Privacy Policies

We want to earn your trust by being transparent about how EnglishGathering works. You should read this policy in its entirety, but should pay particular attention to these highlighted items:
 

• EnglishGathering is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on EnglishGathering and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information.

• Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, gender and geographic region are considered publicly available to everyone and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

• EnglishGathering is a free service supported primarily by advertising. We will not share your information with advertisers without your consent. We allow advertisers to select characteristics of users they want to show their advertisements to and we use the information we have collected to serve those advertisements.

1. Introduction

Scope. This privacy policy covers all of EnglishGathering. It does not, however, apply to entities that EnglishGathering does not own or control. By using or accessing EnglishGathering, you agree to our privacy practices.

Parental participation. We strongly recommend that minors 13 years of age or older ask their parents for permission before sending any information about themselves to anyone over the Internet and we encourage parents to teach their children about safe internet use practices.

2. Information We Receive

Information you provide to us:

Personal information. When you sign up for EnglishGathering you provide us with your name, email, gender, and birth date. During the registration process we give you the opportunity to provide additional profile information, such as where you went to school and where you work, and to add a picture of yourself, to help your friends connect with you. In some cases we may ask for additional information for security reasons or to provide specific services to you. Once you register you can visit your profile at any time to add or remove personal information about yourself. You can add basic information about yourself, such as information about your hometown, family, relationships, and your political and religious views. You can also add other information about yourself including your activities, interests, contact information, as well as more information about your education and job history.

Content. One of the primary reasons people use EnglishGathering is to share content with others. Examples include when you update your status, upload or take a photo, upload or record a video, share a link, create an event or a group, make a comment, write a note, or send someone a message. If you do not want us to store metadata associated with content you share on EnglishGathering (such as photos), please remove the metadata before uploading the content.

Transactional Information. We may retain the details of transactions or payments you make on EnglishGathering. However, we will only keep your payment source account number with your consent.

Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.

Information we collect when you interact with EnglishGathering:

Site activity information. We keep track of the actions you take on EnglishGathering, such as adding a family member,  joining a House or an event, creating a photo album or attending an event. In some cases you are also taking an action when you provide information or content to us. For example, if you share a video, in addition to storing the actual content you uploaded, we might log the fact you shared it.

Access Device and Browser Information. When you access EnglishGathering from a computer, mobile phone, or other device, we may collect information from that device about your browser type, location, and IP address, as well as the pages you visit.

Cookie Information. We use "cookies" (small pieces of data we store for an extended period of time on your computer, mobile phone, or other device) to make EnglishGathering easier to use, to make our advertising better, and to protect both you and EnglishGathering. For example, we use them to store your login ID (but never your password) to make it easier for you to login whenever you come back to EnglishGathering. We also use them to confirm that you are logged into EnglishGathering. You can remove or block cookies using the settings in your browser, but that will impact your ability to use EnglishGathering.

Information we receive from third parties:

Information from other websites. We may institute programs with advertising partners and other websites in which they share information with us:

- We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as “conversion tracking,” helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see.

- We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads.

If in any of these cases we receive data that we do not already have, we will “anonymize” it within 180 days, meaning we will stop associating the information with any particular user. If we institute these programs, we will only use the information in the ways we explain in the “How We Use Your Information” section below.

Information from other users. We may collect information about you from other EnglishGathering users, such as when a family member tags you in a photo or video, provides friend details, or indicates a relationship with you. You can limit who can see that you have been tagged in a photo or video.

3. Information You Share With Third Parties

We take steps to ensure that others use information that you share on EnglishGathering in a manner consistent with your privacy settings, but we cannot guarantee that they will follow our rules. Read the following section to learn more about how you can protect yourself when you share information with third parties.

Sharing information on EnglishGathering. We designed our privacy settings to enable you to control how you share your information on EnglishGathering. You should review the default privacy settings to make sure they reflect your preferences. Here are some specific things to remember:

- You can control the visibility of most of the information you share on EnglishGathering through the privacy settings you select.

- Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of family, gender, geographic region, and Houses you belong to are considered publicly available, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can limit the ability of others to find this information on third party search engines through your search privacy settings.

- Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.

- You understand that information might be re-shared or copied by other users.

- Certain types of communications that you send to other users cannot be removed, such as messages.

- When you post information on another user’s profile, that information will be subject to the other user’s privacy settings.

Exporting Information. You (and those you make your information available to) may use tools like RSS feeds, mobile phone address books, or copy and paste functions, to capture and export information from EnglishGathering, including your information and information about you.

Links. When you click on links on EnglishGathering you may leave our site. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites, and we encourage you to read their privacy statements.

4. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to try to provide a safe, efficient, and customized experience. Here are some of the details on how we do that:

To manage the service. We use the information we collect to provide our services and features to you, to measure and improve those services and features, and to provide you with customer support. We use the information to prevent potentially illegal activities, and to enforce our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. For example, we ask for your date of birth to verify that you are over age 13 and so that we can better limit your access to content and advertisements that are not age appropriate. We also use a variety of technological systems to detect and address anomalous activity and screen content to prevent abuse such as spam. These efforts may on occasion result in a temporary or permanent suspension or termination of some functions for some users.

To contact you. We may contact you with service-related announcements from time to time.

To serve personalized advertising to you. We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are. Even though we do not share your information with advertisers without your consent, when you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and note that it meets the criteria they selected.

To serve social ads. We occasionally pair advertisements we serve with relevant information we have about you and your family to make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your family. We only share the personally identifiable information visible in the social ad with the family member who can see the ad.

5. How We Share Information

EnglishGathering is about sharing information with other family member while providing you with privacy settings that you can use to restrict other users from accessing your information. We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you, reasonably necessary to offer our services, or when legally required to do so. For example:

When you make a payment. When you enter into transactions with others or make payments on EnglishGathering, we will only share transaction information with those third parties necessary to complete the transaction and will require those third parties to agree to respect the privacy of your information.

When you invite a friend or family member to join. When you ask us to invite a friend or family member to join EnglishGathering, we will send your them a message on your behalf using your name. We may also send up to two reminders to them in your name. If they do not want us to keep their information, we will remove it at their request.

To help your family and friends find you. By default, we make certain information you have posted to your profile available in search results on EnglishGathering to help your family and friends find you. However, you can control who has access to this information, as well as who can find you in searches, through your privacy settings. We also partner with email and instant messaging providers to help their users identify which of their contacts are EnglishGathering users, so that we can promote EnglishGathering to those users.

To give search engines access to publicly available information. We generally limit search engines’ access to our site. We may allow them to access public information.

To help improve or promote our service. Sometimes we share aggregated information with third parties to help improve or promote our service. But we only do so in such a way that no individual user can be identified or linked to any specific action or information.

To provide you with services. We may provide information to service providers that help us bring you the services we offer. For example, we may use third parties to help host our website, send out email updates about EnglishGathering, remove repetitive information from our user lists, process payments, or provide search results or links (including sponsored links). These service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time, but when this occurs we implement reasonable contractual and technical protections to limit their use of that information to helping us provide the service.

To advertise our services. We may ask advertisers outside of EnglishGathering to display ads promoting our services. We may ask them to deliver those ads based on the presence of a cookie, but in doing so will not share any other information with the advertiser.

To offer joint services. We may provide services jointly with other companies, such as the classifieds service in the EnglishGathering Marketplace. If you use these services, we may share your information to facilitate that service. However, we will identify the partner and present the joint service provider’s privacy policy to you before you use that service.

To respond to legal requests and prevent harm. We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United Kingdom where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.

Transfer in the Event of Sale or Change of Control. If the ownership of all or substantially all of our business changes, we may transfer your information to the new owner so that the service can continue to operate. In such a case, your information would remain subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy.

6. How You Can View, Change, or Remove Information

Viewing and editing your profile. You may change or delete your profile information at any time by going to your profile page and clicking “Edit My Profile.” Information will be updated immediately. While you cannot delete your date of birth, you can use the setting on the info tab of your profile information page to hide all or part of it from other users.

Deactivating or deleting your account. If you want to stop using your account you may deactivate it or delete it. When you deactivate an account, no user will be able to see it, but it will not be deleted. We save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.) in case you later decide to reactivate your account. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and in doing so are asking us to maintain their information until they return to EnglishGathering. You will still have the ability to reactivate your account and restore your profile in its entirety. When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted. You should only delete your account if you are certain you never want to reactivate it.

Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on EnglishGathering. (For example, if you post something to another user’s profile, and then you delete your account, that post may remain, but be attributed to an “Anonymous EnglishGathering User.”) Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested.

Backup copies. Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies for up to 90 days, but will not be available to others.

7. How We Protect Information

Steps we take to keep your information secure. We keep your account information on a secured server behind a firewall. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card numbers and passwords), we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). We also use automated and social measures to enhance security, such as analyzing account behaviour for fraudulent or otherwise anomalous behaviour, may limit use of site features in response to possible signs of abuse, may remove inappropriate content or links to illegal content, and may suspend or disable accounts for violations of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

Risks inherent in sharing information. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your information, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other users with whom you share your information. We cannot guarantee that only authorized persons will view your information. We cannot ensure that information you share on EnglishGathering will not become publicly available. We are not responsible for third party circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures on EnglishGathering. You can reduce these risks by using common sense security practices such as choosing a strong password, using different passwords for different services, and using up to date antivirus software.

8. Data Protection

English Gathering is obliged to conform to English Data Protection legislation, in order to ensure the safe and authorized use of personal data, and in becoming a user of this service you acknowledge that obligation and undertake to be bound by any requirements under this legislation imposed on the Company and to indemnify the Company against any loss arising as a result of any failing on your part to comply with these requirements.

EnglishGathering.co.uk is registered with the English Data Protection Commissioner as a Data Controller. Our reference number is 115838280.

9. Defamation Act 2009

Information gathered on this site pertaining to individuals is screened as to its accuracy and content to ensure compliance with the laws of this jurisdiction. However, such personal information is received in good faith and EnglishGathering can accept no liability for false or inaccurate information causing harm or damage to others and the Company will not be held liable for any breach under the Defamation Act 2009 that may arise from the use of this site or be held responsible as a facilitator of such a breach.

10. Other Terms

Changes. We may change this Privacy Policy pursuant to the procedures outlined in the EnglishGathering Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account.

Consent to Collection and Processing in the United Kingdom.  By using EnglishGathering, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United Kingdom.

Defined Terms. "Us," "we," "our," "the Company," and "EnglishGathering" mean the same as they do in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. “Information” and “content” are used more generally and interchangeably here than in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities unless otherwise limited by the context.