PRIVACY POLICY
This policy is effective as of 10th August 2009.
A2ZProfiles's Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand how we collect and use the personal information you decide to share, and help you make informed decisions when using A2ZProfiles, located at www.a2zprofiles.com and its directly associated domains (collectively, "A2ZProfiles" or "Website")
By using or accessing A2ZProfiles, you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy.
If you have any queries in relation to this Privacy Policy, you can email us at: support@a2zprofiles.com This is a legal document which sets out how A2ZProfiles handles data which identifies you. This Privacy Policy forms part of our Terms of Use. At A2ZProfiles we believe strongly in protecting the privacy of our Members' personal information. This statement describes the privacy practices we apply for the A2ZProfiles Service. As part of that, it also expresses our approach to complying with the data protection laws which apply in Australia. If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should contact the A2ZProfiles customer services at support@a2zprofiles.com.
1. THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT
Information collected during registration. When you register for the A2ZProfiles Service, you provide your name, your email address, your gender, your date of birth, nationality, your location details and some optional details about yourself. They are available to you, and capable of being corrected or updated, through your A2ZProfiles ‘MY PROFILE’ page.
Cookies. We use small files known as "cookies" to enhance users' experience of the A2ZProfiles Service as follows:
To facilitate optimal use of the A2ZProfiles Service by Members, by means of a "session" cookie.
The cookies on the A2ZProfiles Service do not access or use information by which people can be personally identified. If you wish, you can prevent these files from using non-personal information about you by either deleting the cookie folder in your browser or by putting your browser's Privacy setting higher, but doing so will mean that you will not be able to use the A2ZProfiles Service in the way that we intend it to be used, and may well adversely affect your experience of websites that use cookies to enhance or personalize that experience.
2. ACCESS TO PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION
The information we collect may be used:
To process your payment for premium membership subscriptions or other goods or services ordered on our site or to fulfill such orders.
To provide our customer support service and to verify any claims or requests you make if you use our customer support service.
To enforce our terms and conditions and prevent or detect hacking activities, security breaches or safety risks in connection with our websites.
To send service announcements and messages.
To aggregate information to generate anonymous statistics regarding the use of our website.
For our own internal marketing and demographic studies and to help us improve our website.
In the event of an actual or proposed (including as part of negotiations for any) merger, or business combination or sale of substantially all of our assets or a business operation to which such information relates or as provided under bankruptcy or applicable insolvency laws or by the enforcement of equitable rights.
If your personally identifiable information or email address changes, or if you no longer wish to be a Member of the A2ZProfiles Service, you may correct, update, delete or deactivate your Membership through the Member's account SETTINGS menu option found at the top of most pages when logged on to the A2ZProfiles Service. Alternatively, you can email A2ZProfiles Customer Support at the following email: support@a2zprofiles.com or by mail to:: A2ZProfiles Sdn Bhd, 36th Floor, Menara Maxis, KLCC, 50088 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, or by telephone during normal office hours of 9am to 5pm Mondays to Fridays on: +603-2615-7288. We will endeavour to respond to all email enquires within 3 working days.
3. EMAILS YOU RECEIVE FROM A2ZPROFILES
As part of the A2ZProfiles Service, A2ZProfiles sends Members newsletters and emails. You may also receive email notifications when you have new messages in your A2ZProfiles Private Message Reveived Box, when someone adds you as a contact, when someone you have invited registers, and whenever AZPs are transacted with your AZP Account. Through SETTINGS > NOTIFICATIONS, you can disable receiving of such emails if you do not wish to receive them.
4. CHOICE / OPT-OUT
We provide you the opportunity to 'opt-out' of having your personally identifiable information used for certain purposes during the registration process and from the "PRIVACY" settings option within the site, accessible from the Member's account SETTINGS menu option, found at the top of most web pages when logged on to the A2ZProfiles Service.
You may opt out of any or all of the newsletters and emails we send you by changing your “NOTIFICATIONS” options at any time. Your "NOTIFICATIONS" can be accessed from the Member's account SETTINGS menu option found at the top of most web pages when logged on to the A2ZProfiles Service.
You may also opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or email we send you or by emailing us at: support@a2zprofiles.com or by mail to: : A2ZProfiles Sdn Bhd, 36th Floor, Menara Maxis, KLCC, 50088 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, or by telephone during normal office hours of 9am to 5pm Mondays to Fridays on: +603-2615-7288.
5. SHARING AND USE OF INFORMATION
Any visitor to the A2ZProfiles Service anywhere in the world can view your profile information and photos that you have uploaded to the A2ZProfiles.com community. You can control what part of your profile information and photos is visible to visitors of the website and individually control what information each member can see.
The over-riding principles we apply are these:
We, and (where relevant) our credit card processing agents, will not supply your personal data to a third party for commercial exploitation except as consented to by you in accordance with prevailing law.
Profile Information. Once a Member selects a location, some or all of the information held for that Member, except for the email address, telephone numbers and passwords, will be publicly available at the listing for that location.
Your home location, in terms of your town / city, state / county and country, and any other location specific information you submit to the A2ZProfiles Service must be considered at all times to be publicly available information, save where you specify (in the Privacy options that apply to your profile) that you wish your profile only to be viewable by either Members or Approved Contacts. In addition, if address details are submitted to the A2ZProfiles.com service they are not made publicly available.
Email addresses. We do not directly make your email address available to anyone on any screen of the A2ZProfiles Service. Similarly, when you send a Private Message to another Member through the A2ZProfiles Service, neither the sender's nor the recipient's email address is disclosed by the A2ZProfiles Service itself. Members can, however, choose to make their email addresses known to other Members; however, A2ZProfiles does not recommend that you do so, and any such disclosure is at the Member's own risk. Members may change the email address at any time. If your email system automatically responds to a contact email with a read or delivery receipt, your email address will be revealed. No tracking technologies are used within / in conjunction with emails nor do we share, sell, rent or trade with third parties for their promotional purposes.
Un-validated Memberships. If you register for the A2ZProfiles Service, and you receive a validation email, but fail to validate your Membership then we may contact you via email at periods of 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days at your registered email address to notify you of the invalid status. Should you fail to respond to these notifications then we may send you one final notice before the un-validated Membership is removed.
Advertising. The A2ZProfiles Service may include interactive advertising for other businesses. We may use, and provide to third parties, anonymous demographic data provided by Members to target this advertising more appropriately as in our eCampaigns service.
Telephone numbers. You may enter a contact telephone number in your profile. Your number will never be disclosed to any third party without your prior consent. Should we introduce an additional service which utilises telephone numbers, or we wish to provide you with informational content via your mobile phone, you will be given the option to agree to this, as we believe it should be your choice what services you receive.
Notification of unread messages. If you have a number of messages waiting for you in your A2ZProfiles Private Messages Received Box, 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. We work with the leading Merchant Providers in the industry who specialize in Fraud and Data Verification. These companies include Payvision and B+S Card Service, GmbH. Members' credit or debit card information is encrypted and stored securely. We share your billing information with such companies insofar as necessary for the processing of your payment or to prevent or detect fraud. These companies have agreed not to retain, share, store or use your personally identifiable information for any secondary purpose.
A2ZProfiles companies and subsidiaries. We may share data supplied by you (or collected about you) with our subsidiaries and other companies owned by us, but only for the purposes described in this policy.
Changes in A2ZProfiles's business. If all of the assets which A2ZProfiles 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.
Place of processing. The computers and companies that process data on our behalf are based in the United States. Thus, your personal data (which may include data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, or concerning health or sex life) may be transferred to, processed and held both inside and outside of Australia. Some countries may not have as well developed data protection laws in place to protect your information, but we will ensure your personal data is treated in compliance with those laws and this Privacy Policy.
6. SHARING INFORMATION
When you use the A2ZProfiles Service, you may form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features. In most cases, we retain it so that, for instance, you can return to view prior messages you have sent or easily see your friend list. When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information. You post a User Submission (as defined in the A2ZProfiles Terms of Use) on the A2ZProfiles Service at your own risk. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your pages, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users with whom you may choose to share your pages and information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Submissions you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Submissions may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Submissions.
A2ZProfiles may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the A2ZProfiles Service through the operation of the service (e.g. tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.
When you register for the A2ZProfiles Service, you can create your own profile and determine your own privacy settings.
Your name and profile picture thumbnail will be available in all search results on A2ZProfiles.com and may be searchable through third party web-sites and third party search engines, and may be automatically notified to third party tracking websites/weblogs; in each case, you can prevent this happening by specifying (in the Privacy options that apply to your profile) that you wish your profile only to be viewable by either Members or Approved Contacts.
The fact that your A2ZProfiles profile has been added or updated, as well as a short extract from the title page of your A2ZProfiles profile, may be automatically notified to third party tracking websites/weblogs (thus increasing the traffic to the A2ZProfiles Service, and potentially to your own A2ZProfiles profile). This can also be prevented by specifying (in the Privacy options) that you wish your profile only to be viewable by either Members or Approved Contacts. If you do so, this will prevent subsequent notifications to third party tracking websites/weblogs, but notifications prior to the time when you make the change to your profile's Privacy options may continue to appear on those websites/weblogs.
Your news feeds and friends feeds may aggregate the information you provide and make it available to your friends and network members according to your privacy settings. You may set your preferences for your news feeds at any time by adjusting your Privacy Settings.
7. CHANGING OR REMOVING INFORMATION
Access and control over most personal information on A2ZProfiles is readily available through the profile editing tools. A2ZProfiles users may modify or delete any of their profile information at any time by logging into their account. Information will be updated immediately. Individuals who wish to deactivate their A2ZProfiles account may do so on the SETTINGS page. Select the ‘DEACTIVATE’ tab and follow the instructions. Upon confirming that you have read and understood the full implications of deactivating your account, you will need to re-enter your password (for extra security). Click "DEACTIVATE" and you will be given a final chance to confirm deactivation of your account. Upon clicking 'OK' your account will be completely deactivated.
Where you make use of the communication features under ‘COMCENTRE’ to share information with other individuals on A2ZProfiles, however, (e.g., sending a personal message to another A2ZProfiles user) you generally cannot remove such communications.
8. 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 personal details;
to ensure against use by anyone else of the A2ZProfiles Service through the machine that Member uses while they are "logged on" to the A2ZProfiles Service;
to log off or exit from the A2ZProfiles Service when not using it;
and to keep his/her password secret.
our Security team can be reached via support@a2zprofiles.com
A2ZProfiles strives to protect the Personal Information and email address you provide through our site; however no data transmission over the Internet can be guaranteed to be 100% secure
9. 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.
Legal Disclaimer
We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our web site.
10. CONTACTING A2ZPROFILES
If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with A2ZProfiles, you can contact us at support@a2zprofiles.com You can also use this email address if you wish to request from us a copy of the personal data we hold about you or a description of that data from A2ZProfiles. Please note that we are entitled to charge you a small sum for providing this information.
11. LINKS TO THIRD PARTY SITES
Our site contains links to other sites. A2ZProfiles is not responsible for the privacy practices, or the content, of those web sites or services of other companies or organizations to which we link or which link to us or which provide goods or services to our users from their web sites
12. DATA PROTECTION INFORMATION
You can obtain further information about data protection laws by visiting the Office of the Privacy Commissioner's website at http://www.privacy.gov.au/
13. CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY
If we decide to change our Privacy Policy or email practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, by email, or by means of a notice on our web site.