TravelScoops Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy was last updated on the following date: 13th March 2009

This Privacy Policy forms part of our Term and Conditions. At TravelScoops we believe strongly in protecting the privacy of our Members' personal information. This statement describes the privacy practices we apply at TravelScoops.

Please read this policy before providing us with any personal information. If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should contact us at privacy@travelscoops.com.

1. The information we gather and track

Information gathered on registration. When you register for TravelScoops, you provide your name, your email address, your gender, your date of birth, nationality, your location. They are available to you, and capable of being corrected or updated, through your profile page

To register or not to register

The choice of how much personally identifiable information you disclose to us is completely at your discretion. Some areas of our Site are accessible without registration of any kind, such as reading reviews and travel blogs, and you can browse those areas of our Site. Other areas of our Site require registration in order for you to participate in the services offered. It is not mandatory for you to register and provide information to us, but please realize that in order for us to serve you better or provide particular features such as writing your own reviews and creating travel blogs, you will need to provide certain information to access those areas of our Site.

Cookies

We automatically receive certain types of information whenever you interact with us. For example, when you visit the Site, our systems automatically collect standard user information for all users, including a user's IP address, operating system, and page views. Information may be automatically collected through the use of "cookies." Cookies are data snippets that websites store on your computer's hard drive. We use cookies to analyse site use, target ads, store your preferences/passwords (if you've registered) and personalize your experience. You can configure most web browsers to reject cookies or notify you when cookies are placed. You must accept cookies to access travelscoops.com as a registered user. Your access provider assigns an IP address to your computer when you use the Internet. We log each IP address that accesses the site, along with referring/destination URLs. We use this data, as well as other data in our databases, to analyze site and user behavior, troubleshoot technical problems, resolve disputes, address complaints and prepare aggregated reports that we share with others.

2. Access to Personally Identifiable Information

We do not rent, sell, or share personal information about you with other people or nonaffiliated companies, except when we have your consent to do so, is as necessary to complete a transaction you have requested, when required by law, or when permitted to protect our rights or property.

The information we collect may be used:

• 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. For example, a reminder is sent to members if a subscription payment is due.
• To aggregate information to generate anonymous statistics regarding use of our websites. We may share this anonymous information with our partners and advertisers. This is not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person.
• 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.

3. Emails you receive from TravelScoops

TravelScoops may send it's Members occasional emails.

4. Sharing and use of information

Any visitor to TravelScoops anywhere in the world can view your profile information if you have selected public access on registration. Scoops in the form of photos, blogs and videos that you have uploaded to TravelScoops can be viewed if the trip is viewable to the public. You can control what part of your profile information and which trips are visible to visitors.

Email addresses. We do not directly make your email address available to anyone on any screen of TravelScoops. Similarly, when you send an email to another Member through TravelScoops, neither the sender's nor the recipient's email address is disclosed by TravelScoops itself. Members can, however, choose to make their email addresses known to other Members; Members may change the email address we hold them at any time by editing their profile details.

Un-validated Memberships. If you register for TravelScoops, 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. TravelScoops 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. Ad servers may also use these tools to compile information about where users saw particular advertisements, and to determine which ads were clicked on. We are not responsible for, or have any control over, the privacy policies of those third party websites and ad servers, and encourage all users to read the privacy policies of each and every website visited when linking directly from Real Travel.

Notification of unread messages. If you have a number of messages waiting for you in your TravelScoops mailbox, 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.

Changes to TravelScoops business. If all of the assets which we uses to operate the TravelScoops business (or substantially all of them) are acquired by a third party, we may transfer personal data we then hold to that party.

5. Sharing Information

When you use TravelScoops, you may form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up trips, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalised features. 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.

When you register for TravelScoops, 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 across the TravelScoops.com and may be searchable through third party web-sites with which we partner (such as sites for which we provide a social network service) and third party search engines, and may be automatically notified to third party tracking 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.

6. 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 against use by anyone else of TravelScoops through the machine that Member uses while they are "logged on" to TravelScoops;
• to log off or exit from TravelScoops when not using it;
• and to keep his/her password secret.

7. Remove details

You may have your registration details removed at any time. To remove yourself, please click here to view instructions on the removal process. Alternatively, email us at privacy@travelscoops.com and we will endeavour to remove your details within 24 to 48 hours of receipt of the email.

8. Invite a Friend

If Members elect to permit TravelScoops to search email addresses held within their email service on their behalf they accept that by doing so, an email invitation will be sent on their behalf, to the relevant email address, and that a reminder email could be sent to that contact on their behalf. By inviting their contacts to join the site, the Member agrees that they have obtained prior consent from their contacts to send them such an invitation and a reminder. TravelScoops stores the name and email address of the contacts for the purpose of automatically adding the respondent to the contacts list of the Member sending the invitation and to send a reminder to that invitation on the Member's behalf. The Members' username and password will not be saved anywhere on the site. TravelScoops does not sell these email addresses or use them to send any other communication besides invitations and the reminder to an invitation on behalf of the Member.

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 TravelScoops?

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with TravelScoops, you can contact us at privacy@travelscoops.com .

11. Links to third party sites

Our site contains links to other sites. We are 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 Information Commissioner's website at www.ico.gov.uk.

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 home page.