At Blackd, your privacy is a top priority. Your privacy is at the core of the way we design and build the services and products you know and love, so that you can fully trust them and focus on building meaningful connections.
We appreciate that you put your trust in us when you provide us with your information and we do not take this lightly.
We do not compromise with your privacy. We design all of our products and services with your privacy in mind. We involve experts from various fields, including legal, security, engineering, product design and others to make sure that no decision is taken without respect for your privacy.
We strive to be transparent in the way we process your data. Because we use many of the same online services you do, we know that insufficient information and overly complicated language are common issues in privacy policies. We take the exact opposite approach: we have written our Privacy Policy and related documents in plain language. We actually want you to read our policies and understand our privacy practices!
We work hard to keep your information secure We have teams dedicated to keeping your data safe and secure. We constantly update our security practices and invest in our security efforts to enhance the safety of your information.
Welcome to Blackd’s Privacy Policy. Thank you for taking the time to read it.
We appreciate that you trust us with your information and we intend to always keep that trust. This starts with making sure you understand the information we collect, why we collect it, how it is used and your choices regarding your information. This Policy describes our privacy practices in plain language, keeping legal and technical jargon to a minimum.
WHERE THIS PRIVACY POLICY APPLIES
This Privacy Policy applies to websites, apps, events and other services operated by Blackd. For simplicity, we refer to all of these as our “services” in this Privacy Policy. To make it extra clear, we’ve added links to this Privacy Policy on all applicable services.
Some services may require their own unique privacy policy. If a particular service has its own privacy policy, then that policy -- not this Privacy Policy -- applies.
It goes without saying, we can’t help you develop meaningful connections without some information about you, such as basic profile details and the types of people you’d like to meet. If you want additional info, we go into more detail below.
Information you give us
You choose to give us certain information when using our services. This includes:
Information we receive from others
In addition to the information you provide us directly, we receive information about you from others, including:
Other Users
Other users may provide information about you as they use our services. For instance, we may collect information about you from other users if they contact us about you.
Other Partners
We may receive info about you from our partners, for instance where Blackd ads are published on a partner’s websites and platforms (in which case they may pass along details on a campaign’s success).
Information collected when you use our services
When you use our services, we collect information about which features you’ve used, how you’ve used them and the devices you use to access our services. See below for more details:
Usage Information
We collect information about your activity on our services, for instance how you use them (e.g., date and time you logged in, features you’ve been using, searches, clicks and pages which have been shown to you, referring webpage address) and how you interact with other users (e.g., users you connect and interact with, time and date of your exchanges, number of messages you send and receive).
Device information
We collect information from and about the device(s) you use to access our services, including:
◦ hardware and software information such as IP address, device ID and type, device-specific and apps settings and characteristics, app crashes, advertising IDs (such as Google’s AAID and Apple's IDFA, both of which are randomly generated numbers that you can reset by going into your device’ settings), browser type, version and language, operating system, time zones, identifiers associated with cookies or other technologies that may uniquely identify your device or browser (e.g., IMEI/UDID and MAC address);
◦ information on your wireless and mobile network connection, like your service provider and signal strength;
◦ information on device sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and compasses.
Other information with your consent
If you give us permission, we can collect your precise geolocation (latitude and longitude) through various means, depending on the service and device you’re using, including GPS, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections. The collection of your geolocation may occur in the background even when you aren’t using the services if the permission you gave us expressly permits such collection. If you decline permission for us to collect your geolocation, we will not collect it.
Similarly, if you consent, we may collect your photos and videos (for instance, if you want to publish a photo, video or streaming on the services).
We use and may allow others to use cookies and similar technologies (e.g., web beacons, pixels) to recognize you and/or your device(s). You may read our Cookie Policy for more information on why we use them (such as authenticating you, remembering your preferences and settings, analyzing site traffic and trends, delivering and measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, allowing you to use social features) and how you can better control their use, through your browser settings and other tools.
Some web browsers (including Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome) have a “Do Not Track” (“DNT”) feature that tells a website that a user does not want to have his or her online activity tracked. If a website that responds to a DNT signal receives a DNT signal, the browser can block that website from collecting certain information about the browser’s user. Not all browsers offer a DNT option and DNT signals are not yet uniform. For this reason, many businesses, including Blackd, do not currently respond to DNT signals.
The main reason we use your information is to deliver and improve our services. Additionally, we use your info to help keep you safe and to provide you with advertising that may be of interest to you. Read on for a more detailed explanation of the various reasons we use your information, together with practical examples.
To administer your account and provide our services to you
To help you connect with other users
To ensure a consistent experience across your devices
To provide new Blackd services to you
To serve you relevant offers and ads
To improve our services and develop new ones
To prevent, detect and fight fraud or other illegal or unauthorized activities
To ensure legal compliance
To process your information as described above, we rely on the following legal bases:
Since our goal is to help you make meaningful connections, the main sharing of users’ information is, of course, with other users. Read on for more details about how your information is shared with others.
With other users
You share information with other users when you voluntarily disclose information on the service (including your public profile). Please be careful with your information and make sure that the content you share is stuff that you’re comfortable being publically viewable since neither you nor we can control what others do with your information once you share it.
If you choose to limit the audience for all or part of your profile or for certain content or information about you, then it will be visible according to your settings.
With our service providers and partners
We use third parties to help us operate and improve our services. These third parties assist us with various tasks, including data hosting and maintenance, analytics, customer care, marketing, advertising, and security operations.
We may also share information with partners who distribute and assist us in advertising our services. For instance, we may share limited information on you in hashed, non-human readable form to advertising partners.
We follow a strict vetting process prior to engaging any service provider or working with any partner. All of our service providers and partners must agree to strict confidentiality obligations.
For corporate transactions
We may transfer your information 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.
When required by law
We may disclose your information if reasonably necessary: (i) to comply with a legal process, such as a court order, subpoena or search warrant, government / law enforcement investigation or other legal requirements; (ii) to assist in the prevention or detection of crime (subject in each case to applicable law); or (iii) to protect the safety of any person.
To enforce legal rights
We may also share information: (i) if disclosure would mitigate our liability in an actual or threatened lawsuit; (ii) as necessary to protect our legal rights and legal rights of our users, business partners or other interested parties; (iii) to enforce our agreements with you; and (iv) to investigate, prevent, or take other action regarding illegal activity, suspected fraud or other wrongdoing.
With your consent or at your request
We may ask for your consent to share your information with third parties. In any such case, we will make it clear why we want to share the information.
We may use and share non-personal information (meaning information that, by itself, does not identify who you are such as device information, general demographics, general behavioral data, geolocation in de-identified form), as well as personal information in hashed, non-human readable form, under any of the above circumstances. We may combine this information 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
Sharing of information laid out in Section 6 sometimes involves cross-border data transfers, for instance to the United States of America and other jurisdictions. As an example, where the service allows for users to be located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”), their personal information is transferred to countries outside of the EEA. We use standard contract clauses approved by the European Commission or other suitable safeguard to permit data transfers from the EEA to other countries. Standard contractual clauses are commitments between companies transferring personal data, binding them to protect the privacy and security of your data
We want you to be in control of your information, so we have provided you with the following tools:
We want you to be aware of your privacy rights. Here are a few key points to remember:
For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we may ask you to provide proof of identity before we can answer the above requests.
Keep in mind, we may reject requests for certain reasons, including if the request is unlawful or if it may infringe on trade secrets or intellectual property or the privacy of another user. If you wish to receive information relating to another user, such as a copy of any messages you received from him or her through our service, the other user will have to contact our Privacy Officer to provide their written consent before the information is released.
Also, we may not be able to accommodate certain requests to object to the processing of personal information, notably where such requests would not allow us to provide our service to you anymore. For instance, we cannot provide our service if we do not have your date of birth.
If you are a California resident, you can request a notice disclosing the categories of personal information about you that we have shared with third parties for their direct marketing purposes during the preceding calendar year. To request this notice, please submit your request here. Please allow 30 days for a response. For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we may ask you to provide proof of identity before we can answer such a request.
We work hard to protect you from unauthorized access to or alteration, disclosure or destruction of your personal information. As with all technology companies, although we take steps to secure your information, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information will always remain secure.
We regularly monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks and regularly review our information collection, storage and processing practices to update our physical, technical and organizational security measures.
We may suspend your use of all or part of the services without notice if we suspect or detect any breach of security. If you believe that your account or information is no longer secure, please notify us immediately here
In order to ensure that our systems and your information are protected against unauthorized access, theft and loss, we implemented a bug bounty program. For more information about our bug bounty program, please click here.
We keep your personal information only as long as we need it for legitimate business purposes (as laid out in Section 5) and as permitted by applicable law. To protect the safety and security of our users on and off our services, we implement a safety retention window of three months following account deletion. During this period, account information will be retained although the account will of course not be visible on the services anymore.
In practice, we delete or anonymize your information upon deletion of your account (following the safety retention window) or after two years of continuous inactivity, unless:
Keep in mind that even though our systems are designed to carry out data deletion processes according to the above guidelines, we cannot promise that all data will be deleted within a specific timeframe due to technical constraints.
Our services are restricted to users who are 18 years of age or older. We do not permit users under the age of 18 on our platform and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under the age of 18. If you suspect that a user is under the age of 18, please use the reporting mechanism available through the service.
Because we’re always looking for new and innovative ways to help you build meaningful connections, this policy may change over time. We will notify you before any material changes take effect so that you have time to review the changes.