FreeDating.co.uk - Privacy Policy

Rev: 21st February 2023

Who we are

FreeDating.co.uk and any associated apps are owned and operated by FREE DATING LIMITED, a company registered in England and Wales. Our registered office is at Advantage, Castle Street, Reading, England, RG1 7SN. Our company number is 11348477.

FREE DATING LIMITED is registered with the ICO as a data controller. Our registration number is ZA377477.

About our service

FreeDating.co.uk is a completely free dating service, funded by advertising. We use revenue generated from advertising to operate the service and to advertise for new members.

While using FreeDating.co.uk you should expect to see a variety of advertising, including:

  • Banner adverts on our service.
  • Custom adverts on our service.
  • Promotional messages in your FreeDating.co.uk inbox.

Whilst we appreciate that some advertising can be annoying, the tradeoff is that you will not be charged to access any of the features of our service - features which you might normally expect to pay for on a dating service, including the sending and receiving of messages.

What information do we process?

Registration and profile data

When you join our service you provide us with information by completing one or more online forms to register an account and to create a profile.

This information includes things you might typically expect on a dating profile, such as your age, gender, sexuality, photos, and interests.

As you would expect on a dating site, we make most of this data public, so that other users can get to know something about you.

Some of this information is considered sensitive, such as your sexuality. By providing this information you consent to us making it public on our dating service. You can withdraw this consent by deleting your account.

We keep a small amount of information private which we have listed below:

  • Your email address
  • Your postcode
  • Your password
  • Your exact date of birth (but not your age)

If you provide us with registration or profile data which is not in this list you should assume that we will make it public as part of the service we provide to you.

Messages

Your messages are private between you and the recipient.

However we do have monitoring systems in place to try and identify inappropriate behaviour and fraud in order to keep you safe. In the event that these systems are triggered, or that we have another valid reason to do so such as a complaint from another member, we may examine your messages.

Behaviour

We process data about your behaviour on the service, such as which profiles you view.

Anti-fraud data

We process data to try and identify fraud and inappropriate behaviour. We do not explicitly list which data we process in this respect, as such a list could be used by scammers to circumvent our anti-fraud measures, and hence put users of our service at risk. In general terms we are looking at data which helps us link a new account to a pre-existing problem account so that we can block the new account.

Advertising

Advertising is our only source of revenue, and a big part of our business is optimising advertising to maximise revenue. We need this revenue to operate the service, and to advertise for new users to ensure you have plenty of potential matches.

We work with third-party ad networks who target advertising at you based on information about you, or which identifies you, such as the fact that you are a 35 year old woman, or that you are shopping for a new TV.

This is why adverts on the internet sometimes appear to "follow you around" from one website to another.

We also work directly with advertisers such as other dating services and the adverts you see might depend on the information you have provided to us. For example, if we know you are interested in football we might show you an advert for a dating service aimed at football fans.

Managing your information

We provide tools to enable you to manage your information once you are logged into our service.

Legal basis for processing

We rely on three legal bases for processing your data:

  • Contract - Even though our service is completely free, we are providing you with a service and need to process your data in order to do so. We use this legal basis for the provision of much of the FreeDating.co.uk service.
  • Legitimate interests​- An example of where we rely on this legal basis is where we use your information for the prevention of fraud, for example, to check that you are not a scammer.
  • Consent - We rely on consent to process your sensitive data, such as sexuality. We also rely on consent in the provision of advertising, for example, setting tracking cookies to deliver relevant advertising, or sending promotional messages directly to your FreeDating.co.uk inbox.

How long do we keep your data?

We retain different information for different periods of time, depending on the nature of the data and the reason for retaining it.

Your registration and profile data is retained for a period of two years after the last activity. After 60 days of inactivity we remove your profile visibility from the service. You can reactivate your profile at any time between 60 days and two years of inactivity simply by logging into your account.

Your messages are retained for 90 days and then deleted.

When you delete your account, we immediately remove your information from public view. We then delete your information within 30 days. Please also see the section regarding backups.

Where we have concerns that an account is fraudulent, poses a risk to other users, or has been used inappropriately, we retain the data relating to that account for up to ten years from the last activity, in order to prevent those same problems recurring on other accounts.

We use Google Analytics, and have set the User and event data retention period to 26 months, which is the default.

Where you send us a support query this ultimately gets delivered to a Gmail account, where it is archived indefinitely. The same applies to any follow-up correspondence.

We backup our main database on a rolling basis, and it is therefore possible that your data may exist in a backup beyond the timeframes stipulated above, but at most for 60 additional days.

Who do we share your data with?

We share your data with third parties including those identified below:

  • Scamalytics - used to identify fraudulent accounts on our service.
  • Fingerprint.com - used to identify fraudulent and abusive accounts on our service.
  • Shared Workforce - used to moderate profiles and photos.
  • Google Analytics - used to help us improve the service, for example, by measuring how many people visit our website over time.
  • Cogeco Peer 1 - our hosting company.
  • Kickbox - used to verify email addresses and ensure they are valid.
  • Ad networks - companies who serve the adverts on our service, including adverts targeted specifically at you and/or based on demographic information about you which we provide to them.
  • Moderators - our service relies on moderators to keep profile content appropriate and to identify problem users who need removing from the service such as scammers.
  • Law enforcement agencies - for example, if the police are investigating a crime and request information about one of our users in order to assist their investigation.
  • Consultants - for example, developers working on our systems. In the event that we sell the FreeDating.co.uk business that sale would also likely include all the data belonging to the business, including the data you have provided to us, and that we hold on you.

Your rights

Under the EU's GDPR you have the below rights:

  1. The right to be informed - this privacy policy explains what information we collect and how we use it.
  2. The right of access - to access the personal information we hold on you.
  3. The right to rectification - to correct the personal information we hold on you.
  4. The right to erasure - to request that we delete the personal information we hold on you under certain circumstances.
  5. The right to restrict processing - to request that we stop processing your personal information - without deleting it - under certain circumstances.
  6. The right to data portability - to request that we provide you with a copy of the personal information you have provided us, in a machine-readable form.
  7. The right to object - to object to us processing your personal information under certain circumstances - and always for direct marketing.
  8. Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling - you have certain rights in this area, for example, to request a human review of an automated decision under certain circumstances.

You also have the right to complain to the ICO.

How do we protect your personal data?

We take a wide variety of steps to protect your data, for example, our servers are placed behind a hardware firewall, and we encrypt the data transmitted to and from our website using SSL.

However we do not promise, nor should you expect, that your personal information will always remain secure: No system is completely secure, and you provide us with your information and use our service at your own risk.

We strongly recommend that you you use a different password for different services in case of a data breach.

Where is my personal data kept?

Our business is located in the UK, and our servers are also located in the UK at our hosting company Cogeco Peer 1's UK datacentre.

We share your information with third parties, some of whom are based outside of the UK, and some of whom are based outside of the EEA (for example, Google is based in the USA). Where we pass your data to third parties we will take appropriate measures to ensure that they are GDPR compliant.

Children

Our service is not available to users under the age of 18.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our service. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you use our service, helps us to improve our service, and allows us to target relevant advertising at you. For detailed information on the cookies we use, and the purposes for which we use them, and how to manage cookies, see our Cookie Policy.

Contact us

You can contact us using our contact form.

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