Privacy Policy

OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU

At Afro-Caribbean Matchmaking Agency (ACMA), your privacy is a top priority. We have designed and built the products and services you use and love with your privacy in mind, so that you may focus on enjoying the experience as you search for your Afro-Caribbean life partner. We understand the trust you repose in us by sharing your private information, and so we highly value your privacy and make it our priority to keep your private information secure and ensure it is only used in accordance with our stated policies.

Our commitment to privacy. Our products and services are designed with your privacy in mind. We involve experts from various fields, including legal, security, engineering, product design and others to ensure that our decisions are taken with the utmost respect for your privacy.

Our commitment to transparency. We, like you, use online services that have privacy policies, many of which use complex language hard to follow and understand. Here at ACMA, we aim to do the opposite. We want you to make our privacy policy plain and simple to understand so that you can read it, and understand it.

Our commitment to security. Our team is dedicated to keeping your data safe and secure. As such we regularly update our security practices and invest in our security efforts to enhance the safety of your information.

PRIVACY POLICY

Here’s ACMA Privacy Policy. We request that you take the time to read it. It is simple and easily understood. We thank you for trusting us with your information and it is our desire to maintain that trust. To accomplish this, we want you to understand the information we collect, why we collect it, how we use it and your choices regarding your information. This Policy describes our privacy practices in plain speech, limiting to a minimum legal and technical jargon.

This Privacy Policy applies from 20/04/2024.

WHO WE ARE

The company responsible for your information under this Privacy Policy is: Afro- Caribbean Matchmaking Agency (ACMA), Wilson’s Park, Monsall Rd, Manchester, M40 8WN

APPLICATION OF PRIVACY POLICY

This Privacy Policy applies to websites, apps, and other services we operate under the brand ACMA. For simplicity, we refer to all of these as our “services” in this Privacy Policy. To make it extra clear, we have added links to this Privacy Policy on all applicable services. Some services may require their own unique privacy policy. If a service has its own privacy policy, then that policy — not this Privacy Policy — applies.

INFORMATION WE GATHER

In order to help you develop connections that may led to you finding your life partner, we need some of your information, including your basic profile details and the types of people you’re interested in meeting. We collect information on how you use our services including access logs, as well as information from third parties, like when you use your social media account to access sour services or when you upload information from your social media account to complete your profile.

Additional information about what we collect is below. Information you give us By agreeing to use our services, you agree to us accessing certain of your information. This includes:

  • In the process of creating your account, you will automatically supply us with your login credentials, phone number, along with other basic details like your gender and date of birth.
  • After your profile has been completed, you can share additional information such as your likes and dislikes, your personality, interests and hobbies, and other personal details. You will likely upload photos and video which may give us access to your camera or photo album.
  • By subscribing to a paid service or marking a purchase directly from us (instead of using another platform such as android or iOS), you will provide us or our payment service provider with some of your financial information such as your debit or credit card number and other financial information.
  • By participating in our surveys, market studies, or focus groups, you provide your personal insights into our products and services, provide responses o to our questions and provide testimonials which allow us access to information on your personality, beliefs, viewpoints, etc.
  • By participating in our contest, events, and promotions, we get access to your registration information.
  • If you interact with customer care, we collect the information provided during the interaction.
  • When and if you share information about another person (for example if you provider someone else’s contact details to complete a feature on our site), we will process such information on your behalf to complete your request.
  • We will process your conversations with other users and any content that you publish, as needed for the operation of our services.

 

Information we receive from others Others also provide information about you becoming an indirect source.

Among this group include: Users We receive information as other users interact with you or if they should file a report about you. Social Media You may also share information about yourself through your social media accounts, for instance if you log into our service through your social media account or if you should upload information such as photos from any of your existing social media accounts.

Other Partners In compliance with legal requirements, we may also get information about undesirable actors such as convicts from third parties in our efforts to protect and secure you. Information generated when you use our services Each time you access our services, technical data is generated to include features that you accessed, how they were accessed and devices that were used to access the. Below is more information about such information:

Usage Information When you use our services, data covering your activities while on our service is generated to include:

  • how you used the services— login time, features accessed, actions taken, information generated at your request, referring web addresses, ads you interacted with.
  • Your interactions with other users, for instance which users you connected with, time of interaction, and numbers of messages exchanged.
  • Device Information We will also connect information about the devices you use to access our services, including hardware and software information including IP address, device ID and type, apps settings and characteristics, app crashes, advertising IDs, identifiers associated with cookies or other technologies that may uniquely identify a device or browser.
  • Other Information with your Consent With your permission, we can collect your precise geolocation (latitude and longitude) which may be done in the background even if you’re not using our services. If permission for us to collect your precise geolocation is declined, we will not collect it.
  • With your consent, we may collect photos and videos (for example, if you publish a photo or video or participate in streaming features on our services).
  • With your choice to participate in our Selfie Verification feature, we will collect your face geometry data, considered biometric data in some jurisdictions, to verify that you’re the real you.

COOKIES & DATA COLLECTION TECHNOLOGIES

We use and may allow others to use cookies and similar technologies (e.g., web beacons, pixels, SDKs) to recognise you and/or your device(s). You may read our Cookie policy for more information on why we use them and how you can better manage their use. Some web browsers have a “Do Not Track” (“DNT”) feature that informs websites of a user’s desire not to have his online activity tracked. Upon receipt of such a DNT signal, websites that responds to a DNT signal can have their browser block the website from collecting certain information about the browser’s user. DNT signals are not yet standardised and some browsers do not offer a DNT option. Thus, many businesses, including ACMA do not currently respond to DNT signals.

HOW INFORMATION IS USED

Your information is used in several ways including to deliver and improve our services, to provide for your safety and security, and to provide you with tailored advertising. Below is an expansion of our use of your information. To administer your account and provide our services to you

  • Create and manage your account
  • Provide customer support and respond effectively to your requests
  • Complete your transactions
  • Communicate our services to you
  • To help you connect with other users
  • Make recommendations about other users you may meet
  • Show users profiles to other users

To operate advertising and marketing campaigns

  • Administer contests, discounts or other offers
  • Perform and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on our services. Measure the marketing campaigns promoting ACMA on and outside of our services
  • Communicate products and services that we think may interest you.

To improve our services offerings and create others

  • Administer focus groups, market studies and surveys
  • Review interactions with customer care teams to improve our quality of service
  • Understand how users typically use the services then seek to improve the user experience (for instance, we may modify a feature based user response to the feature)
  • Develop new features and services.

To prevent, detect and fight fraud and other illegal or unauthorised activities

  • Learn from and respond to reports and interactions among users to discover and respond to ongoing, suspected or alleged violations of our Terms of Use .
  • Better understand and design measures to reduce or eliminate violations of our Terms of Use
  • Retain database related to Terms of Use violation to prevent future recurrences
  • Enforce or exercise our rights, for example our Terms of Use .
  • Communicate actions in response to reports to users.

To ensure legal compliance

Comply with legal requirements

Assist law enforcement

To process your information as described in this Privacy Policy, we rely on the following legal bases: Provide our service to you:

We process your information for purposes A and B above to be able to perform the contract you have with us. For example, we make your information available to other users so that they may be able to connect with you as you seek for your life partner. We also process your information to be able to provide our free and paid features.Legitimate interests:

We process your information for purposes C, D and E above, based on our legitimate interest. For example, we tailor our services to meet your desires and needs, suggests offers we deemed of interest to you, in response to our evaluation of your interactions with our services. We process information required to fulfill our legal commitment to you, ACMA, and law enforcement authority and to keep you safe as you interact with our services.Comply with applicable laws and regulations: We process your information for purpose F above such processing is required for our compliance and evidence of our compliance with various laws and regulations. For example, we keep traffic data and transaction data in compliance with our accounting, tax, and statutory data retention obligations, and for instances when such data is requested by the requisite law enforcement authorities. We also maintain data evidencing users’ consent and any decisions users’ take to opt-out of provided and offered features or processing.Consent: The provision of information considered “sensitive” or “special” in some jurisdictions, for instance your sexual orientation, is a consent for us to process such information in line with this Privacy Policy. Alternatively, we may sometimes request permission to collect other special information such as your geolocation or use your information for specific situations.

You do have the option, in some instances, of rescinding your consent by adjusting your settings or deleting your consent (for instance the deletion of “sensitive” information in your profile). Consent may be rescinded at any time by contacting us at the address provided in this Privacy Policy.

HOW INFORMATION IS SHARED

The primary goal of ACMA is to connect you with your life partner, as such we need to share your information with other users. Some of your information is also shared with our service providers and partners who assist us in operating our service. In certain cases, your information is also shared with legal authorities. Continue reading for more details about these shares: With other users Upon the voluntary disclosure of your information on our service including when you sign up a public profile, you automatically share your information with other users. You must be cautious about what information you reveal and ensure it is information you are comfortable with other, including strangers knowing. Limiting the audience that can view certain information from your profile is an option available according to the settings you choose. If you are reported by another user (for example, for a claim of violation of our community guidelines or terms of use), we may communicate the actions, if any we take against you to the reporting user. With our service providers and partners Third parties are a key player in helping us operate our services. Third parties provide hosting services, advertising, payment processing, security, etc. We also share information with our partners, for example our advertising partners may receive non-human readable forms of information about our users. Our services providers and partners are thoroughly vetted and are obliged to the strictest adherence of privacy and confidentiality. For corporate transactions

  • Your information may be transferred to another entity(ies) if we are involved, whether in whole or in part, in a merger, sale, acquisition, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, bankruptcy or other change of ownership or control.
  • With law enforcement / when required by law
  • We may disclose your information if reasonably necessary:
    • to comply with a legal process, such as a court order, subpoena or search warrant, government / law enforcement investigation or other legal requirements;
    • to assist in the prevention or detection of crime (subject in each case to applicable law); or
    • to protect the safety of any person.
  • To enforce legal rights Your information may also be shared:
    • if disclosure would mitigate our liability in an actual or threatened lawsuit;
    • as necessary to protect our legal rights and legal rights of our users, business partners or other interested parties;
    • to enforce our agreements with you; and
    • to investigate, prevent, or take other action regarding illegal activity, suspected fraud or other wrongdoing.
  • With your consent or at your request

We may request your permission to share your information with other third parties. In such case you will be clearly information of why we want to share your information. We may use and share non-personal information (information that does not identify you specifically, to include general demographics, general behavior data, etc.) and personal information in non-human readable form under any of the above circumstances. This information may also be shared with third parties (particularly advertisers) to help us provide targeted ads on our services and on websites or applications of third parties, and for the analysis and reporting of shown ads. This information may be twinned with additional non-personal information or personal information in hashed, non-human readable form collected from other sources. More information on our use of cookies and similar technologies can be found in our Cookie policy

CROSS-BORDER DATA TRANSFERS

The sharing of information laid out in Section 6 above involves cross-border data transfers to the United States of America and other jurisdictions that may have different laws about data processing. When we transfer personal information outside of the EEA, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or other countries which data protection laws have been deemed adequate by the European Commission or other competent governmental body, we use standard contract clauses (standard contractual clauses are commitments between companies transferring personal data, binding them to protect the privacy and security of your data) or other appropriate transfer mechanism.

YOUR RIGHTS

Your information should be under your control. In keeping with that thought process, we remind you of the available tools to help you control your information:

  • Access / Update tools in the service: With tools and account settings you can access, change, or delete information provided to us and that is directly associated with your service account. Please contact our customer care team for help here for assistance if needed.
  • Device permissions. Mobile platforms can have permission systems for specific types of device data and notifications, such as phone contacts, pictures, location services, push notifications and advertising identifiers. You can change your settings on your device to either consent or oppose the collection or processing of the corresponding information or the display of the corresponding notifications. Of course, if you do that, certain services may lose functionality.
  • Uninstall. You can stop all information collection by an app by uninstalling it using the standard uninstall process for your device. Note that uninstalling an app does NOT close your account. To close your account, please use the corresponding functionality on the service.
  • Account closure. You can close your account by using the corresponding functionality directly on the service.

We also want you to be aware of your privacy rights. Here are a few key points to remember:

  • Reviewing your information. Applicable privacy laws may give you the right to review the personal information we keep about you (depending on the jurisdiction, this may be called right of access, right of portability, right to know or variations of those terms). You can exercise this right by putting in such a request here .
  • Updating your information. If you think the information we have about you is inaccurate or that we should no longer be allowed, and you want to request its change, deletion, object to it or restrict its processing, please contact us here.

Before we respond to your above request, we may ask for proof of your identity. Bear in mind, request may be rejected, for instance, if your identity cannot be verified, if the request is unlawful or invalid, or if it may infringe on trade secrets or intellectual property or the privacy or other rights of another individual. If you require information about another user, such as messages previously exchange between you two on our services, the other user will have to contact us and provide their written consent before the information is released. We may also ask them to provide proof of identity before we can answer the request. In cases where your request would preclude us from being able to provide our services, we may not be able to accommodate them. For instance, without your birth of date, we cannot offer you our services as you may be under 18. In certain countries, including in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, you have a right to lodge a complaint with the appropriate data protection authority if you have concerns about how we process your personal information. You can find information about your data protection regulator in the European Economic Area here, and in the United Kingdom here. The data protection authority you can lodge a complaint with may be that of your habitual residence, where you work or where an alleged infringement took place.

INFORMATION RETENTION PERIOD

Your personal information is retained for as long as we need it to continue our legitimate business offerings (as laid out in Section 5) and as permitted by applicable law. If you no longer desire to use our services you may close your account, upon which point your profile it is no longer visible to other users. Note that inactivity for a period of two years will result in us automatically closing your account . After your account is closed, we will delete your personal information, as laid out below: 1. After your account is closed, your information is retained over a period titled a “safety net window” lasting three months. The purpose is to protect the safety and security of our users. For instance, it might become necessary to investigate unlawful or harmful conducts involving the account holder. The retention of information during this safety net window is for our legitimate interest as well as that of potential third-party victims. 2. Once the safety net window ends, we delete your data and only keep minimal information for specified purposes, as indicated below: 1. We maintain minimal data to comply with legal data retention obligations: to be specific, we retain transaction data for 10 years in compliance with tax and accounting legal requirements. We may also need to keep “traffic data” / logs for one year in compliance with legal data retention obligations. We also keep records of consents users give us for five years to evidence our compliance with applicable law. 2. We maintain minimal information on the basis of our legitimate interest: we keep customer care records and supporting data as well as imprecise location of download/purchase for five years to support our customer care decisions, enforce our rights and enable us to defend ourselves in the event of a claim. We retain profile data for a year in anticipation of potential litigation, for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims. We also keep data which will help us to prevent banned users or persons who were found to be under the age of 18 from opening a new account, to ensure the safety and vital interests of our users. 3. Finally, we maintain information on the basis of our legitimate interest where there is an outstanding or potential issue, claim or dispute requiring us to keep information (in particular if we receive a valid legal subpoena or request asking us to preserve data (in which case we would need to keep the data to comply with our legal obligations) or if data would otherwise be necessary as part of legal proceedings).

CHILD PRIVACY

Our services are restricted to persons who are 18 years of age or older. We do not permit individuals under the age of 18 to use our platform and services. If you suspect that a user is under the age of 18, please report such a user using the reporting infrastructure on our service.

JOB CANDIDATES, CONTRACTORS AND VENDOR REPRESENTATIVES

We also process the personal information of our job candidates, contractors and vendor representatives, as part of our recruitment and talent management operations and our management of the services that contractors and vendors provide to us.

If you are a job candidate, contractor, or vendor representative of ACMA, certain relevant terms of this Privacy Policy apply to our processing of your personal information, including the sections of this Privacy Policy that discuss the entity responsible for processing your personal information, transfers of personal information, your rights under applicable laws, and how to contact us.

If you are a job applicant, the personal information we process about you will be tied to the position you seek but typically includes what you provide to us as part of your job application as well as professional qualifications, background and reference information that recruiters or other third parties share with us.

We use this information to support the recruitment process, which may lead to an employment contract. For contractors and vendor representatives, we may process identification information and work-related information, as necessary to manage our relationship with you and your employer, which is necessary for the performance of the services agreement, and to establish, exercise or defend potential legal claims.

We may share personal information with service providers that assist us with recruitment and technical data processing operations. We keep your personal information only as long as necessary for those purposes.

PRIVACY POLICY CHANGES

As we continue to strive to provide the best service that will enable you to make a link with your future life partner, and ensure your safety and privacy, this policy may be adjusted over time. We will notify you before any material changes take effect so that you have time to review the changes.

CONTACT US

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, you have different options below: Online: here By post: The Afro-Caribbean Matchmaking Agency Wilson’s Park, Monsall Rd, Manchester, M40 8WN