At LinkMyHome, we believe strongly in protecting the privacy of our Members' personal information. You should read this policy in conjunction with the LinkMyHome Terms and Conditions, of which this Privacy Policy forms part.

Emails and messages from LinkMyHome. There are some emails and messages that we will need to send you to provide you with a good LinkMyHome service. These include notifications that you have a message from a friend, news from Groups, reminders about your membership and other similar matters. We try to keep these to a minimum, and of course will never send spam.

A LinkMyHome member can communicate directly with another member via an internal messaging service and a chat service once each has agreed to become the friend of the other. Members may also receive emails from other members and non-members if they have voluntarily entered an email address as part of their member's profile - please note that this is quite separate from the initial validation email address used to open an account.

Information gathered on registration. When you register for the LinkMyHome Service, you must provide your name, an email address to validate your registration, your nationality, your gender, your date of birth, the name of your house, its location (not full address), and your period of occupation of that house. You may also if you wish provide certain further information, such as an email contact address, but this is not compulsory. All of this information (other than the validation email address) is available to you and can be changed through the "My account/profile" pages. Please update your details with relevant changes as soon as possible to ensure we have the correct information for you on your account.

All of this information is available to all members to enable them to search for friends.

Additionally, we use cookies and other technologies to recognize you and uniquely identify your browser. Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, but you can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. We also automatically receive such information as IP address, your type of browser and ISP.

This information allows us to customize your experience and the advertisements you see, to store your preferences and record session information.

The information we collect is used for internal review to improve the content of our Website, to conduct research and analysis to help improve your experience, to ensure the technical functionality of our network, and to create and develop new ideas and services for our members. We may also use it to provide third parties with anonymised demographic data to target interactive advertising for other businesses. These are the only circumstances in which we will provide any of your personal data to a third party, subject to paragraph 7 below.

The compulsory elements of your registration information are available to all members, as are your contributions to Groups and discussions tbc and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can however control the privacy of your home. You may decide to show your home to every member of the community, or keep it "private" and share it only with your friends on the network.

You can edit and change your settings at any time from the Privacy page on your Profile page. Any changes you make will go into effect immediately.

If you want to stop using your account you may delete it. When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted. You should only delete your account if you are certain you never want to reactivate it. You may delete your account from your "account settings" page.

Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on Linkmyhome. (For example, if you post something to a Group and then you delete your account, that post may remain, but be attributed to an "Anonymous Linkmyhome Member.") Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested.

The LinkMyHome service contains links to other sites. LinkMyHome is not responsible for the privacy practices, or the content, of those web sites

In order to secure your personal information, access to your data on Linkmyhome is password-protected, and sensitive data is protected by SSL encryption when it is exchanged between your web browser and the Linkmyhome web site. (TBC) To protect any data you store on our servers we also regularly audit our system for possible vulnerabilities and attacks and we use a tier-one secured-access data centre. It is your responsibility to protect the security of your login information. Please note that emails and instant messaging and similar means of communication with other users of Linkmyhome are not encrypted and we strongly request you not to communicate any confidential information through these means.

We may disclose and use personally identifiable and other information in special circumstances where it is necessary to enforce our terms and conditions, policies and agreements, to detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, and to protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Linkmyhome. We may also disclose and use personally identifiable and other information when we, in good faith, believe that the law requires us to do so.

In the event that the ownership of all or substantially all of our business changes, we may transfer your information to the new owner so that the service can continue to operate. In such a case, your information would remain subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy.

We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. By continuing to use our website after notice of changes have been sent to you or published on the Linkmyhome website, you are consenting to the changes.

If you have any questions about this policy, or need to report any security violation, please contact us by mail at privacy@linkmyhome.com. Or alternatively you can contact us at:

Privacy Policy Issues
c/o DVV Italia
Via Monte Zebio, 40
00195 Roma
ITALY

This privacy policy was last updated on 25th May 2010