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

• BuyGB is designed to make it easy for you to share information with other members. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on BuyGB and you should consider this whenever you share information.

• BuyGB is not just a website. It is also a service for sharing your information on other BuyGB enhanced applications and websites. You can learn more about how information is shared with them on our About BuyGB pages.

• Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, gender, geographic region, and items you have commented on are considered publicly available to everyone, including BuyGB-enhanced applications.

• BuyGB 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 BuyGB. It does not, however, apply to entities that BuyGB does not own or control, such as BuyGB-enhanced applications and websites. By using or accessing BuyGB, you agree to our privacy practices outlined here.

No information from children under age 13

If you are under age 13, please do not attempt to register for BuyGB or provide any personal information about yourself to us. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that we might have any information from a child under age 13, please contact us.

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 from you

Personal information you provide to us

When you sign up for BuyGB you must provide us with your location. During the registration process we give you the opportunity to provide additional profile information, such as your name, address, email address, and to add a picture of yourself. 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 ‘My BuyGB’ area at any time to add or remove personal information about yourself.

Content

One of the primary reasons people use BuyGB is to share content about your local community with others. Examples include when you update your status, share a link, create an event, make a comment, or send someone a message. If you do not want us to store metadata associated with content you share on BuyGB (such as photos), please remove the metadata before uploading the content.

Transactional Information

We retain the details of transactions or payments you make on BuyGB in order to allow your transactions to be processed, and to provide you with relevant product suggestions in the future.

Location Information

Any content you share on BuyGB is tagged with your location, based on your postcode provided to us at registration. This location is used to control which other members see your content.

Information we collect when you interact with BuyGB:

Site activity information. We keep track of the actions you take on BuyGB, such as adding a comment, viewing an event, indicating you “like” a post. In some cases you are also taking an action when you provide information or content to us. For example, if you comment on an event, in addition to storing the actual content you uploaded, we might log the fact you commented on it.

Access Device and Browser Information

When you access BuyGB 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 BuyGB easier to use, to make our advertising better, and to protect both you and BuyGB. 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 BuyGB. We also use them to confirm that you are logged into BuyGB, and to know when you are interacting with BuyGB Platform applications and websites, our widgets and Share buttons, and our advertisements. You can remove or block cookies using the settings in your browser, but in some cases that may impact your ability to use BuyGB.

3 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 “anonymise” 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 BuyGB users, such as when another user views or comments on your profile.

4. Information You Share With Third Parties

We take steps to ensure that others use information that you share on BuyGB in a manner consistent with this policy, 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 BuyGB

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, comments and items you have marked as ‘like’ are considered publicly available.

Some of the content you share and the actions you take will show up on other user’s home pages and other pages they visit.

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 prior to deletion, 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.

Some information posted to BuyGB is publicly available information, and may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into BuyGB), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of BuyGB (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. If you delete content that you posted on BuyGB, we will remove it from your BuyGB profile, but have no control over its use outside of BuyGB.

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 BuyGB, including your information and information about you.

Advertisements

Sometimes the advertisers who present ads on BuyGB use technological methods to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalise advertising content. You may opt-out of the placement of cookies by many of these advertisers here. You may also use your browser cookie settings to limit or prevent the placement of cookies by advertising networks.

Links

When you click on links on BuyGB 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.

5. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to try to provide a safe, efficient, and customised 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. 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. You may opt out of all communications except essential updates. We may include content you see on BuyGB in the emails we send to you.

To serve personalised advertising to you

We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. (An example of consent would be if you asked us to provide your shipping address to an advertiser to receive a free sample.) 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 the fact that you have commented on certain types of local produce to show you ads for that produce, but we do not tell the advertiser 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 supplement your profile

We may use information about you that we collect from other BuyGB users to supplement your profile (such as when your posts are commented on).

To make Suggestions

We use your profile information, location and other relevant information, to help you connect with other users, including making suggestions to you and other users that you connect with on BuyGB.

6. How We Share Information

BuyGB is about sharing information with others — friends and people in your local community. 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 BuyGB, 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 to join. When you ask us to invite a friend to join BuyGB, we will send your friend a message on your behalf using your name. We may also send up to two reminders to them in your name. If your friend does not want us to keep their information, we will remove it at their request.

When you choose to share your information with marketers. You may choose to share information with marketers or electronic commerce providers that are not associated with BuyGB through on-site offers. This is entirely at your discretion and we will not provide your information to these marketers without your consent.

To help your friends find you. By default, we make certain information you have posted to your profile available in search results on BuyGB to help your local community find you. We also partner with other social network providers to help their users identify which of their contacts are BuyGB users, so that we can promote BuyGB 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 information posted by you and your public search listing.

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 BuyGB, 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 BuyGB 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. 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 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, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. 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.

7. 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.

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 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 BuyGB. 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, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on BuyGB. (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 BuyGB 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.

Non-user contact information

If a user provides any of your personal details to us, and you are not a BuyGB user but you want us to delete your details, you can do so. However, that request will only apply to details we have at the time of the request and not to any details that users provide to us later.

8. How We Protect Information 

We do our best to keep your information secure, but we need your help.

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), we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL). We also use automated and social measures to enhance security, such as analysing account behaviour for fraudulent or otherwise anomalous behavior, 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 policies.

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 authorised persons will view your information. We cannot ensure that information you share on BuyGB will not become publicly available. We are not responsible for third party circumvention of any security measures on BuyGB. 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.

Report Violations

You should report any security violations to us.

9. Other Terms

Changes

We may change this Privacy Policy. Unless stated otherwise, our current privacy policy applies to all information that we have about you and your account. If we make changes to this Privacy Policy we will notify you by publication here.

Consent to Collection and Processing in the European Union.

By using BuyGB, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the European Union.