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 ComScore, 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 ComScore can be found at http://www.ComScore.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.
