Privacy Policy

Effective from: 25th May 2018

Introduction

Our Privacy Policy explains what data we collect from you, when it is used, for what purpose, and explains how and when you may withdraw consent for any personal data to be stored or retained.

This document may change from time to time. In such cases we will post announcements on the website prior to it coming into effect. You may choose to decline our Privacy Policy by unregistering your account from tvChix.

tvChix complies with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) EU legislation, which is applicable to all EU citizens.

Furthermore, tvChix is committed to providing the same level of consumer protection to our overseas users, regardless of citizenship or country of residence.

What data does tvChix collect, and what are the legal bases for collecting it?

In order to sign up for a tvChix account, we first ask you to provide an email address.

Legal Basis: We use your email address to allow you to manage and secure your account, provide you with the ability to reset your password or regain access to your account, notify you of any security alerts relating to your account, to (optionally) provide you with email alerts when you have new tvChix messages, to (optionally) provide you with a monthly account overview and to (optionally) notify you of any promotions or discounts being offered directly by tvChix.

On completing your tvChix profile, you are asked to provide various personal details about yourself.
This data includes your chosen username, gender, city, county or state, country, geographical location, and chosen profile type.

Legal Basis: It is necessary for the purpose of providing you with our services.

tvChix provides features for you to express your interests, publish a textual bio and publish content to our forums, chatrooms, and other features on the the website.
Some of these features provide the (optional) ability for you to disclose additional personal information such as sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religious or political beliefs, phone numbers and social media addresses.

Legal Basis: It is necessary for the purpose of providing you with our services.
Any optional data detailed above, is published if, and only if, you choose to disclose it on your profile.
tvChix cannot be held responsible for any personal data you choose to publish or otherwise disclose to other users, which is not specifically required to complete your profile.

tvChix collects technical data relating to the way you access tvChix, such as IP address, date and time you accessed the site, authorisation events such as login attempts, and device characteristics such as web browser and computer or mobile platform.

Legal Basis: It is necessary in order to provide support and troubleshooting services, abuse mitigation, monitor our online property for performance and security related incidents, to assist in improving our service, and in some cases to assist with law enforcement where applicable.

In cases where you submit an online donation to tvChix via online card payment, we collect your name, address information, and card details.

Legal Basis: It is necessary in order to process your card payment. Name, address and card details are provided securely to our card processing partner. Our card processing partner is not a 'Data Controller' under the GDPR legislation, and do not have the freedom to decide how your data is used or to utilise it for other purposes. They are permitted to use it exclusively to fulfil your payment transaction and to fulfil their legal obligations.

In cases where you submit a bank transfer donation to tvChix, we collect the payee (payment reference) which appears on the transaction, which may or may not contain personal data.

Legal Basis: It is necessary in order to identify and process your transaction.

Who does tvChix share my personal data with?

tvChix does not share, trade or sell your account email address with any third party individual, business, or entity.

Other personal data you publish to tvChix, including username, gender, profile type, website (optional), social media addresses (optional), forum posts, events, venues, images, and any other personal data you have explicitly chosen to publish on your profile or via tvChix, may potentially be shared with (ie, viewed by) other users.
We provide privacy controls to control many of these features, please see My Account » Profile Preferences

We provide features for users to download their tvChix Messages in an archive format.
Any personal data you choose to privately disclose to other users, may potentially be retained by them.

For personal data such as card payment information, we share your name, address and card details with our card payment processor, which is transmitted using industry standard encryption.

tvChix uses Google Analytics (https://analytics.google.com), to facilitate monitoring and reporting of overall traffic and trends of our online property.
In compliance with the GDPR legislation, we make use of Google Analytics 'IP Anonymization' feature, which ensures your full IP address is not provided to Google, nor can be viewed in Google Analytics reporting features.

tvChix uses NewRelic APM (https://newrelic.com), to help monitor application performance, reliability and uptime metrics for our servers and associated services. In some cases this may result in your IP address being shared with NewRelic for private reporting purposes.

Is my personal data transferred outside of the European Union?

Any account or personal data you provide to tvChix is submitted to, and stored on, our private servers. At the time of writing our servers are hosted in the United States.

In accordance with GDPR legislation, we are legally required to disclose that any information you submit to tvChix is directly transmitted to our servers which do reside outside of the European Union.

Data Retention

To remove your personal data from the site, you may unregister at any time from the My Account page, at which point your profile and any personal data will be immediately and permanently removed from the site.

There are however, some exceptions to this, in accordance with the GDPR legislation.

We retain your chosen username, and profile type indefinitely

For the purpose of displaying in our forums, to prevent your chosen username being reclaimed by another users, and for the purpose of displaying in other community areas of the site you may have published content to.

Any private tvChix messages you have sent to other users are retained for a period of up to 12 months

For the purpose of displaying your message to the intended recipient, for abuse mitigation, and for cooperating with law enforcement, should it be required.

All chatroom activity is logged, and chatroom logs are retained for a period not exceeding 12 months.

For the purpose of abuse mitigation, and cooperating with law enforcement, should it be required

In the event your account is terminated for violation of our Terms and Conditions (including but not limited to abuse, threats or otherwise malicious conduct, posting content which tvChix views to be racist, homophobic, inciting hatred, scamming, violations of other users privacy, or attempting to exploit our online property or other users for financial gain), we retain a cryptographic hash of your email address (indefinitely), aswell as any relevant IP address or device data (for a period not exceeding 36 months).

For the purpose of abuse mitigation, to assist in providing a safe and secure environment for our users, and to facilitate tvChix declining to provide you with further service in the future.

Any data or images you have chosen to publish on community pages (excluding your profile page, but including and not limited to venues, events, reviews, other users guestbooks or verifications, or forum content you have published on tvChix) will be retained indefinitely.

For the purpose of providing you with our services

In the event you submit a online card donation to tvChix, which is subsequently identified as fraudulent, subject to excessive chargebacks, or refund requests, we retain a one-way cryptographic fingerprint (hash) of your card identifier, for a period not exceeding 36 months.

For the purposes of fraud prevention and to allow tvChix to decline further financial transactions from you

Cookie Policy

A cookie is a small file containing text and/or numerical information or identifier, which a website can deploy to your web browser, and can then be retrieved on subsequent visits. They are often used for authentication purposes, to record preferences, record that you have opted in or out to certain website features, and to improve your experience of the website.
For further information about cookies and how they are used, please see http://www.allaboutcookies.org

tvChix utilises the following kinds of cookies...

Authentication Cookies:

We deploy 'First Party' cookies (ie, ones which can only be retrieved by tvchix.com) to establish you are authenticated with tvChix, and to track that you are logged in whilst browsing tvChix

Preference or Functionality Cookies:

We deploy preference first party cookies (ie, ones which can only be retrieved by tvchix.com) in some cases, to record temporary preferences, such as a checkpoint on our Quick Search feature, or to record transient preferences you have made on some pages on our website.

Google Analytics:

tvChix makes use of Google Analytics for the purpose of monitoring device metrics and trends, monitoring traffic to facilitate capacity planning, to identify heavily used features, and to prioritise future development. Our use of Google Analytics adheres to the 'Anonymised IP' requirement, provided by Google Analytics, and in accordance with the GDPR legislation.

tvChix Marketplace:

Our Marketplace displays a wide range of retail products from selected third party vendors. tvChix Marketplace vendors, with your consent, may place a cookie when you click through to the full product page on the third party vendor site, in order to track sales for affiliate commission purposes. For further information, please refer to Webgains Privacy Policy and Paid On Results Privacy Policy

Google Adwords, and third party advertising networks:

tvChix does not currently make use of Google Adwords for onsite advertising, marketing or tracking purposes, nor do we deploy advertising provided by any third party advertising network. If this was to change in the future, we will amend our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy, and notify you in advance, asking for your explicit consent.

Unintentional Disclosure

In the event of a site security breach, or software or hardware malfunction, which may have resulted in any of your personal data being unintentionally disclosed to third parties, tvChix is committed to notifying you within 7 days, from the time we become aware of any disclosure.

By using tvChix, you agree to abide by well established principles of online security to assist in keeping your account secure.

This includes using a unique and non-trivial password for tvChix, which is not shared by any other website or email account you own or access, to avoid accessing the site via any third party proxy servers or VPN services which have not been established to be secure, and to avoid entering any personal information or login details into a shared or public computer, or device, unless they have been established as secure.

How can I get more information, or make a privacy-related complaint?

Please contact tvChix from our Contact pages, providing full details.

We will review your concern and endeavour to take action to address or rectify your issue, wherever possible.

If you are unhappy with our response regarding a privacy related issue, or to find out more about your rights, you may contact the Information Commissioners Office at https://www.ico.org.uk