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Last Updated: September 30, 2024
This Privacy Statement explains our practices, including your choices, regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of certain information, including your personal information in connection with the Chatbuddy service.
Contacting Us
If you have general questions about your account or this privacy policy, please email info@chatbuddy.org. The data controller of your personal information is Chatbuddy, Inc. Please note that if you contact us to assist you, for your safety and ours we may need to authenticate your identity before fulfilling your request.
Collection of Information
We receive and store information about you such as:
Information you provide to us:
We collect information you provide to us which includes:
your name, email address, address or postal code, payment method(s), telephone number, and other identifiers you might use. We collect this information in a number of ways, including when you enter it while using our service, interact with our customer service, or participate in surveys or marketing promotions;
information when you choose to provide ratings, taste preferences, account settings, or otherwise provide information to us through our service or elsewhere.
Information we collect automatically:
We collect information about you and your use of our service, your interactions with us, as well as information regarding your network, network devices, and your computer or other Chatbuddy capable devices you might use to access our service (such as gaming systems, smart TVs, mobile devices, set top boxes, and other streaming media devices). This information includes:
your activity on the Chatbuddy service;
your interactions with our emails and texts, and with our messages through push and online messaging channels;
details of your interactions with our customer service, such as the date, time and reason for contacting us, transcripts of any chat conversations, and if you call us, your phone number and call recordings;
device IDs or other unique identifiers, including for your network devices (such as your router), and devices that are Chatbuddy capable on your network;
device and software characteristics (such as type and configuration), connection information including type (Wi-Fi, cellular), statistics on page views, referring source (for example, referral URLs), IP address (which can be used to tell us your general location, such as your city, state/province, and postal code), browser and standard web server log information;
information collected via the use of cookies, web beacons and other technologies, including ad information (such as information on the availability and delivery of ads, the site URL, as well as the date and time). (See our "Cookies and Internet Advertising" section for more details.)
Information from partners:
We collect information from other companies with whom you have a relationship (“Partners”). These Partners might include (depending on what services you use): your TV or internet service provider, or other streaming media device providers who make our service available on their device; and voice assistant platform providers who enable interaction with our service through voice commands. The information Partners provide us varies depending on the nature of the Partner services, and may include:
search queries and commands applicable to Chatbuddy that you make through Partner devices or voice assistant platforms;
service activation information such as your email address or other contact information;
IP addresses, device IDs or other unique identifiers, as well as associated pre-paid promotion, billing and user interface information, that support user authentication, the Chatbuddy service registration experience, Partner payment processing, and the presentation of Chatbuddy content to you through portions of the Partner user interface.
Information from other sources:
We also obtain information from other sources. We protect this information according to the practices described in this Privacy Statement, plus any additional restrictions imposed by the source of the information. These sources vary over time, but could include:
service providers that help us determine a location based on your IP address in order to customize our service and for other uses consistent with this Privacy Statement;
security service providers that provide us with information to secure our systems, prevent fraud and help us protect the security of Chatbuddy accounts;
payment service providers that provide us with payment or balance information, or updates to that information, based on their relationship with you;
publicly-available sources such as publicly available posts on social media platforms and information available through public databases associating IP addresses with internet service providers (ISPs).
Use of Information
We use information to provide, analyze, administer, enhance and personalize our services and marketing efforts, to process your registration, your orders and your payments, and to communicate with you on these and other topics. For example, we use such information to:
provide you with customized and personalized recommendations for restaurants, stores, recipes, travel destinations, music, stage productions, movies, TV shows, and games we think will be of interest to you (collectively “content”);
determine your general geographic location (such as your city, state/province, and postal code);
provide localized content;
determine your ISP to support network troubleshooting for you (we also use aggregated ISP information for operational and business purposes);
help us quickly and efficiently respond to inquiries and requests;
coordinate with Partners on making the Chatbuddy service available to members and providing information to non members about the availability of the Chatbuddy service, based on the specific relationship you have with the Partner;
secure our systems, prevent fraud and help us protect the security of Chatbuddy accounts;
prevent, detect and investigate potentially prohibited or illegal activities, including fraud, and to enforce our terms (such as determining whether and for which Chatbuddy signup offers you are eligible and determining whether a particular device is permitted to use the account consistent with our Terms of Use);
analyze and understand our audience, improve our service (including our user interface experiences and service performance) and optimize content or ad selection, recommendation algorithms and delivery;
communicate with you concerning our service so that we can send you news about Chatbuddy, details about new features and content available on Chatbuddy, special offers, promotional announcements, consumer surveys, and to assist you with operational requests such as password reset requests. These communications may be by various methods, such as email, push notifications, text message, online messaging channels, and matched identifier communications (described below).
Disclosure of Information
We disclose your information for certain purposes and to third parties, as described below:
Service Providers:
We use other companies, agents or contractors ("Service Providers") to perform services on our behalf or to assist us with the provision of services to you. For example, we engage Service Providers to provide marketing, advertising, communications, security, infrastructure and IT services, to customize, personalize and optimize our service, to process credit card transactions or other payment methods, to provide customer service, to analyze and enhance information (including information about users' interactions with our service), and to process and administer consumer surveys. In the course of providing such services, these Service Providers may have access to your personal or other information. We do not authorize them to use or disclose your personal information except in connection with providing their services (which includes maintaining and improving their services).
Partners:
As described above, you may have a relationship with one or more of our Partners, in which case we may share certain information with them in order to coordinate with them on providing the Chatbuddy service to members and providing information about the availability of the Chatbuddy service. For example, depending on what Partner services you use, we may share information:
in order to facilitate Partner pre-paid promotions or collection of payment for the Chatbuddy service for distribution to us;
with Partners who operate voice assistant platforms that allow you to interact with our service using voice commands;
so that content and features available in the Chatbuddy service can be suggested to you in the Partner’s user interface. For members, these suggestions are part of the Chatbuddy service and may include customized and personalized viewing recommendations.
Promotional offers:
We may offer joint promotions or programs that, in order for your participation, will require us to share your information with third parties. In fulfilling these types of promotions, we may share your name and other information in connection with fulfilling the incentive. Please note that these third parties are responsible for their own privacy practices.
Protection of Chatbuddy and others:
Chatbuddy and its Service Providers may disclose and otherwise use your personal and other information where we or they reasonably believe such disclosure is needed to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request, (b) enforce applicable terms of use, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address illegal or suspected illegal activities (including payment fraud), security or technical issues, or (d) protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Chatbuddy, its users or the public, as required or permitted by law.
Business transfers:
In connection with any reorganization, restructuring, merger or sale, or other transfer of assets, we will transfer information, including personal information, provided that the receiving party agrees to respect your personal information in a manner that is consistent with our Privacy Statement.
You may also choose to disclose your information in the following ways:
certain portions of our service may contain a tool which gives you the option to share information by email, text message and social or other sharing applications, using the clients and applications on your smart device;
social plugins and similar technologies allow you to share information.
Access to Account and Profiles
“Remember me” function:
For ease of access to your account, you can use the "Remember me on this device" function when you log in to the website. This function uses technology that enables us to provide direct account access and to help administer the Chatbuddy service without requiring reentry of any password or other user identification when your browser revisits the service.
Giving others access to your account:
If you share or otherwise allow others to have access to your account, they may be able to see your chat history.
Removing device access to your Chatbuddy account:
To remove access to your Chatbuddy account from your devices, visit the "Account Settings" section of our website, choose "Log out," and follow the instructions to deactivate your devices (note, deactivation may not occur immediately). Where possible, users of public or shared devices should log out at the completion of each visit. If you sell or return a computer or Chatbuddy ready device, you should log out and deactivate the device before doing so. If you do not maintain the security of your password or device, or fail to log out or deactivate your device, subsequent users may be able to access your account, including your personal information.
Cookies and Internet Advertising
We and our Service Providers use cookies and other technologies (such as web beacons), as well as resettable device identifiers, for various reasons. We want you to be informed about our use of these technologies, so this section explains the types of technologies we use and what they do.
Cookies and similar technologies, web beacons, and resettable device identifiers
Cookies are small data files that are commonly stored on your device when you browse and use websites and online services. We use other technologies such as browser storage and plugins (e.g., HTML5, IndexedDB, and WebSQL). Like cookies, these other technologies may store small amounts of data on your device. Web beacons (also known as clear gifs or pixel tags) often work in conjunction with cookies. In many cases, declining cookies will impair the effectiveness of web beacons associated with those cookies.
If you use the Chatbuddy app on a mobile device, tablet, or streaming media device, we may collect a resettable device identifier from your device. Resettable device identifiers (also known as advertising identifiers) are similar to cookies and are found on many mobile devices and tablets (for example, the "Identifier for Advertisers" (or IDFA) on Apple iOS devices and the "Google Advertising ID" on Android devices), and certain streaming media devices. Like cookies, resettable device identifiers are used to make online advertising more relevant and for analytics and optimization purposes.
Why does Chatbuddy use these technologies?
We use these types of technologies for various reasons, like making it easy to access our services by remembering you when you return; to provide, analyze, understand and enhance the use of our services; to enforce our terms, prevent fraud; to improve site performance, monitor visitor traffic and actions on our site; and to deliver and tailor our marketing or advertising, and to understand interactions with our emails, marketing, and online ads on third party sites.
To help you better understand how we use cookies and resettable device identifiers, please see the information below:
Essential cookies:
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide our website or online service. For example, we and our Service Providers may use these cookies to authenticate and identify our members when they use our websites and applications so we can provide our service to them. They also help us to enforce our Terms of Use, prevent fraud and maintain the security of our service.
Performance and functionality cookies:
These cookies help us to customize and enhance your online experience with Chatbuddy. For example, they help us to remember your preferences and prevent you from needing to re-enter information you previously provided (for example, during member sign up). We also use these cookies to collect information (such as popular pages, conversion rates, viewing patterns, click-through and other information) about our visitors' use of the Chatbuddy service so that we can enhance and personalize our website and service and conduct market research. Deletion of these types of cookies may result in limited functionality of our service.
Advertising cookies and resettable device identifiers:
These cookies and resettable device identifiers use information about your use of this and other websites and apps, your response to ads and emails, and to deliver ads that are more relevant to you.
When we advertise our services on other websites or apps, some of the websites and apps where we advertise, as well as advertising technology companies that we use to purchase, deliver, optimize, and/or measure our advertisements (collectively “Advertising Partners”), may receive information from us as part of our campaign targeting, measurement, and optimization (e.g., steps completed in sign-up and site visit or app open/install information). Common uses of this type of information are to judge the effectiveness of and optimize ad campaigns, by allowing Advertising Partners to see when someone who saw an ad later signed up for our service.
Another common use is to make sure we do not serve ads trying to get individuals to sign up for the Chatbuddy service if they are already a Chatbuddy user.
Your Information and Rights
When you visit the "Account Settings" portion of our website, you have the ability to access and update a range of information about your account, including your contact information and your Chatbuddy payment information. You must be signed in to access the "Account Settings" section.
Retention of Information
We may retain information as required or permitted by applicable laws and regulations, including to honor your choices, for our billing or records purposes and to fulfill the purposes described in this Privacy Statement. Specifically, we retain information for our legitimate interests and essential business purposes, such as operating, maintaining and improving our services; complying with our legal obligations; and exercising our legal rights and remedies, including enforcing our terms of use. Our retention of information is based on many factors such as your relationship with Chatbuddy (for example, are you a Chatbuddy current member); the nature of the information; compliance with our legal obligations; defending or resolving actual or anticipated legal claims. We take reasonable measures to destroy or de-identify personal information in a secure manner when it is no longer required.
Security
We use reasonable administrative, logical, physical and managerial measures to safeguard your personal information against loss, theft and unauthorized access, use and modification. These measures are designed to provide a level of security appropriate to the risks of processing your personal information. Unfortunately, no measures can be guaranteed to provide 100% security. Accordingly, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information.
Other Websites, Platforms and Applications
The Chatbuddy service may be provided through and/or utilize features (such as the display of social media content, or the provision of voice controls) operated by third party platforms, or contain links to sites operated by third parties whose policies regarding the handling of information may differ from ours. For example, you may be able to access the Chatbuddy service through platforms such as gaming systems, smart TVs, mobile devices, set top boxes and a number of other Internet connected devices. These websites and platforms have separate and independent privacy or data policies, privacy statements, notices and terms of use, which we recommend you read carefully. In addition, you may encounter third party applications that interact with the Chatbuddy service.
Children
You must be at least 18 years of age or older to subscribe to the Chatbuddy service. Minors may only use the service with the involvement, supervision, and approval of a parent or legal guardian.
Changes to This Privacy Statement
We will update this Privacy Statement from time to time in response to changing legal, regulatory or operational requirements. Your continued use of the Chatbuddy service after any such updates take effect will constitute acknowledgement and (as applicable) acceptance of those changes. If you do not wish to acknowledge or accept any updates to this Privacy Statement, you may cancel your use of the Chatbuddy service. To see when this Privacy Statement was last updated, please see the "Last Updated" disclosure at the top of this policy statement.