Privacy Statement (US)

Our Privacy Policy explains how Groupeasy collects, uses, and discloses information about you. The terms “Groupeasy,” “we,” “us,” and “our” include Groupeasy, LLC (owner of Groupeasy platform) and our affiliates. We use the terms “member,” “you,” and “your” to mean any person using our Platform, including any organization or person using the Platform on an organization’s behalf. This Privacy Policy applies to the processing of information about members and other individuals that we collect when you use our “Platform,” which means any website, application, or services we offer, or when you communicate with us. This Privacy Policy does not apply to the information that you may provide to third parties, such as members, and others with whom you may share information about yourself.

 

Summary

Groupeasy does not share the personally identifiable information which you choose to provide Groupeasy with third-parties for the purposes of advertising, marketing, or other promotional purposes. Groupeasy is not an advertising platform like most social media sites.  We only share limited information about you with our business partners for either: the sole purpose of directly operating our Platform such as when when you choose to use google or facebook to authenticate yourself when creating a Groupeasy account or signing into an existing Groupeasy account; and or for improving our site such as through the use of Google Analytics or similar platforms.

 

1. Collection Of Information

We collect information about you when you:

  • Create a Groupeasy account;
  • Join a Groupeasy group;
  • Start a Groupeasy group;
  • Visit our website at groupeasy.com;
  • Communicate with us.

We also collect information, such as usage statistics, by using cookies, server logs, and similar technologies.

If you elect to use certain features, we also collect information through other sources, such as social media services, invitations, and imported contacts.

1.1 Information You Provide to Us. We collect information that you provide directly to us. For example, we collect information that you provide when you create an account, choose interests or groups, fill out a form, or communicate with us. The types of information that we might collect include your name, username, password, email address, postal address, phone number, birth date, payment method data, photos, files, choices of interests and groups, and any other information that you choose to provide. Importantly, the only information that is required to use Groupeasy is an email address, password, first name, and last name. In addition to these required fields, your location is captured to facilitate group searches. Groupeasy account owners must supply a group specific user name when joining a group. Your choice of which groups you join or set up in Groupeasy is optional, but we are required to process this information in order to administer your account, and to indicate that you are a member of the groups you join.

1.2 Information We Collect Automatically When You Use the Platform. When you use our Platform, we automatically collect information about you, including:

  • Log Information: We collect log information about your use of the Platform, including the type of browser that you use; the time, duration and frequency of your access; Platform pages viewed; your IP address; and the page you visited before visiting our Platform.
  • Device Information: We collect information about the computer or mobile device that you use to access our Platform, including the hardware model, operating system and version, unique device identifiers, and mobile network information.
  • Location Information: We may collect information about the location of your device each time you use our Platform based on your consent to the collection of this information.
  • Information Collected by Cookies and Similar Tracking Technologies: We, and our service providers, collect information using various technologies such as cookies and pixel tags (which are also called clear GIFs, web beacons, or pixels). Cookies are small data files stored on your hard drive or in device memory that help us improve our Platform and your experience, and track usage of our Platform. You can learn more about the types of cookies we and our service providers use by reading our Cookie Policy.
  • Other Information: With your permission, we may collect other information from your device, such as photos on your local hard drive, documents from your local drive, contacts of individuals you wish to find or connect with, or calendar information you want to manage via the Platform.

1.3 Information We Collect From Other Sources. We may collect information about you from other sources, such as through certain features on the Platform you elect to use, but only where these third parties either have your consent or are otherwise legally permitted or required to disclose your information to us. Examples include:

  • Social Media Services. If you register or log into your account through a third-party social media service, we will have access to some of your third-party account information from that service, such as your name and other information in that account, and used for purposes such as improving your Groupeasy recommendations. We may also have access to third-party account information if you use the Platform feature to share a link.
  • Invitations. If another member sends you an invitation through our Platform, we may receive certain personal information, such as your name, email address, or phone number. Groupeasy stores this contact information only to send these invitations and evaluate their success. You may unsubscribe from future invitations using the instructions in those messages. You may also contact us at [email protected] to request that we remove this information from our database.
  • Member Content. We may receive information about you when you or another member uploads photos or posts other content to the Platform.
 

2. Use Of Information

Summary. We use information about you for the following purposes: to operate, improve, promote, and protect Groupeasy and our Platform; communicate with you; and personalize content. Please note we do not share or sell your personally identifiable information with advertisers or other third-parties for the purposes of advertising.

2.1 Operating our Platform. We may use information about you for various purposes related to operating our Platform, including to:

  • Display information about you to other members in your group(s), for instance, your personally identifiable information, however, this is only done with your consent. However, this is completely the control of the user who can choose to share any, all or none of their personally identifiable information with other members.
  • Allow you to share information about your use of the Platform through a third-party social media service, if you connect your account through that service (which you can turn off at any time) and to provide you with better recommendations, for example: if you choose to authenticate your self to our Platform using google or facebook.
  • Provide, maintain, and improve our Platform, including to process transactions, develop new products and services, and manage the performance of our Platform;
  • Personalize the Platform, for example, to suggest content in which we think you may be interested (including content given special protection under EU law or that relates to sensitive topics such as health, political opinions, religion, and sexual identity);
  • Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities in connection with our Platform;
  • Perform accounting and administrative tasks, and enforce or manage legal claims, and
  • Prevent, detect and investigate abuse, illegal activities, and fraudulent transactions; to minimize risks to the safety, rights and property of Groupeasy and others; to enforce compliance with our policies; and complying with applicable law and government requests.

2.2 Communicating With You. We may use information about you for various purposes related to communicating with you, including to:

  • Respond to your comments, questions, and requests, and provide customer service;
  • Communicate with you, in accordance with your account settings, about products, services, and events offered by us and others, to provide news and information that we think will be of interest to you, to conduct online surveys, to contact you about events on our Platform that are being held near your location, and to otherwise communicate with you in accordance with Section 2.3;
  • Notify you about communications of other members, in accordance with the communication preferences that you indicate in your account; and
  • Send you technical notices, updates, security alerts and support, and administrative messages.

2.3 Advertising and Promotions. We may use information about you for various other purposes, including to: provide content, features, or sponsorships that match group or member profiles or interests:

  • Facilitate contests and other promotions;
  • Combine with information that we collect for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy; and
  • Carry out any other purposes described to you at the time that we collected the information.

2.4 Legal Basis. Our legal basis for collecting and using the information described above will depend on the type of information and the specific context in which we collect it.

  • We process information about you in order to provide our services in accordance with our Terms of Use; for example to allow you to join groups, or to display your profile to other members, and to allow us to send you important service updates.
  • We also process information about you where it is in our legitimate interests to do so and not overridden by your rights (for example, in some cases for direct marketing by Groupeasy, fraud prevention, network and information systems security, responding to your communications, the operation of networks of groups by the network administrators, and improving our Platform).
  • Sometimes you provide us with sensitive information about you; for instance, the mere fact of joining a certain group may indicate information about your health, religion, political views, or sexual identity. Joining such groups, or posting information on the Platform about these topics is entirely voluntarily and done with your explicit consent. Groupeasy does not sell your information for the purposes of marketing which includes your personally identifiable information of the groups in which you choose to join.
  • In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect information about you, or may otherwise need the information to protect your vital interests or those of another person.
  • We may also process information to comply with a legal requirement.
 

3. Sharing Of Information

We do not share information about you in any way other than as described in this Privacy Policy. We may disclose limited information about you to:

  • Members or social media services, subject to the choices you may make via the use of our Platform;
  • Our third-party service providers who help us to operate or improve our Platform;
  • Authorities to comply with legal obligations and to protect and defend our rights and property; and
  • Affiliate or successor entity’s as part of a corporate transaction.

In addition, we may share aggregated information or information that does not have personally identifiable information.

3.1 Through Our Platform. We share some of the information that we collect by displaying it on our Platform according to your member profile and account settings. Some information, such as user name, but not your actual name, is always viewable by other members of your group. Some information, such as group user name will always be visible to other members of that Groupeasy group. Group user name may be public, depending on the settings of that group. We recommend that you check the group settings and what information will be available before joining the group to ensure that you are happy with the information that is visible to others.

3.2 With Our Service Providers. We may use service providers in connection with operating and improving the Platform to assist with certain functions, such as payment processing, email transmission, conducting surveys or contests, data hosting, managing our ads, and some aspects of our technical and customer support. We take measures to ensure that these service providers access, process, and store information about you only for the purposes we authorize, subject to confidentiality obligations.

3.3 Following The Law And Protecting Groupeasy. We may access, preserve, and disclose information about you to third parties, including the content of messages, if we believe disclosure is in accordance with, or required by, applicable law, regulation, legal process, or audits. We may also disclose information about you if we believe that your actions are inconsistent with our Terms of Use or related guidelines and policies, or if necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of, or prevent fraud or abuse of, Groupeasy or others.

3.4 Social Sharing And Other Tools. The Platform may offer social sharing features and other integrated tools which let you share actions that you take on our Platform with third-party services, and vice versa. Such features let you share information with your friends or the public, depending on the settings you have chosen with the service.

3.5 Affiliate Sharing And Merger, Sale, Or Other Asset Transfers. If Groupeasy is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, bankruptcy, or sale of our assets, the Platform and all information contained within may be shared or transferred as part of that transaction.

3.6 Other Situations. We may de-identify or aggregate information about you with other Groupeasy account owners so that you can no longer be identified for the purposes of improving our platform. We may also share information about you but only with your consent or at your direction or where we are legally entitled to do so.

 

4. Additional Details

4.1 Analytics Provided by Others. With your permission, we may allow others to use cookies and other technologies to collect information about your use of the Platform and other websites and online services. See our Cookie Policy for details about these technologies and the information that they collect, use, or share, including how you may be able to control or disable these services.

4.2 Transfer Of Information To The U.S. And Other Countries. Groupeasy is based in the United States. Information about you will be transferred to, and processed in, the U.S. and countries other than the country in which you are resident. These countries may have data protection laws that are different to the laws of your country and, in some cases, may not be as protective. We have taken appropriate safeguards to require that your information will remain protected in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

4.3 Security. We employ technical and organizational measures designed to appropriately protect your information that is under our control and that we process on your behalf from unauthorized access collection, use, disclosure, copying, modification or disposal, both during transmission and once we receive it. We store all information that you provide to us on secure servers. We train employees regarding our data privacy policies and procedures, and permit authorized employees to access information on a need to know basis, as required for their role. We use firewalls designed to protect against intruders and test for network vulnerabilities. However, no method of transmission over the internet or method of electronic storage is completely secure.

Where you have a password, which enables you to use our services, you are responsible for keeping this password complex, secure, and confidential. If you would like to update or change your password, you may select the “Forgot your password?” link on the login page. You will be sent an email that allows you to reset your password.

4.4 Data Retention. We may temporarily block your account if you have not logged in for six months or more. You may contact us if you wish to reactivate your account. We retain certain information that we collect from you while you are an account owner and or a member a group hosted on the Platform, and in certain cases where you have deleted your account, for one or more of the following reasons:

  • So you can use our Platform;
  • To ensure that we do not communicate with you if you have asked us not to;
  • To provide you with a refund, if entitled;
  • To provide accurate accounting information to other members about the groups that they organize or administer, and associated memberships;
  • To better understand the traffic to our Platform so that we can provide all members with the best possible experience;
  • To detect and prevent abuse of our Platform, illegal activities and breaches of our Terms of Use; and
  • To comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements.

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your information, we will either delete or de-personalize the data elements.

4.5 Policy Scope. This Privacy Policy does not apply to information that you provide to third parties, such as other members, including group administrators, and others with whom you may share information. Our Platform may direct you to a third-party service, such as social media services, or a portion of our Platform may be controlled by a third party (typically through the use of a frame or pop-up window separate from other content on our Platform). Disclosure of information to these third parties is subject to the relevant third party’s privacy policy. We are not responsible for the third-party privacy policy or content, even if we link to those services from our Platform or if we share information with these third parties.

Groupeasy is a data controller. Members, including group administrators, are directly responsible for complying with all requirements of applicable EU privacy laws in connection with the information that they obtain and process for the purposes of managing their contacts, or organizing groups. More information about the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can be found here https://eugdpr.org/

4.6 Revisions To This Policy. We may modify this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will provide notice to you by publishing the most current version and revising the date at the top of this page. If we make any material change to this policy, we will provide additional notice to you, such as by sending you an email or displaying a prominent notice on our Platform.

 

5. Your Choices

5.1 Account Information you may update or correct your account information by editing your account settings. You may deactivate your account by editing your account settings or by sending an email to [email protected]. You will also be able to choose what information others see about you and who may contact you by using the Contact Info section under your Account Settings. By default, only your group specific username is displayed.

5.2 When you first access the Platform, we will collect information about your location, which we use to make better recommendations for groups and to improve our Platform. You may prevent Groupeasy from accessing this information through your browser settings.

Your mobile device settings may also give you the option to choose whether to allow us to view your location on a continuous basis, when only using the app, or never. Allowing us to view your location when you are not using the app allows us to provide you with recommendations on a regular basis. Please refer to your device’s guide for additional information on how to adjust location services.

5.3 We may use and allow others to use cookies, web beacons, device identifiers, and other technologies to collect information about your use of the Platform and other websites and online services. See our Cookie Policy for details about these technologies and the information that they collect, use, or share, including how you may be able to control or disable these services.

 

6. Data Rights

Rights that you may have, depending on the country in which you live, include:

  • Opting out from receiving marketing communications that we send you at any time. You can exercise this right by selecting the “unsubscribe” or “opt-out” link in the marketing emails we send you. Additionally, you may update your email preferences by changing the settings in your account.
  • Accessing, correcting, updating, or requesting deletion of your information.
  • Objecting to processing of your information, asking us to restrict processing of your information, or requesting the portability of your information.
  • Withdrawing your consent at any time if we have collected and processed your information with your consent. Withdrawing your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing that we conducted prior to your withdrawal, nor will it affect processing of your information conducted in reliance on lawful processing grounds other than consent.
  • Complaining to a data protection authority about our collection and use of your information. For more information, please contact your local data protection authority. Details for data protection in the European Union are available here.

Note that Groupeasy is a controller of your information. Other members, such as group organizers may also act as controllers of your information. You should contact these members if you have any questions about how they use the information that you have provided to them.

 

7. Contact Us

If you have any questions or complaints about this Privacy Policy or how we use your information, please contact [email protected]. If you have any suggestions please use the same email address to submit your suggestions to us too.