Privacy policy
GEKKO PRIVACY POLICYDated 5 October 2009
INTRODUCTION
Gekko is committed to protect your personal information when you use our website (www.gekko.com, the “Website) and we want our Members and visitors to have a safe and enjoyable experience. It is completely optional to become a Member, and when you choose to do so, you will be required to undertake the Gekko Profiler and enter certain personal data on this site. To become a Member you will be required to set up an account with password and email address, you also have the option to create your personal profile and are encouraged to include an accurate photograph of yourself.
All content you submit to the Website will be displayed with your full name, you will not have the option of using a pseudonym.
Please note: Gekko will not initially provide privacy settings to enable you control the users with whom you share that information so please remember that any information you submit becomes public information that can be viewed by other Members. We will inform all Members when the option of applying privacy settings becomes available.
We advise that you never reveal any critical personal information about yourself or anyone else (for example: telephone number, postal address, home address or any other details that could be abused by others) in your profiles or in any other contribution to the Website.
We may use the email address provided by you to contact you from time to time about the Gekko service. We won’t pass your email address on to anyone to contact you directly about their own products or services, unless you have provided your prior consent to do so. Our policy is to provide a clear and easy way for you to opt out of receiving specific types of emails.
Children under the age of 15 are not eligible to use our service and must not attempt to register with us and/or submit any personal information to us. Young people between 15 and 17 should not send any information about themselves to anyone over the Internet (including to us) without asking their parents/legal guardians for permission beforehand
As set out above, Gekko is committed to safeguarding your personal information. Whenever you provide such information, we are legally obliged to use your information in line with all laws in England and Wales (our country of registration) concerning the protection of personal information, including the Data Protection Act 1998 (these laws are referred to collectively in this Privacy Policy as the "data protection laws").
The Website contains hyperlinks to websites owned and operated by third parties. These third party websites have their own privacy policies, including cookies, and we urge you to review them. They will govern the use of personal information you submit or are collected by cookies whilst visiting these websites. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of such third party websites and your use of such websites is at your own risk.
WHAT INFORMATION WILL GEKKO COLLECT ABOUT ME?
Unregistered Users
We encourage you to register with us in order to be part of the Gekko community and to take full advantage of Gekko's features detailed below. However, you may choose not to register and take advantage of any feature of our site where registration is not required.
If you do not register, then the information we collect from you is limited. We log your IP address in order to help diagnose problems with our applications or hosting environments, administer our Web site and track usage statistics. It would be extremely difficult for us to identify you through your IP address, and we make no attempt to do so. If you reached our site by clicking on a link or advertisement on another site, then we also log that information. This helps us to maximize our Internet exposure, and to understand the interests of our users. All of this information is collected and used only in the aggregate; that is, it is entered into our database, where we can use it to generate overall reports on our visitors, but not reports about individual visitors.
We also place small files known as "cookies" (and/or similar technology) on your computer's hard drive to maintain the integrity of our content and to provide our users with a better site experience. Please see below for more information about cookies.
If you visit our site by "clicking-through" from a site operated by one of our partners, and you have registered with that partner, then certain information about you that you have provided to that partner may be transmitted to us. You should review the privacy policy of the Web site from which you reached our site in order to determine what information was collected and how you agreed that our partner could use that information. Regardless of what information was transmitted to us, however, we don't keep it unless you register with us.
Participants in Gekko competitions
You do not need to be a registered Member to participate in Gekko competitions. When you sign up to participate in competitions which Gekko may run from time to time on the Website, we will probably ask for personal information about you. This can consist of information such as your name, email address, postal address, telephone or mobile number or date of birth.
Registered Users (“Members”)
If you choose to register with us, you will be provided with personalised travel recommendations; be able to book hotels and restaurants through third party websites; and add content to our site. For example, you may post your own travel reviews and participate in our discussion forums or blogs. You will also be able to email fellow Gekko Members and friends; and send content to yourself and others. The benefits of registering will increase over time as we get to know you better and introduce new features. We encourage you to register so that you can experience everything that Gekko has to offer.
We will collect personal information from you in addition to the non-personal information described above. That personal information will include your name, email address, travel preferences, user name and password, as well as contact information for other people that you provide to us. You may also include optional information under the following categories: date of birth, location, sex and your interests and preferences The information we collect may vary, but we only collect the information that you manually enter into our forms or otherwise authorise us to collect.
We may store all or some of that information in a cookie file on your hard drive, so that our system will recognize you each time you visit our site. In that way, we can save your preferences from visit to visit and present you with a customized Web site, without requiring you to log into our site every time you visit.
“Clicking”on a third party site
If you choose to book a hotel or restaurant (or any other service Gekko will or may provide) by clicking on a third party link provided on the Website, such third party may collect your personal details (such as your credit card number, address, etc.) for the purpose of completing your chosen transaction. We may be provided with confirmation of your transactions with such third parties and, in some instances, such confirmation may include your personal information. Aside from such confirmations, the only information that we will collect with respect to such third party links is: (a) the number of generic Gekko users who utilised such links; (b) the number of purchases made by these generic users; and (c) your name, email address destination and selected property or product so that we may contact you to enquire about your experience or to propose compatible products.
HOW WILL GEKKO USE THE INFORMATION?
To personalise the way content is presented to you
As part of the Gekko registration process you will be required to undertake Gekko's Profiler. Having selected whether you are most interested in leisure, family or business travel (and any options that we may add to in the future), you will be presented with theoretical cases each with their own set of attributes: you decide which you prefer. This process is repeated several times. This will create your automated travel preferences which enables Gekko to tailor and match the content presented to you so that the recommendations you receive are personalised from people who value the same things as you. You may create profiles for all settings (leisure, family and business travel) plus any future settings.
To contact you
We will use the email address and any other means provided by you when you register, to contact you from time to time. This may be for security reasons (so that we can check that you are who you say you are, by sending you an initial validation email); to inform you about planned maintenance to the Website or other disruptions; to ask your opinion about the Website; or it may be to keep you updated on the services currently available on the Website; and any changes to those services and those that we intend to launch in the future.
If you register with Gekko, and you receive a validation email, but if you fail to validate your Membership to by responding to this email 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 that your account will not become active until you validate your Membership. Should you fail to respond to these notifications then we may send you one final notice before your details are removed.
Where you have agreed to this, we may also use such personal information to send you our newsletters and marketing notices, on behalf of others and ourselves, regarding products and services that we think may be of interest to you; or to deliver targeted advertisements, promotions and other similar initiatives to you. While this may include material about third party products or services, those third parties will not contact you directly (unless you subsequently ask them to).
To contact you about any submission you have made to the Website, including any content you provide.
To invite you to participate in surveys about Gekko services (participation is always optional).
Monitoring and editing user content
Where you submit a review or provide other content to the Website; we may, but have no obligation to, monitor such traffic via electronic software or otherwise in order to check for obscenity, defamation, unlawful acts, abusive or inappropriate language (please see our terms of use for greater details), which we reserve the right to remove at any time. Please refer to our Terms of Use for details on Gekko's rules regarding posting content on the Website.
Statistical Analysis
To aggregate information in order to generate anonymous statistics regarding use of the Website. 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 the Website.
Third-Party Adservers
We may use third-party advertising companies to target and serve ads when you visit the Website. These companies may use information (generally not including your name, address – though possibly the location of your home town-, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. These companies may employ cookies and other tracking technologies to measure advertising effectiveness. Any information that these third parties collect via cookies is generally not personally identifiable (unless, for example, you provide personal information to them through an ad or email message).
WILL GEKKO SHARE MY INFORMATION WITH ANYONE ELSE?
We will keep your information confidential except where disclosure is required or permitted by law. However, in the event that we are required to disclose personally identifiable information by a court, the police or other law enforcement bodies for their investigations, regulation or other governmental authority we will make such a disclosure without being in violation of this Policy.
If you post or send offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content anywhere on or to the Website, or otherwise engage in any disruptive behaviour the Website, Gekko may use your personal information to stop such behaviour. Where Gekko reasonably believes that you are or may be in breach of any of the laws of England or Wales (e.g. because content you have posted may be defamatory), Gekko may use your personal information to inform relevant third parties such as your employer, school, email/Internet provider or law enforcement agencies about the content and your behaviour.
If Gekko is acquired by another company or sells all or a portion of its assets to another company, or in the event of a merger or reorganisation, it is likely that user information will be a part of the assets transferred and may be disclosed to the new company.
Where you have supplied us with a friend's email address and that friend subsequently asks us for the identity of the person supplying their email details we give them your name and/or contact details.
INVITE A FRIEND
If you click on "Invitations" or “Tell a Friend” and submit email addresses your contacts to invite to Gekko, you accept that by doing so, an email invitation will be sent on your behalf, to the relevant email address, and that a reminder email could be sent to that contact on your behalf. By inviting your contacts to join Gekko, you agree that you have obtained their prior consent to send them such an invitation and a reminder. Gekko will store the name and email address of your contacts for the purpose of automatically adding the respondent to your contacts list and to send a reminder to that invitation on the Member's behalf. Gekko 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. You or your “Friend” can request the removal of their details from our database at any time by sending an email to: privacy@gekko.com
POLICY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Children under the age of 15 are not eligible to use the Website and must not attempt to register with Gekko and/or submit any personal information to us. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from any person who is under the age of 15 or allow them to register. If it comes to our attention that we have collected personal data from a person under the age of 15, we will delete this information as quickly as possible. If you have reason to believe that this has occurred, please contact us at unsubscribe@gekko.com, and we will delete all relevant information.
If you are aged between 15 and 17 , please get your parent/guardian's permission beforehand whenever you provide personal information to the Gekko website. Users without this consent are not allowed to provide us with personal information.
HOW TO REMOVE DETAILS, STOP MARKETING EMAILS; AND UPDATE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
You may have your registration details, including your profile, removed at any time. To remove yourself, please email us at unsubscribe@gekko.com and we will endeavour to remove your details within 7days of receipt of the email.
You may continue to be a Member but choose to stop receiving marketing emails at any time by emailing unsubscribe@gekko.com
You can review and update the personal information you have provided through the registration process by clicking on “My Profile” or “Profile” on your account page.
SECURITY/ HOW LONG WILL GEKKO HOLD PERSONAL INFORMATION
We employ firewalls and store all of our files and information on computer hardware which require password access. You should never disclose your account password to unauthorised people. We use certain security measures to help keep your personal information safe, but we cannot guarantee that these measures will stop any users try to get around the privacy or security settings on the Website through unforeseen and/or illegal activity. Consequently, you acknowledge that there are circumstances in which your personal information may be accessed by unauthorised persons.
In the event that we believe that the security of your personal information in our possession or control may have been compromised, we may seek to notify you. If a notification is appropriate, we would endeavour to do so as promptly as possible under the circumstances, and, to the extent we have your e-mail address, we may notify you by e-mail.
We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary to provide the relevant service. In the case that you wish to cancel your registration as a Gekko member, your account will be deleted but once an account is deleted a red flag goes on the database and, while people cannot use the personal information, it stays on the system for a period of one year for administration purposes before being deleted automatically.
Where you contribute reviews or other content to the Website, Gekko will generally only keep your content for as long as is reasonably required for the purpose(s) for which it was submitted. Hotel and restaurant reviews and related content are likely to be kept for a long time, or even permanently.
CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY
This privacy policy may be updated from time to time so you may wish to check it each time you submit personal information to the Website website. The date of the most recent revisions will appear on this page.
COOKIES
A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes a unique identifier that is sent to your computer or mobile phone (referred to here as a "device") browser from a website's computer and is stored on your device's hard drive. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser's preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites. Many sites do this whenever a user visits their website in order to track online traffic flows.
We use cookies to collect data that we can use to improve the efficiency and quality of our service. We use these cookies to identify you as a valid user and to help personalise your Gekko experience in conjunction with your profile. We currently employ persistent cookies which stay on your computer after you have gone offline. Persistent cookies remain in the “cookies” folder after you have closed your web browser.
Most browsers have cookies turned on as a default, but you can always disable cookies or only allow non-persistent cookies via your browser preferences. If you choose to disable cookies, however, you won’t be able enjoy a significant proportion of Gekko’s functionality. Please remember that cookies cannot read your hard drive or give any information collected to any third party. A cookie can only be read by the organisation that sets it.
CAN I FIND OUT WHAT PERSONAL INFORMATION GEKKO HOLDS ABOUT ME?
Under the Data Protection Act you have the right to request a copy of the personal information Gekko holds about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. (We charge £10 for information requests and will require you to prove your identity with 2 pieces of approved photographic identification.) We will use reasonable efforts to supply, correct or delete personal information about you on our files.
Please address requests and questions about this or any other question about this Privacy Policy to the Data Protection Officer, 48 Charlotte Street, London W1T 2NS (Email: privacy@gekko.com.
