1. Lourish privacy statement
We have provided this Privacy Statement to help you understand how we collect, use and protect your information when you visit lourish.com and generally use our products and services. It also explains some of the basic features of our services that may have an impact on your privacy, including how you can protect yourself and your privacy. We wish to help you make informed decisions, so please take a few moments to read the sections below and learn how we may use your personal information.
2. Registration, usage and connection information
Your registration information is the information you submit when you sign up and create an account. Your usage information is the information we collect from your use of Lourish products and services, such as the services and features you use, where you access the service from etc. This is separate from your personal content - see below. Your connection information is information we automatically receive as a result of certain technical standards on the web - this includes the URL of the site from which you came and the site to which you are going when you leave Lourish. Registration, usage and connection information is used for the purpose of operating the Lourish products and services, to analyse overall trends to help us improve the Service and for the other purposes described below in this privacy statement.
3. Your personal content
All content uploaded by you to the Lourish service (personal content) is your own private property. Please take care when uploading or publishing personal content about yourself. Please check out our community guidelines which provides guidance on how to protect your privacy online. Lourish will not read, change, destroy or forward the contents of your account, unless it is in accordance with this Privacy Statement or we are forced to do so by law, regulation or any extraordinary circumstance. See the Disclosures section below.
4. Your profile
When you first register with Lourish, your chosen service name and real name are visible to other users by default which means this information is available to all Lourish users.
Be careful about what you publish. Identity thieves have been known to trawl community sites for information that enables them to complete a picture of a person’s identity in conjunction with other information they obtain.
Please consider carefully the impact publishing your real name might have on your privacy. Note also that by making your information visible to other users, those other users may take a copy of your information or use it for purposes that you do not intend or expect. For example, new technologies can make use of information in unexpected ways, such as photo recognition and social matching techniques. While we attempt to prevent any misuse of personal information by our users, we can’t guarantee this. If you subsequently hide or change information that was once visible, this may not remove it from the public domain if others have already seen or taken copies.
We allow public search engines to crawl parts of our site but your Lourish registration profile will not appear in a general search against your name. This means that content you have generated may be available through search engines, but it will not be directly attributed to you by the search engine. Also, we will not create interfaces with other parties or social networks that will enable your data to be exposed to a third party network without your express consent.
Please check out our community guidelines which provide guidance on how to protect yourself online.
5. Your location
We offer location features for some services which is taken from the location you provide on the site for your home location or the locations of exchanges and offers. This data may be provided explicitly by you or indirectly by your browser allowing access to your location profile. We publish your approximate location for exchanges but we never use the location information to pinpoint you on a map or give your full address.
6. Respect for others' privacy
Any information you publish on Lourish, such as exchanges and messages, are your responsibility. You need to be respectful of others privacy and dignity, and ensure that if you post others' personal information on Lourish you ensure you have their permission and respect their other rights to be treated fairly and decently. Consider carefully how you tag or link your content so that you don’t invade someone else’s privacy.
Help us to protect your community - if you see anyone behaving in a way you think is in violation of this Privacy Statement or our Community Guidelines please report it - this helps us ensure that everyone is protected.
7. Invitations to friends
If you choose to invite a friend to register on Lourish, we will ask you for your friend’s name and email address. We will then send your friend an email inviting him or her to visit Lourish. We only store and use this information for the purpose of sending one email to your friend and to see if your friend subsequently registers.
Your friend can ask us to delete this information from our database by sending an email to privacy@lourish.com.
8. Prohibited activities
Our terms and conditions set out a list of Prohibited Activities that you must not engage in. Some of these relate specifically to the protection of our users’ privacy, such as:
- impersonating another person or entity, using as fake identity, or falsely misrepresenting yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity;
- misrepresenting your intentions and purposes in order to glean information from Lourish users under false pretences;
- uploading or distributing content which we consider to be invasive of privacy or publicity rights;
- sending spam or any unsolicited communications for marketing or advertising purposes, or which encourage the viewing or access to illegal content or content of a sexually explicit nature;
- harvesting or collecting personal details of users for the purpose of making unsolicited contact for commercial or unlawful purposes;
- using tools to automate exchange/offer/message/note/comment posting;
- using automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service,
- sending, initiating or distributing viruses, worms or trojans;
- conducting bulk downloads of content from the Service.
By using our products and services you agree to refrain from engaging in any of these activities and anyone found engaging in these activities will be barred from Lourish, your account and information may be frozen and we will take action to report any abuse to the appropriate authorities.
See our community guidelines for information on how to behave when using Lourish.
9. General marketing by Lourish
We may use registration, usage and connection information about you and how you use Lourish to better understand how our users generally use our products and services and in order to improve them and enhance the user experience. For example, we want to ensure the service delivers what our users want and to stop offering things that our users do not appear to want or use.
We will not use your personal content (i.e. information you post on the site) for this purpose without your prior consent.
We may contact you from time to time about new products, services or features via email, or other forms of electronic communication. We understand that you may have preferences about how we may contact you, or not want to be contacted at all. You can tell us which marketing messages you would like to receive and/or which you object to by changing your preferences on the site or by emailing us at privacy@lourish.com. All mobile or email marketing messages will contain information on how you can stop us sending you email marketing.
We do not rent, sell or disclose your personal information to third parties so that they can carry out their own marketing campaigns.
10. Advertising on Lourish
We recognise that some users are concerned by targeted advertising, i.e. advertising that uses information about your profile or your usage to improve the relevance to you of advertisements. Lourish does not currently provide targeted advertising to its users. We may wish to introduce this in the future. If we do, we will inform you beforehand and give you an opportunity to object to this.
However, there may be products, services or content that we introduce that are offered without charge or provided at a discounted rate in return for receiving the targeted advertising that is delivered with that product, service or content. In those cases the only way that you will be able to object to the targeted advertising is not to access the product, service or content, but we will make that clear when promoting the product, service or content.
In any event, we will not use certain sensitive information fields about you for advertising purposes unless you expressly consent, namely information relating to your geo-location or communications content.
Whatever we do, we will ensure we retain full control over your personal information and will never share your personal information with advertisers without your prior consent. We may need to work with third party companies who provide advertising technologies and techniques, but we will retain control over this information and minimise the information that they need to have access to (see section below on Outsourcing and International Transfers).
11. Disclosure
Other than as explained in this section, we do not rent, sell or disclose your personal information or contact details to third parties for their own use:
- In the event that we undergo re-organisation or are sold to a third party, any personal information we hold about you may be transferred to that re-organised entity or third party for the purposes and subject to the terms of this Privacy Statement and the conditions in the Lourish terms and conditions.
- It may be necessary to share your personal information with third parties who are involved in the delivery of the products and services used by you.
- It may also be necessary to pass some of your personal information to a third party service provider whose services you may be using.
- From time to time Lourish may be obliged by law or order of the court to disclose your personal information to meet any legal or regulatory obligations - for example the law enforcement agencies are able to require Internet communications related information from us where it is relevant to their investigations into criminal activity. Where that is the case we will only disclose your information to the extent strictly required by applicable law.
12. Cookies
'Cookies' are text files that collect small pieces of information sent by a web server which enables the server to collect information from the browser, such as the type and version of browser, language settings, etc. These are stored on your browser on your PC hard disk.
We do use cookies and may use other interactive techniques such as web beacons to collect information about how you interact with our site and/or related products and services, to:
- understand what you like and use or don’t like and don’t use
- provide a more enjoyable, customised service and experience, and
- help us develop and deliver better products and services tailored to our customers’ interests and needs.
We use a persistent cookie to enable you to keep your log in details on your PC. This helps us recognise you on subsequent visits to this website so that you don't have to re-enter your registration details each time you visit us and allows us to carry out the activities mentioned above.
Most browser software (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari) allows you to choose whether to accept cookies or not - you can either refuse all cookies or you can set your browser to alert you each time that a website tries to set a cookie.
Please note that if you refuse our cookie or delete it at a later date, you will have to enter your registration security details each time you visit our site or wish to use one of our web-related services or products.
13. Security
Lourish recognises that its customers are increasingly concerned about how companies protect personal information from misuse and abuse. At Lourish we are constantly reviewing and enhancing our technical, physical and managerial procedures and rules to protect your personal information from unauthorised access, accidental loss and/or destruction.
Please be aware that communications over the Internet, such as emails/webmails, are not secure unless they have been encrypted. Your communications may route through a number of countries before being delivered - this is the nature of the web and the internet. Lourish cannot accept responsibility for any unauthorised access or loss of personal information that is beyond our control.
14. Data protection
The Data Protection Act 1998 (the "Act") gives you the right to access information held about you. Your right of access can be exercised in accordance with the Act. Any access request may be subject to a fee of £10 to meet our costs in providing you with details of the information we hold about you.
For the purpose of the Act, the data controller is: 13 Villa Place, Impington, Cambridgeshire, CB24 9PR.
Our nominated representative for the purpose of the Act is Mr. David Bower.
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please email privacy@lourish.com.
Here is how you can exercise your privacy rights:
- To object to receiving marketing messages from Lourish - see Marketing, above
- To be provided with a copy of your personal information – see Data Protection, above
- To ask for a review of any decision that Lourish might make about you using a wholly automated process. Please put your request in writing to privacy@lourish.com setting out all the circumstances of your case.
- If you have requested a copy of your personal information (see second bullet point above) and believe that there is something inaccurate in your information, you should write to privacy@lourish.com setting out what information you believe to be inaccurate, why you believe it to be inaccurate and provide what evidence you can to support your argument.
- To have your personal information deleted where that personal information is no longer required for our legitimate business purposes. Where this right applies, you should put your request in writing to privacy@lourish.com.
15. Contact Us
If you have any enquiries about Lourish’s privacy practices, you should put your enquiry in writing to privacy@lourish.com
