Privacy Policy

5. Third-party social plugins

Our Platform may use social plugins which are provided and operated by third-party companies, such as Facebook's Like Button.

As a result of this, you may send to the third-party company the information that you are viewing on a certain part of our Platform. If you are not logged into your account with the third-party company, then the third party may not know your identity. If you are logged into your account with the third-party company, then the third party may be able to link information about your visit to our Platform to your account with them. Similarly, your interactions with the social plugin may be recorded by the third party.

Please refer to the third party's privacy policy to find out more about its data practices, such as what data is collected about you and how the third party uses such data.

HOW DESKMATE USES AND PROCESSES THE INFORMATION THAT YOU PROVIDE OR MAKE AVAILABLE

We use, store and process Information about you for the following general purposes: 

1. to enable you to access and use the Platform;


2. to operate, protect, improve and optimize the Platform and our users' experience, such as to perform analytics, conduct research, personalize or otherwise customize your experience;


3. to help create and maintain a trusted and safer environment on the Platform and Services, such as fraud detection and prevention, conducting investigations and risk assessments, and conducting checks against databases such as public government databases;


4. to send you service, support and administrative messages, reminders, technical notices, updates, security alerts, and information requested by you;


5. where we have your consent, to send you marketing and promotional messages and other information that may be of interest to you, including information about Deskmate or general promotions for partner campaigns and services. You can unsubscribe or opt-out from receiving these communications in your settings (in the "Account" section) when you login to your Deskmate account;


6. to administer referral programs, rewards, surveys, sweepstakes, contests, or other promotional activities or events sponsored or managed by Deskmate; and


7. to comply with our legal obligations, resolve any disputes that we may have with any of our users, and enforce our agreements with third parties.

HOW DESKMATE USES AND PROCESSES USER COMMUNICATIONS

We may, either directly or through third party companies and individuals we engage to provide services to us, review, scan, or analyze your communications with other users exchanged via the Platform for fraud prevention, risk assessment, regulatory compliance, investigation, product development and customer support purposes. For example, as part of our fraud prevention efforts, the Platform may scan and analyze messages to mask contact information and references to other websites. This helps to prevent fraudulent actors from harming users. We may also scan, review or analyze messages for research and product development purposes to help make search, and user communications more efficient and effective, as well as to debug, improve and expand product offerings; We will not review, scan, or analyze your communications for sending third party marketing messages to you. We will also not sell these reviews or analyses of communications to third parties. We will also use automated methods to carry out these reviews or analyses where reasonably possible. However, from time to time we may have to manually review some communications. By using the Platform, you consent that Deskmate, in its sole discretion, may, either directly or through third party companies and individuals we engage to provide services to us, review, scan, analyze, and store your communications, whether done manually or through automated means.

WHEN DESKMATE DISCLOSES OR SHARE PERSONAL INFORMATION AND TO WHOM

Please note that laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and so the privacy laws applicable to the places where your information is transferred to or stored, used or processed in, may be different from the privacy laws applicable to the place where you are resident.

Your Personal Information may be disclosed as follows: 

1. Parts of your public profile page that contain some Personal Information may be displayed in other parts of the Platform to other users for marketing purposes or to the extent necessary to operate and manage referral and rewards programs.


2. Your public post will always include some minimum information such as the city and your public profile photo. Your public post page may also include aggregated demand information (such as number of page views over a period of time). Parts of your public post page may be displayed in other parts of the Platform to other users for marketing purposes.


3. The Platform allows your public post pages to be included in search engines, in which case your public post pages will be indexed by search engines and may be published as search results. This option is enabled by default, and you may opt out of this feature by changing your settings on the Platform. If you change your settings or the information on your public profile or public post pages, third-party search engines may not update their databases quickly or at all. We do not control the practices of third-party search engines, and they may use caches containing outdated information, including any information indexed by the search engine before you change your settings or the information on your public profile or public post pages.


4. When a you know about a school, we will ask you to review the school. If you choose to provide a review, your review may be public on the Platform.
You may link your Deskmate account to your social network account. We refer to a person's contacts on these third party sites as "Friends". When you create this linkage: 



• some of the information you provide to us from the linking of your accounts may be published on your Deskmate account profile;


• your activities on the Platform may be displayed to your Friends on the Platform and/or that third party site;


• other Deskmate users may be able to see any common Friends that you may have with them, or that you are a Friend of their Friend if applicable;


• other Deskmate users may be able to see any schools, hometowns or other groups you have in common with them as listed on your linked social networking site(s); and


• the information you provide to us from the linking of your accounts may be stored, processed and transmitted for fraud prevention and risk assessment purposes.



The publication and display of information that you provide to Deskmate through this linkage is subject to your settings and authorizations on the Platform and the third party site.

5. We may allow our related entities such as our subsidiaries, and their employees, to use and process your Personal Information in the same way and to the same extent that we are permitted to under this Privacy Policy. These related entities comply with the same obligations that we have to protect your Personal Information under this Privacy Policy.


6. We may also engage third party companies and individuals to provide services to us, including but not limited to technology services and services to help verify your identification, to conduct checks against databases such as public government databases (where legally allowed), to otherwise assist us with fraud prevention and risk assessment, to assist us with customer service, and to facilitate the payments or reimbursements you request (such as Paypal and Visa). We may provide Personal Information about you to these third parties, or give them access to this Personal Information, for the limited purpose of allowing them to provide these services. We will ensure that such third parties have contractual obligations to protect this Personal Information and to not use it for unrelated purposes.


7. You acknowledge, consent and agree that Deskmate may access, preserve and disclose your account information and Collective Content if required to do so by law or in a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) respond to claims asserted against Deskmate; (b) to comply with legal process (for example, subpoenas and warrants); (c) to enforce and administer our agreements with users, such as the Terms of Service, this Privacy Policy (d) for fraud prevention, risk assessment, investigation, customer support, product development and de-bugging purposes; or (e) to protect the rights, property or personal safety of Deskmate, its users or members of the public. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to notify users about law enforcement requests for their data unless:
   
   
   
   • providing notice is prohibited by the legal process itself, by court order we receive, or by applicable law; or
   
   
   • based on information supplied by law enforcement, we, in our sole discretion, believe: (a) that providing notice could create a risk of injury or death to an individual or group of individuals, (b) that the case involves potential harm to minors, or (c) that harm or fraud could be directed to Deskmate, its Members, the Platform, or Services.
   
   
   
   

We may also publish, disclose and use Aggregated Information and non-personal information for industry and market analysis, demographic profiling, marketing and advertising, and other business purposes.

BUSINESS TRANSFERS BY DESKMATE

If Deskmate undertakes or is involved in any merger, acquisition, reorganization, sale of assets or bankruptcy or insolvency event, then we may sell, transfer or share some or all of our assets, including your Personal Information. In this event, we will notify you before your Personal Information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

SECURING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

We are continuously implementing and updating administrative, technical, and physical security measures to help protect your Personal Information against unauthorized access, destruction or alteration. However, no method of transmission over the Internet, and no method of storing electronic information, can be 100% secure. So, we cannot guarantee the absolute security of your transmissions to us and of your Personal Information that we store.

YOUR PRIVACY WHEN YOU ACCESS THIRD-PARTY WEBSITES AND RESOURCES

The Platform will contain links to other websites not owned or controlled by Deskmate. Deskmate does not have any control over third party websites. These other websites may place their own cookies, web beacons or other files on your device, or collect and solicit Personal Information from you. They will have their own rules about the collection, use and disclosure of Personal Information. We encourage you to read the terms of use and privacy policies of the other websites that you visit.

Some portions of the Platform implement Google Maps/Earth mapping services, including Google Maps API(s). Your use of Google Maps/Earth is subject to Google's terms of use (located at www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/terms_maps.html) and Google's privacy policy (located at http://www.google.com/privacy.html), as may be amended by Google from time to time.

SPECIAL FEATURES AND PROGRAMS

We may integrate the Platform with third party sites such as Facebook, so that you can send invitation messages or requests for references via the third party site itself. These messages will be sent by the third party site, and Deskmate does not collect or retain the contact information that is used to send them.

You may also send invitation/request emails via the Platform itself, in which case we will ask you for the contact information to which to send your invitation/request. You can type in the email addresses or other contact information manually, or you can choose to import the contacts in your address book(s). In both cases, we may use and store this information for the sole purposes of allowing you to send your friends and contacts an invitation and for fraud detection and prevention.

If you request us to import your contacts, we will collect, but not store, the username and password for the email account you wish to import your contacts from. We will use this information only for the purpose of importing your contacts.

Meetups

The Platform may allow registered account holders to organize, search for or participate in offline events in selected cities.

Groups

The Platform may allow registered account holders to participate in online discussion forums ("Group(s)") in selected cities.

If you join a Group, then your membership in the Group as well as some of your public information (such as your profile picture and public profile page) will be visible to users who browse the Group. If you publish postings in a Group, then your postings will be visible to such users as well. The ability to browse the Group will depend on the Group settings, and it may or may not be limited to members of that Group.

CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

We may change how we collect and then use Personal Information at any time and without prior notice, at our sole discretion. We may change this Privacy Policy at any time. If we make material changes to the Privacy Policy, we will notify you either by posting the changed Privacy Policy on the Platform or by sending an email to you. We will also update the "Last Updated Date" at the top of this Privacy Policy. If we let you know of changes through an email communication, then the date on which we send the email will be deemed to be the date of your receipt of that email.

GOT FEEDBACK?

Your opinion matters to us! If you'd like to provide feedback to us about this Privacy Policy, please contact us

COOKIE POLICY

Deskmate uses "cookies" in conjunction with the Platform to obtain information. A cookie is a small data file that is transferred to your device (e.g., your phone or your computer) for record-keeping purposes. For example, a cookie could allow the Platform to recognize your browser, while another could store your preferences and other information.

Your browser may allow you to set how it handles cookies, such as declining all cookies or prompting you to decide whether to accept each cookie. But please note that some parts of the Platform may not work as intended or may not work at all without cookies.

Deskmate cookies and third party cookies

Deskmate may place our cookies on your device via the Platform. Accordingly, our Privacy Policy will apply to our treatment of the information we obtain via our cookies.

We may also allow our business partners to place cookies on your device. For example, we use Google Analytics for web analytics, and so Google may also set cookies on your device. As further explained below, third parties may also place cookies on your device for advertising purposes.

There are two types of cookies used on the Platform, namely "persistent cookies" and "session cookies".

Session cookies will normally expire when you close your browser, while persistent cookies will remain on your device after you close your browser, and can be used again the next time you access the Platform.

Other technologies

The Platform may also use other technologies with similar functionality to cookies, such as web beacons and tracking URLs to obtain Log Data about users. We may also use web beacons and tracking URLs in our messages to you to determine whether you have opened a certain message or accessed a certain link.

Uses for Deskmate cookies

Deskmate uses cookies for a number of purposes, such as the following: 

1. to enable, facilitate and streamline the functioning of the Platform across different webpages and browser sessions.


2. to simplify your access to and use of the Platform and make it more seamless.


3. to monitor and analyze the performance, operation and effectiveness of the Platform, so that we can improve and optimize it.


4. to show you content that is more relevant to you.