- What Information We Collect
- How We Collect and Use Information
- Disclosure of Your Information to Third Parties
- Third-Party Advertising
- Age Restrictions
- Security
- Choice/Opt-Out
- Updating Your Information
- Contacting the Website
- Acceptance of Privacy Statement
TRUSTe is an independent, non-profit organization whose mission is to build user trust and confidence in the Internet by promoting the use of fair information practices. Because this website wants to demonstrate its commitment to your privacy, it has agreed to disclose its information practices and have its privacy practices reviewed for compliance by TRUSTe. By displaying the TRUSTe trustmark, this website has agreed to notify you of:
1. Any personally identifiable information of yours or third party personal identification is collected from you through the eHarmony, Inc. (“eHarmony”) website;
2. The organization collecting the information;
3. How the information is used;
4. With whom the information may be shared;
5. What choices are available to you regarding collection, use and distribution of the information;
6. The kinds of security procedures that are in place to protect the loss, misuse or alteration of information under eHarmony’s control; and
7. How you can correct any inaccuracies in the information.
If you have questions or concerns regarding this statement, you should first contact the website by writing to eHarmony, Inc., P.O. Box 60157, Pasadena, California 91116 USA, or by sending an email to privacy@eHarmony.com. If you do not receive acknowledgment of your inquiry or your inquiry has not been satisfactorily addressed, you should then contact TRUSTe by clicking here. TRUSTe will then serve as a liaison with the website to resolve your concerns.
This privacy statement discloses the privacy practices of eHarmony, Inc. and all websites owned or operated by eHarmony, Inc. and its subsidiaries and corporate affiliates.
The types of information that we collect fall under two general categories: personally identifiable information (PII) and non-personally identifiable information (non-PII). PII consists of any information which can be used to specifically identify you as an individual, whereas non-PII consists of aggregate information or any information that does not reveal your identity. The following sections describe how your PII and non-PII are collected by us, and how we use such information.
How We Collect and Use Information
- Log Files. Any time you visit any of our websites, our servers automatically gather information from your browser (such as your IP addresses, browser type, Internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks) to analyze trends, administer the site, prevent fraud, track visitor movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information. For example, we may log your IP address for system administration purposes. IP addresses are logged to track a user’s session. This gives us an idea of which parts of our site users are visiting. We do not share the log files externally.
- Cookies. We use “cookies” to keep track of some types of information while you are visiting our website or using our services. Cookies are very small files placed on your computer, and they allow us to count the number of visitors to our website and distinguish repeat visitors from new visitors. They also allow us to save user preferences and track user trends. We rely on cookies for the proper operation of our website; therefore if your browser is set to reject all cookies, the website will not function properly. Users who refuse cookies assume all responsibility for any resulting loss of functionality. We do not link the cookies to any PII.
- Web Beacons. “Web beacons” (also known as “clear gifs” and “pixel tags”) are small transparent graphic images that are often used in conjunction with cookies in order to further personalize our website for our users and to collect a limited set of information about our visitors. We may also use web beacons in email communications in order to understand the behavior of our customers. We do not link the web beacons to any PII.
- Information About You. When you register or subscribe to any of our services, we collect a wide variety of information about you. For our Singles service, for example, you provide us with answers to our proprietary questionnaire, and we use your answers to build a personality profile for you and to match you with other compatible singles. Your individual responses to the questions about your personality in our questionnaire will be held strictly confidential, while other non-PII about yourself (such as first name, occupation, height, etc.) will be used to build your “about me” profile. If you subscribe to our Marriage service, we may display your personal information to your spouse in order to offer you the benefits of the Marriage service. Finally, for interactive content and community services such as Advice where you may choose to have a public profile, we may display your information to other community members and visitors. You may choose to provide us with your photo(s) or video(s) and by providing us such content, you agree that we may make them available to your matches and users of eHarmony’s services. Except as otherwise stated in this privacy statement, we do not disclose your PII to your matches or other users of our services.
- Purchase Information. To process purchases, we may require your name, address, phone number, email address and credit card information. Such information is used primarily to process your order or as otherwise described herein. Credit card transactions are processed through industry standard Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and/or strong encryption (3DES) by a third party, which only uses your information for that purpose.
- E-mails and Telephone Calls. We require an e-mail address from you when you register for our services. We use your e-mail for both transactional (e.g., order confirmation, refund and renewal processing, notifying of matches for our Singles service) and promotional (e.g., newsletters, new product offerings, special discounts, event notifications, special third-party offers) purposes. E-mail messages we send you may contain code that enables our database to track your usage of the e-mails, including whether the e-mail was opened and what links (if any) were clicked. If you would rather not receive promotional e-mails from us, please see the section below labeled “Choice/Opt-Out”. We reserve the right to send you certain communications relating to the eHarmony services, such as service announcements and administrative messages, without offering you the opportunity to opt out of receiving them. We may also contact you by telephone or text message (including to any wireless number you may provide to us) solely in connection with eHarmony’s services. If you would rather not receive telephone calls or text messages from us, you may change or delete your number from your account preferences page(s), or ask to be removed from our contact list if you receive a call or text message from us. We fully comply with the requirements of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act.
- Demographic Data. Demographic data is also collected at our site. We use this data to tailor our visitors’ experience at our site, showing them content that we think they might be interested in, and displaying the content according to their preferences. Some of this information may be shared with advertisers on a non-personally identifiable basis.
- Online Survey Data. We may periodically conduct voluntary member surveys. We encourage our members to participate in such surveys because they provide us with important information regarding the improvement of our services. You may also volunteer for certain surveys that we may offer to our users, and any additional rules regarding the conduct of such surveys will be disclosed to you prior to your participation. We do not link the survey responses to any PII, and all responses are anonymous.
- Information Regarding Your Friends. We encourage you to refer a friend to our Singles service by sending us a friend’s name and email address. We will keep this information in our database, and send that person a one-time e-mail containing your name and inviting them to visit our site. This e-mail will also include instructions on how to remove their information from our database. You agree that you will not abuse this feature by entering names and addresses of those who would not be interested in eHarmony’s services. For some of our services, you may also give gift memberships to your friends, in which case we will use your friends’ e-mail address that you provide in order to deliver the gift.
- Public Forums. We make discussion boards available to our users and visitors. Any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and you should exercise caution when deciding to disclose any PII. Please consult the community guidelines for each eHarmony discussion board when posting comments on them for other specific information.
- Use for Research. In addition to the uses outlined above, by using our site, you agree to allow us to anonymously use the information from you and your experiences to continue our research into successful relationships. This research, conducted by psychologists and behavior research scientists, may be published in academic journals. However, all of your responses will be kept anonymous, and no PII will be published. You can find out more about the standards we follow in conducting scientific research by clicking here.
Disclosure of Your Information to Third Parties
- Disclosure By Law. You acknowledge and agree that we may disclose information you provide if required to do so by law, at the request of a third party, or if we, in our sole discretion, believe that disclosure is reasonable to (1) comply with the law, requests or orders from law enforcement, or any legal process (whether or not such disclosure is required by applicable law); (2) protect or defend eHarmony’s, or a third party’s, rights or property; or (3) protect someone’s health or safety, such as when harm or violence against any person (including you) is threatened.
- Disclosure to Protect Abuse Victims. Notwithstanding any other provision of this privacy statement or our Terms and Conditions of Service, we reserve the right, but have no obligation, to disclose any information that you submit to the services, if in our sole opinion, we suspect or have reason to suspect, that the information involves a party who may be the victim of abuse in any form. Abuse may include, without limitation, elder abuse, child abuse, spousal abuse, neglect, or domestic violence. Information may be disclosed to authorities that we, in our sole discretion, deem appropriate to handle such disclosure. Appropriate authorities may include, without limitation, law enforcement agencies, child protection agencies, or court officials. You hereby acknowledge and agree that we are permitted to make such disclosure.
- Disclosure to Trusted Third Parties By Us. We may share your non-PII with third parties, but not in a manner that would reveal your identity. We may share your PII, sometimes in conjunction with your non-PII, with service providers that may be associated with us to perform functions on our behalf. For example, outsourced customer care agents or technology assistants may need access to your information to perform services for you. Your information will be treated as private and confidential by such service providers and not used for any other purpose than we authorize. In addition, from time to time, we may share PII (such as e-mail or mailing address) about our user base with carefully selected third parties, so they can offer goods and services that we believe may be of interest to our users. If you do not wish to receive offers from our trusted partners, you can change your e-mail preferences at any time by following the steps outlined in the “Choice/Opt-Out” section below.
- Disclosure to Trusted Third Parties at Your Request. When purchasing an eHarmony subscription or while visiting our site, we may provide you with advertisements, promotions, sweepstakes and offers from third party providers. If you choose to accept any such offers, you may either (depending on the situation) directly provide your information in connection with the offer to such third party provider, or we will provide your information, including billing information, to the third party provider by pre-populating the offer registration forms. Your information will not be transferred until you actually accept the offer. You may opt-out of the offer at any time up until this point. Please refer to the third party provider’s own privacy policy (provided on the offer pages) if you have any questions regarding how your information is used by such providers. Please be aware that these offers may be presented on pages framed by an eHarmony website. We do this to provide a seamless experience. Although these offer pages have the look and feel of our websites, you will be submitting your information directly to the third-party advertiser. You agree that we will not be responsible or liable for any loss or damage of any sort incurred as the result of any such dealings, including the sharing of the information you supply to us with third party providers described here, or as the result of the presence of such providers on an eHarmony site.
- Information Transferred As a Result of Sale of Business. As we develop our business, we may buy or sell assets and, depending on the transaction, your PII may be one of the transferred assets. In the event that we are acquired by another company, your PII may be part of the assets transferred to the acquiring party. If this occurs, you will be notified if there are any material changes to the way your PII is collected or used.
We may use third-party advertising agencies or other service providers to serve ads on our website on behalf of eHarmony or third-party advertisers (e.g., retailers of goods or services). These companies may employ cookies and web beacons to measure advertising effectiveness. Any information that these third parties collect via cookies and web beacons is completely anonymous. Some of these third-party advertising agencies may be members of the Network Advertising Initiative, which offers you the option to opt out of ad targeting from its member agencies by following the procedures listed here.
We will only share your information with third parties in the ways defined in this privacy statement.
Our age restrictions for different services are set forth in each applicable Terms and Conditions of Service. We do not target our sites or services to children under the age of 13, and in compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, any information we may receive from users we believe to be under the age of 13 will be purged from our database.
We have extensive security measures in place to protect the loss, misuse and alteration of the information stored in our database. These measures include the use of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and/or strong encryption (3DES) technology during credit card transactions and administrative access to site data, as well as other proprietary security measures which are applied to all repositories and transfers of user information. We will exercise reasonable care in providing secure transmission of information between your computer and our servers, but given that no information transmitted over the Internet can be guaranteed 100% secure, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of any information transmitted to us over the Internet and hence accept no liability for any unintentional disclosure.
We are not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of other websites that may be linked to this site or of any third party advertisers.
You may use the following options for removing your information from our e-mail database if you wish to opt out of receiving promotional e-mails and newsletters.
- Click on the “unsubscribe” link on the bottom of the e-mail;
- Send mail to the following postal address letting us know which promotional e-mails you wish to opt-out of:
eHarmony, Inc.
P.O. Box 60157
Pasadena, CA 91116 USA - For the eHarmony Singles service, select our Help link from your account home page and search our FAQ's to find the answer you are looking for, or send us an e-mail and our Customer Care agents will be happy to assist you; or
- For any services that allow you to control which e-mails you receive, go to the e-mail settings page from your account home page, and un-check the undesired promotions.
eHarmony provides users the following options for changing and modifying information previously submitted.
- For the eHarmony Singles service, select our Help link from your account home page and search our FAQ's to find the answer you are looking for, or send us an e-mail and our Customer Care agents will be happy to assist you;
- For any services where you have an account page, you may change your credit card (if applicable), e-mail address, password and other information from the account settings or preferences page; or
- You can send mail to the postal address listed above, providing us with your account information and letting us know which information you wish to update.
If you have any questions about this privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with any eHarmony websites, you can contact:
Site Administrator
eHarmony, Inc.
P.O. Box 60157
Pasadena, CA 91116 USA
Acceptance of Privacy Statement
Your use of our website(s), including any dispute concerning privacy, is subject to this privacy statement and the applicable Terms and Conditions of Service. BY USING OUR WEBSITE, YOU ARE ACCEPTING THE PRACTICES SET OUT IN THIS PRIVACY STATEMENT AND THE APPLICABLE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF SERVICE.
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes to this privacy statement page and any other places we deem appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it. We reserve the right to modify this privacy statement at any time, so please review it frequently. If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you here, or by other means, such as e-mail, at our discretion.
Your continued use of any portion of our website following posting of the updated privacy statement will constitute your acceptance of the changes.
Effective Date
This privacy statement was last revised on October 15, 2008.
