Privacy Policy for StarFriendly

Effective April 15, 2022

1. Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy applies to the sites, apps, events and other services provided by StarFriendly. For simplicity, we will refer to them as “services” in the Privacy Policy. For your convenience, we have added links to this Privacy Policy on all relevant services. Some services may have their own privacy policy. If a particular service has its own privacy policy, then the policy of the service will govern, not this Privacy Policy.

2. Information we collect

It goes without saying that we won't be able to help you get to know each other if we don't have some information about you, such as basic profile data and the characteristics of the people you want to get to know. We also collect information about your use of our services, such as browsing logs, and information from third parties, such as when you sign in to our services with a social network account or upload social media information to your profile. If you'd like more information, we'll go into more detail about that below.

Information you provide to us

When you use our services, you provide us with certain information. It includes the following:

  • When you create an account, at a minimum, you provide us with your phone number and email address, as well as some basic information necessary for the operation of the service, such as your gender and date of birth.
  • When you complete your profile, you can provide us with additional information about yourself, your interests and more, as well as photos and videos. To add certain content, such as images or videos, you can give us access to your camera or photo album.
  • When you subscribe to paid services or make a purchase directly on our site (and not through platforms such as iOS or Android), you provide us or the payment processor with information such as your debit or credit card number and other financial information.
  • When you participate in focus group surveys or market research, you share with us your opinion about our products and services, answers to our questions and feedback.
  • When you participate in our promotions, events or contests, we collect information that you provide when you register or log in.
  • When you contact our support team, we collect information that you provide to us during the call.
  • If you provide us with information about other people (for example, if you use a friend's contact information in one of our features), we process that information on your behalf to fulfill your request. Of course, we also process your chatting with other users and the content you post in order to provide the services.

Information we receive from others

In addition to the information you provide us directly, we also receive information about you from others:

  • Users Other users may provide information about you when using our services, such as when communicating with you or filing a complaint against you.
  • Social media You may choose to share information with us through your social media account, for example, if you choose to register and log in to StarFriendly with your social media or other account (such as Facebook, Google or Apple) or upload information to our services , such as photos, from one of your social media accounts (such as Instagram or Spotify).
  • The StarFriendly group of companies is part of the Match Group of companies. User privacy and security is of the utmost importance to Match Group. If you have been banned from one of the Match Group services, your information may be shared with us so that we can take appropriate action, including terminating your account or preventing you from registering on our services.
  • Our Partners We may receive information about you from our partners, for example when we publish StarFriendly ads on partner services (in which case they may share information about the success of the advertising campaign). Where permitted by law, we may also receive information from third parties about suspected or confirmed fraudulent users to protect the safety of our users.
  • Information Collected When You Use Our Services. When you use our services, we collect technical information about which features you used, how you used them, and which devices you used to access our services. More on this below:
    • Usage data When you use the services, data is recorded about your use of our services: how you use them (date and time you logged in, features you use, activities, information shown to you, addresses of pages you came from, advertisements clicked) and how you communicate with other users (for example, the users you contact and interact with, the time and date of the contact, the number of messages you receive and send).
    • Device Information We collect information about the devices you use to access our services, including hardware and software information such as IP address, device ID and type, application settings and characteristics, application crashes, advertising identifiers (randomly generated numbers that you can reset in your device settings), identifiers associated with cookies or other technologies that can uniquely identify a device or browser.
    • Other information provided with your consent With your permission, we may determine your exact location (latitude and longitude). Location data collection may occur in the background even when you are not using the services, if you have given us permission to collect this information. If you do not give us permission to collect information about your exact location, we will not collect this information. With your consent, we may also collect your photos and videos (for example, after you post a photo, video or live stream on one of our services).

3. Cookies & measuring methods

Our platform employs cookies and similar tracking technologies, like web beacons and pixels, to identify you and your devices. For detailed information on our use of these technologies and guidance on managing their use, please consult our Cookie Policy. Additionally, certain web browsers, such as Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, feature a "Do Not Track" (DNT) option, allowing users to indicate a preference against being tracked online. However, since DNT signals are not standardized and not all browsers support this feature, many businesses, StarFriendly included, do not currently act in response to these signals.

3. Cookies and other similar data collection technologies

We use and may allow others to use cookies and similar technologies (eg, web beacons, pixels) to recognize you and your devices. You can read our Cookie Policy to learn more about why we use cookies and how you can control their use. Some web browsers (including Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome) have a "Do Not Track" ("DNT") feature that tells a website that a user does not want their online activity to be tracked. If a website that responds to a DNT signal receives a DNT signal, the browser may block that website from collecting certain information about the browser user. Not all browsers offer the DNT option, and DNT signals are not unified yet. For this reason, many businesses, including StarFriendly, are not currently responding to DNT signals.

4. How we use information

The primary reason we use your information is to provide and improve our services. In addition, we use your information for security purposes and to serve ads that may be of interest to you. In the following, we will detail the reasons why we use your information, as well as provide examples.

  • To manage your account and provide our services
    • Create and manage your account
    • Provide you with customer support and respond to your inquiries
    • Conduct your transactions
    • Communicate with you about your use of the Services
  • To show your profile to other users
    • Recommend you to other users
    • Show user profiles to each other
  • To provide you with new StarFriendly services
    • Register and display your profile in new StarFriendly features and appss
    • Administer your account in these new features and applications
  • To manage advertising and marketing campaigns
    • Organize sweepstakes and contests, provide discounts or other offers
    • Run and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on our services, as well as StarFriendly marketing campaigns on third-party services
    • Tell you about products or services that we think you might be interested in
  • To improve our services and develop new
    • Manage focus groups, market research and surveys
    • Study interaction with the help desk to improve the quality of service
    • Analyze user behavior in the services to improve them (for example, we may change the design or completely redesign a feature depending on user actions)
    • Develop new features and services (for example, we may create a new feature based on interests as a result of requests received from users)
  • To prevent, detect and combat fraud and other illegal or unauthorized activities
    • Detect or respond to current or suspected violations of our Terms of Use through complaints investigation and user communication
    • Learn more and develop measures to counter violations of our Terms of Use
    • Store data related to violations of our Terms of Use to prevent recurrence
    • Comply with or enforce our rights, such as our Terms of Service
    • Report the results to users who have filed complaints
  • To ensure legal compliance
    • Comply with legal requirements
    • Help law enforcement

For information on how we process personal information through user profiling and automated decision making, please see our FAQ section.

In order to process your information as described in this Privacy Policy, we rely on the following legal bases:

  • Providing you with our service: The reason we process your information for purposes A, B and C above is to fulfill the terms of a contract we have with you. For example, as you use our dating service, we use your information to maintain your account and profile, to make them visible to other users and to recommend other users to you, and to provide you and other users with free and paid features.
  • Legitimate Interests: We process your information for purposes D, E and F above where we have legitimate interests. For example, we analyze user behavior on our services to continually improve our products, make suggestions that we think you may be interested in, advertise our services, and process information to ensure your safety, exercise our rights when necessary, assist law enforcement authorities and protect themselves in the event of a lawsuit.
  • Compliance with Applicable Laws and Regulations: We process your information for Purpose G above as necessary to comply with local laws and regulations and to verify compliance with applicable laws and regulations. For example, we retain traffic and transaction data to comply with our accounting, tax and other statutory data retention obligations in order to be able to respond to law enforcement requests. We also store data about user consent and their decisions to opt out of any features or data processing.
  • Consent: If you choose to provide us with information that may be considered "sensitive" or "confidential" in certain jurisdictions, such as about your sexual orientation, you consent to the processing of such information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. We may from time to time ask you for your consent to collect specific information, such as your exact location, or use your information for certain purposes. In some cases, you may be able to withdraw your consent by changing your settings (for example, regarding the collection of precise location) or deleting your content (for example, if you have added information to your profile that may be considered “sensitive” or “private”). In any case, you can always withdraw your consent by contacting us at the address provided at the end of this Privacy Policy.

5. How we share information

  • Since our goal is to help you get to know each other, the main exchange of information takes place with other users. We also share some user information with service providers and partners who assist us in operating the service, with other Match Group companies for the reasons listed below, and in some cases with the courts. Read on to learn more about sharing your information with others.
    • Providing information to other users: You share information with other users when you voluntarily disclose information on the Service (including a public profile). Be careful about providing your information and make sure you are comfortable posting such content.
    • If you choose to limit the audience for all or part of your profile, for certain content or information about you, then it will be displayed according to your settings.
    • If someone files a complaint against you (for example, because of a violation of the Terms of Use), we may tell that person about the action taken in response to their complaint.
  • Sharing information with our service providers and partners. We use third party services to support our operations and improve our services. These third parties help us with a variety of tasks, including data hosting and maintenance, analytics, customer service, marketing, advertising, payment processing, and security operations. We may also provide information to partners who distribute and help us advertise our services. For example, we may provide limited information about you to advertising partners in a hashed, unreadable format. We conduct rigorous due diligence before engaging a service provider or working with a partner. All of our service providers and partners must agree to strict confidentiality obligations.
  • Providing information to affiliates. StarFriendly is part of the Match Group.
    • For certain lawful purposes, we share your information with affiliates in order to:
      • ensure the security of Match Group platforms and block unscrupulous users on other platforms; receive assistance from them in the processing of data as service providers on our behalf or on our behalf. This assistance may include technical data processing operations such as data hosting and maintenance, customer service, marketing and targeted advertising, financial and accounting support, improving our service, ensuring the security of our data and systems, combating spam, abuse, fraud and other offences.
      • We may also share information with other Match Group companies for other legitimate business purposes such as corporate auditing, analytics and aggregate reporting, and to comply with applicable law.
      • Ability to grant access
      • You can share other users' profiles, and they can share yours outside of our services.
  • Corporate Operations. We may share your information if we are involved, in whole or in part, in a merger, sale, acquisition, spin-off, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, bankruptcy or other change of ownership or control.
  • Law enforcement / legal requirement. We may disclose your information as necessary to: (a) comply with court orders, such as a court order, subpoena or search warrant, government/law enforcement investigation, or other legal requirement; b) assist in the prevention or detection of crime (in each case, in accordance with applicable law); or c) to protect the safety of the user.
  • Enforcement of legal rights. We may also share information: a) if disclosure would reduce our liability in an actual or alleged claim; b) protect our legal rights and the legal rights of our users, business partners or other interested parties as necessary; c) to enforce our agreements with you; and d) to investigate, prevent or take other action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud or other violations.
  • With your consent or at your request. We may ask for your consent to share your information with third parties. In such a case, we will explain why we want to provide the information. We may use and share non-personal information (i.e., information that does not by itself identify who you are, such as device information, general demographics, general behavioral data, geolocation in an anonymized form), as well as personal information in hashed, unreadable form, under any of the above circumstances. We may also share it with other Match group companies and third parties (such as advertisers) in order to develop and deliver targeted advertising on our services, third party websites or applications, and to analyze and report on the ads you see. We may combine this information with additional non-personal information or personal information in hashed, unreadable form collected from other sources. More information about our use of cookies and similar technologies can be found in our Cookie Policy

6. Cross-border data transfer

The disclosures set out in Section 6 involve cross-border transfers to the United States of America and other jurisdictions that may have different data processing laws. When transferring personal information outside the EEA, United Kingdom, Switzerland or other countries whose data protection laws are recognized by the European Commission or other competent authority, we use standard contract clauses (standard contract clauses are obligations of companies when transferring personal information in the field of privacy protection and data security) or other appropriate data transmission mechanism. We are currently reviewing how we share data with our suppliers and the related legal framework in line with the European Union's recent decision on the transfer of personal data to the United States.

7. Your rights

We want you to be in control of your information, so we remind you that you have the following tools:

  • Access/update tools in the service. Tools and account settings through which you can access, correct or delete the information provided to us and associated with your account. If you have any questions regarding these tools and settings, please contact our Customer Support Center here.
  • Permissions for devices. Mobile platforms have permission systems for certain types of data and notifications, such as contacts, photos, location services, push notifications, and advertising identifiers. You can change the settings on your device to enable or disable the collection or processing of relevant information or the display of relevant notifications. However, the ban may limit the functionality of some services.
  • Removal. You can stop the collection of all information by the application by uninstalling it using the standard process on your device. Remember that deleting the app does NOT delete your account. To remove it, use the appropriate function of the service.
  • Account deleting. You can delete your account using the corresponding function of the service.

We want you to be aware of your privacy rights. Here are a few key points you should keep in mind:

  • Verification of information. The laws governing the processing of personal data may give you the right to request the information we hold about you (depending on the jurisdiction, this may be referred to as the right of access, the right to data portability and the right to know). You can exercise your right to submit a request here.
  • Information update. If you believe that the information we hold about you is inaccurate or that we no longer have the right to use it, and if you would like to request its rectification, deletion, objection or restriction of processing, please contact us here.
  • For your protection and the safety of all our users, we may ask you to verify your identity before we can respond to the above requests.

Please note that we may refuse requests, including if we cannot verify your identity, if the request is illegal, or may violate the trade secrets, intellectual property, or privacy of other users. If you wish to receive information about another user, such as copies of communications received from him or through our service, the other user must contact our Privacy Officer to provide their written consent before the information is shared. We may also ask the user to verify their identity to complete the request.

In addition, we may not be able to comply with certain requests to object to the processing of personal information, especially in cases where such requests would prevent us from providing our services to you. For example, you will not be able to use the Service if we do not have your date of birth and cannot verify that you are over 18 years of age.

In some countries, including the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, you have the right to complain to the appropriate data protection authority if you have concerns about how we process your personal information. You can find information about the data protection authority in the EEA here and in the UK here. You can file a complaint with the data protection authority where you live, work or where the alleged infringement occurs.

8. How long do we keep your data

We retain your personal information only for as long as we need it for legitimate business purposes (as set out in Section 5) and as required by applicable law. If you decide to stop using our services, you can delete your account and your profile will no longer be visible to other users. Please note that we will automatically terminate your account if it is inactive for two years. After closing your account, we will delete your personal information as follows:

  • To ensure the safety and security of our users, we retain data for three months after an account is deleted or for one year after an account is disabled. During this period, we retain your information in case we need to investigate illegal or malicious activities. The retention of information during this period is based on our legitimate interests, as well as the interests of possible third-party victims.
  • After the retention period has expired, for security purposes, we will delete your data and retain only limited information for the specific purposes listed below:
  • We keep some data in accordance with legal data retention obligations: for example, we keep transaction data for 10 years in accordance with tax and accounting requirements, bank card information during the entire period during which the user can dispute the transaction, and "traffic data"/visit logs for one year to comply with legal data retention obligations. We also keep records of the consents that users provide for 5 years to confirm our compliance with applicable laws.
  • We retain limited information based on our legitimate interests: customer service records and ancillary data, and inaccurate download/purchase location for five years to help make customer service decisions, enforce our rights and defend against claims; information about the existence of past accounts and subscriptions, which we delete three years after the termination of your last account, in order to ensure proper and accurate financial planning and reporting; One year of profiling data for possible litigation for filing, executing and defending legal claims; data necessary to prevent access by users who have been prevented from registering a new account - for the period required to ensure the safety and well-being of our users.
  • Finally, we retain information based on our legitimate interests when there is an unresolved or potential issue, claim or dispute requiring us to retain the information (in particular if we receive a valid subpoena or request to retain the data (in which case we need to retain the data to comply with our legal obligations), or if the data is required as part of legal proceedings).

9. Protect children's privacy

Our services are provided only to users 18 years of age or older. We do not allow persons under the age of 18 to use our platform. If you suspect that a user is under the age of 18, please use the available reporting feature.

10. Applicants, contractors and supplier representatives

We process the personal information of applicants, contractors and supplier representatives as part of our recruitment and personnel management operations, as well as in the management of the services provided by our contractors and suppliers. If you are a job seeker, contractor, or representative of a StarFriendly supplier, certain terms of this Privacy Policy apply to our processing of your personal information, including the sections dealing with the entity responsible for processing your personal information, the transfer of personal information, your rights under applicable law, our contact details for communication and information for residents of the State of California.

If you are a job seeker, the personal information we process about you may vary depending on the position you seek, but typically includes what you provide to us in your job application, as well as professional qualifications, curriculum vitae, and background information provided to us by recruiters or others. We use this information to organize the recruitment process, which may lead to an employment contract. We may process the identification data of contractors and supplier representatives, as well as information related to their work, if it is necessary to manage our relationship with you and your employer. We require such information in order to perform the service agreement and to establish, exercise or defend against possible legal claims. We may share personal information with service providers who help us recruit and process technical data, and with Match Group companies (for example, if you have a business relationship with an affiliate's employees). Personal information is stored only as long as it is necessary to fulfill the specified purposes.

11. Changes to the privacy policy

We are always looking for new and innovative ways to help you learn about and provide up-to-date information about our approach to data processing, so this policy may change over time. We will alert you before any major changes go into effect so you have time to review them.