical or other reasons. In this event, we will endeavour to give you
advance warning that we are going to do so.
Email
communications to non members Friends Reunited members can invite friends to join the
Friends Reunited service by email via our automated email service. Friends
Reunited will store the non members’ email addresses provided by the member for
invite purposes only. These non member addresses will not be stored on our
database for longer than required for invite purposes. This data will also not
be sold or passed on to a third party. Non member recipients of these
communications can request the removal of their information from our database
at any time by contacting Friends Reunited Customer Support.
2.
The information we gather and track.
Information
gathered on registration. When you register for the Friends Reunited Service, you
provide your name (including a previous name, where relevant), one or more
category listings on the Friends Reunited Service (school, workplace, street
etc) your email address, and some optional notes about yourself
("Registration Information"). They are available to you, and capable
of being changed, through the “My account/profile” pages. Please update your
details with relevant changes as soon as possible to ensure we have the correct
information for you on your account.
Cookies. We use small files
known as "cookies" to enhance Members' experience of the Friends
Reunited Service as follows:
- To hold Members' login information, so that your category listings
are displayed when you visit the Friends Reunited Service. This option can
be turned off by switching the "Remember Your Password" option
to "No" in “My details/profile”
- To facilitate optimal use of the Friends Reunited Service by
Members, by means of a temporary "session" cookie. These cookies
disappear when the Member's browser session ends, or if the Member clicks
the "logoff" text, which appears on the Friends Reunited
Service.
We also use cookies and other such devices to compile
anonymous, aggregated statistics that allow us to understand how users use the
Friends Reunited Service and to help us improve the structure of our website
(we cannot identify you personally in this way). We use cookies and other such
devices to allow us to understand who has seen which pages and advertisements
on the website, to determine how frequently particular pages and advertisements
are visited, to determine the most popular areas of the website and generally
in order to monitor usage of the website.
We may also use cookies and other such devices:
- To help us recognise you as a unique visitor when you return to our
website and to allow us to tailor content or advertisements to match your
preferred interests or to avoid showing you the same adverts repeatedly; and/or
- To gather aggregate non personal data to help us improve the services
to you. We will also use aggregate non personal data to track the success of
any advertising campaigns on our website, to improve the effectiveness and
suitability of advertising in communications sent by us and other companies in
the same group as Friends Reunited, and/or to provide to third parties
anonymised demographic data provided by you to target advertising more
appropriately.
We
use Nielsen, an independent
measurement and research company, who use cookies and code on our website
to gather non-personal data regarding the number and frequency of visitors to
our site. Both the cookies and the embedded code
provide general site and not personal statistical information about visits to
pages on the site, the duration of individual page view, paths taken by
visitors through the site and other general information. Friends
Reunited uses this type of information to help it improve the
services to its members. Further information regarding Nielsen can be
found at http://www.nielsen.com/
Third
party cookies including those from DoubleClick, TheSearchWorks and Google are used on some parts of the site. They
are used for tracking the success of advertising campaigns. These cookies are
normally permanent. Advertisers on our website and newsletters may also use
cookies and similar devices (both on our site and elsewhere) to monitor the
success of the advertising, to control the frequency and repetition of
advertisements and to ensure that advertising is relevant to individual users.
Disabling
cookies. Most internet browsers are automatically set up to accept cookies, but
you can set your browser to refuse a cookie or ask your browser to show you
where a cookie has been set up. Certain services are only activated by the
presence of a cookie and, if you choose to refuse cookies, particular features
of this website may not be available to you.
Find out how to disable/enable cookies by clicking on the
“Manage Cookies” section of the Interactive Advertising Bureau website on the
following link http://www.allaboutcookies.org/
Members’ Privacy
settings. Who
you allow to see your profile are defined by the privacy settings you apply for these pages and information. For example you can
add members and friends to your friend list and allow certain friends different
privacy settings to others. You are also able to block members from
communicating with you. These privacy setting can be set or changed through the
“Privacy Menu/profile” pages.
3.
Sharing and use of information
The
over-riding principles we apply are these:
-
the only circumstances in which we will provide any of your personal data to a
third party are those contained in this Privacy Policy.
-
Registration Information. Once a Member selects
a school or other category listing (workplace, street etc), the Registration
Information held for that Member, except for the email address, will be
available to, and searchable by, users of the Friends Reunited Service.
-
Advertising. The Friends Reunited
Service may include interactive advertising for other businesses. We may use,
and provide to third parties, anonymised demographic data provided by Members
to target this advertising more appropriately. See the section on Cookies
above for more information about this.
-
Companies in the Friends
Reunited group. We may share data supplied by you (or collected about you) with other
companies in the corporate group of which Friends Reunited forms a part, but
only for the purposes described in this policy.
-
Changes in Friends
Reunited's business. If all of the assets which Friends Reunited uses to operate
its business (or substantially all of them) are acquired by a third party, we
may transfer personal data we then hold to that party so that the acquirer can
continue to provide the Friends Reunited Service.
-
Place of processing. The personal
information held by us is held on and processed by computers situated in the United Kingdom .
4.
Security
We
have security measures in place to protect our customer database and access to
this database is restricted internally. However, it remains each Member's
responsibility:
- to protect against unauthorised access to Your Details;
- to ensure no-one else uses the Friends Reunited Service on that
Member's machine while it is "logged on" to the Friends Reunited
Service;
- to log off or exit from the Friends Reunited Service when not
using it; and
- to keep his/her password secret.
5. Removing yourself from the Friends Reunited
Service
You may have your registration details
removed from the site at any time. To remove yourself please click here
and we will remove all Your Details.
Your
information will be archived and stored for the necessary time period for legal
reasons. It is important to understand and recognize that member content may
be copied or stored by other members even after it has been removed from the
site. It may also remain cached and archived by those that have copied it.
6. Disclosure for legal reasons
We reserve the right to communicate such
of a Member's personal information as we hold to third parties which seek the
disclosure of it, and which make a request for its disclosure with which we are
obliged by law to comply.
7.
Data retention period
We
will retain your personal data only as long as is necessary for the purposes to
which you consent under the Friends
Reunited Terms and Conditions and this Privacy Policy, or as is required by
applicable law, and then we will delete it.
8.
Contacting Friends Reunited
If
you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, the practices of the Friends
Reunited Service, or your dealings with Friends Reunited, you can contact us here. You can also use this address if you wish to request from Friends
Reunited a copy of the personal data we hold about you or a description of that
data. Please note that by law we are entitled to charge you a small sum for
providing this information
9.
Links to third party sites
The
Friends Reunited Service contains links to other sites. Friends Reunited is not
responsible for the privacy practices, or the content, of those web sites
10.
Data protection information
You
can obtain further information about data protection laws by visiting the
Information Commissioner's website at http://www.ico.gov.uk.
You can search for our Data Protection Notification there, should you so wish.
11.
Changes to
this Privacy Policy
If
we change this Privacy Policy, we will notify you of the changed document in
the same way as we notify changes to the Friends Reunited Terms and Conditions.
This
privacy policy was last updated on 30th April 2008
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