Privacy, Protection and You
The Internet has become a convenient, and a common new place to find matches for smart, eligible people. As a result, many individuals are looking for relationships online with people they have not met and know little about. Make the experience enjoyable and safe, it is still necessary for you to exercise some precautions for your safety. Here are some guidelines YOU can follow to protect your privacy.
Keep your identity hidden- would you ever hand out your phone number or address to strangers walking on the street? NO. Then why reveal your contact information to the millions of strangers surfing the web? Make sure that you do not give out your contact information anywhere in your personals advertisement or your profile. This includes your full name, address, telephone number and even your email address.
Begin by communicating online- when you begin communicating don’t jump into telephonic conversations or personal meetings prematurely. Take your time and give yourself a chance to know more about the person. We provide you with your very own messaging service.
Look out for inconsistencies- take care to notice odd behaviour or inconsistencies. If someone is evasive, then chances are they may not be completely above board. People can sometimes exaggerate or embellish their profiles to create good impressions. It’s up to you to ferret out the embellished profiles from the truly good ones. Remember, that while some people do fake their profiles, most others are simply genuine, if you do find out that a person has embellished his/her profile do contact us.
Request for a photograph- a photograph puts a face to the person you are getting to know. A photograph does help you to picture the person you are communicating with. It immediately allows you to judge the truthfulness of a person’s physical description about himself / herself. Based on this you can form a general opinion about other information the person has revealed.
Let's talk- do not give out your phone number to a stranger. Trust takes time to develop. Only once you have gained sufficient information to satisfy yourself that you are definitely interested in the person. Also, call unexpectedly once in a while. The response you get from the other person can be very informative.
Meeting up- You should agree to a meeting only when you are completely ready. Do not get pressurized into a meeting. When you decide to meet the person, proceed with caution. Arrange the meeting on your terms. If you are meeting alone then always tell someone you trust where you are going and when you will return. Leave the person’s full name and telephone numbers with that person. Always meet in a public place that you are familiar with the first time. Being in a place you are familiar with will make you comfortable and reduce the awkwardness of first meetings. Getting together for coffee is a pleasant, casual way to get to know someone.
Your Privacy- Crazy Mates offers an online place to meet friends". Personal information is information about you that is personally identifiable like your name, address, email address, or phone number, and that is not otherwise publicly available. Crazy Mates collects personal information when you register and use the service. When you browse certain pages we may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other companies. Once you register with Crazy Mates and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us. Crazy Mates collects information about your transactions with us and with some of our business partners. We automatically receive and records information on our server logs from your browser.
Use of information- Profile information and photos are displayed to people who view your profile. In order to provide useful information about social networks, we may use your profile information and photos on the website and when we send emails. Additionally, when you send email invitations to join Crazy Mates, we may use your email address. When you click to view a member's profile, we may show that member that you clicked to view their profile. If you wish not be shown to members whose profiles you viewed, you can change this in your privacy.
Information Sharing and Disclosure- Crazy Mates does not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or non affiliated companies except to provide products or services you've requested, when we have your permission, or under the following circumstances;
We provide the information to trusted partners who work on behalf of or with us under confidentiality agreements. These companies may use your personal information to help us communicate with you about offers and our marketing partners. However, these companies do not have any independent right to share this information.
If you register with us, your registration and profile information may be shared with the co-branding partner. We encourage you to review the privacy policy of the co-branded partner for questions about their use of your personally identifiable information and how you can modify or delete it.
We believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of Crazy Mates terms of use, or as otherwise required by law. We transfer information about you if it is acquired by or merged with another company. In this event, we will notify you before information about you are transferred and becomes subject to a different policy.
Cookies- Crazy Mates may set and access cookies on your computer. We let other companies that show advertisements on some of our pages set and access their cookies on your computer. Other companies' use of their cookies is subject to their own privacy policies, not this one. Advertisers or other companies do not have access to our cookies.
Account Information and Preferences- new categories of marketing communications may be added to the Marketing Preferences page from time to time. Users who visit this page can opt out of receiving future marketing communications from these new categories or can unsubscribe by following instructions contained in the messages they receive. We reserve the right to send you certain communications relating to this service, such as service announcements, administrative messages and our Newsletter, that are considered part of your account, without offering you the opportunity to opt-out of receiving them. To delete your account, please send an e-mail message to info@crazy-mates.co.uk, subject: account deletion
Confidentiality and Security- we limit access to personal information about you who we believe need to come into contact with that information to provide products or services to you or in order to do their jobs. We have physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with federal regulations to protect personal information about you. Your account Information is password-protected.
Third Party Advertising- we use other third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our Web site. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements on this site and other sites about goods and services that may be of interest to you
Third Party Cookies- In the course of serving advertisements to this site, our third-party advertiser may place or recognize a unique 'cookie' on your browser.
Changes to this Privacy Policy- we will notify you about changes in the way we treat personal information by sending a notice to your email address or by placing a prominent notice on our site.
Use of Information - we will display your personal information on your profile according to the preferences you set in your account. We will use your name so that we can personalize your experience. We will use your email address to contact you from time to time and we will use your email address for security reasons to confirm that you are who you say you are. You can control the types and frequencies of certain emails you receive. We may use the non-personally identifiable information, like your IP address, to statistically analyze site usage and to customize our site's content, layout and services. The resulting information will allow us to improve our site and better understand and serve our users. We may access, preserve, and disclose your personal information and the contents of your account if required to do so by law or in a good faith belief that such access preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to comply with legal process, such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order, or to protect the rights and property of crazy mates, its affiliates or the public.
Control Who Shares Your Information- your profile will only be given to friends you have specifically agreed to share such information with and to other members of groups you choose to belong to. You can limit who can view certain personal information, such as email addresses and phone numbers. You can choose to make your profile visible to non-members by editing your profile and opting in to 'accessible profile.
Reviewing and Changing Your Profile- You can revise your profile, and who will be given access to your personal profile, at any time.
Internet Awareness- whenever you post personal information in public areas like message boards and forums, you should be aware that this information can be accessed by the public and can in turn be used by others. Please exercise discretion in deciding what information you disclose.
Age Limit- those under the age of sixteen (16) are not eligible to use our service and must not submit any personal information to us.
Security - the security of your personal information depends on your protection of your account password. Please do not disclose your account password to unauthorized people. We use industry standard technology designed to help keep your personal information safe. 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 against use by anyone else of the service through the machine that Member uses while they are "logged on", to log off or exit the service when not using it; and to keep his/her password secret.
The information we gather and track- Information gathered on registration. When you register is available to you, and capable of being corrected or updated, through the “My Details” page.
Sharing and use of information- Our credit card processing agents, will not supply your personal data to a third party for commercial exploitation – thus, you can rest assured that we will not sell the lists of our Members’ email addresses to a third party; and the only circumstances in which we will provide any of your personal data to a third party for non-commercial purposes are those contained in this Policy. Once a Member selects a location, some or all of the information held for that Member, except for the email address and mobile number and passwords, will be publicly available at the listing for that location. Specific information you submit must be considered at all times to be publicly available information, unless where the option to keep private such information is available and activated. We do not directly make your email address available to anyone.
Advertising- we may use, and provide to third parties, anonymous demographic data provided by Members to target this advertising more appropriately.
Telephone numbers- Your number will never be disclosed to any third party without your prior consent. Should we introduce a service which utilises telephone numbers, you will be given the option to 'OPT-IN' as we believe it should be your choice what services you receive.
Subscription- as a member you will receive regular newsletters and emails, according to their preferences. This may be for news and subscription updates as well as promotions and shopping offers.
Notification of unread messages- If you have a number of messages waiting for you in your mailbox, and you have not logged in to the service for an extended period, we may at our discretion contact you via your registered email address to notify you of the unread messages. Should you still not read and remove these messages then we may remove the messages as part of our data cleansing process.
Credit Card information- there has been a lot of publicity about Credit Card security on the Internet so we decided to use Pay pal, who operate a secure server, to process our credit card payments. They encrypt Members’ credit or debit card information and authorise payment directly. This means that Members’ credit card details are never revealed to us.
Opt-out policy- you may have your registration details removed at any time..
Invite a Friend- if a user elects to use our Invitation option to invite a friend to our site, we ask them for the friend's email address. You will automatically send the friend an email inviting them to join the site provided the user agrees to obtain consent from their friends to send them an invitation. We store this email address for the purpose of automatically adding the respondent to the friends list of the user sending the invitation, and also to send reminders of the invitation. We do not sell these email addresses or use them to send any other communication besides invitations and invitation reminders. The friend may contact us to request the removal of this information from our database.
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 legally-compliant request for its disclosure.
Contacting Us- If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings you can contact us.
Data Protection Information- you can obtain further information about data protection laws by visiting the Information Commissioner’s website at www.dataprotection.gov.uk.