Privacy Policy

Your Privacy is Important

Affinitee’s mission is to help underrepresented professionals connect, learn and grow.  We believe a more diverse, equal and inclusive workforce is a more successful one. Your data privacy is important to us and we aim to be as transparent as possible about the data we collect from you, how it is used and with whom it is shared.

This Privacy Policy applies when you use our Services (described below). We offer our users choices about the data we collect, use and share as described in this Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

Introduction

We are a peer to peer networking and mentoring platform for underrepresented professionals. Our Privacy Policy applies to any Member or Visitor to our Services.

Our registered users (“Members”) share their personal background information, professional identities, engage with their network, exchange knowledge and professional insights, post and view relevant content, learn and find business and career opportunities. Content and data on some of our Services is viewable to non-members (“Visitors”).

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

To use our Services, users register on the Affinitee platform. We keep the contact form submissions for customer service, but we do not use this information for marketing purposes.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

Affinitee does not share any personal data with anyone.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

User data/profile

We collect information about you during the registration and edit profile process on our site. This information may include, but is not limited to, your name, email address, phone number, address, IP and any other details that might be requested from you for the purpose of building your public profile.

Handling this data also allows us to:

  • Send you important account/order/service information.
  • Display this information in a public facing manner (such as a web page or API request) and allow website users to search and view submitted information.
  • Respond to your queries or complaints.
  • Set up and administer your account, provide technical and/or customer support, and to verify your identity. We do this on the basis of our legitimate business interests.

Any profile information provided to this site may be displayed publicly.

Purchasing Services: What we collect and store

While you visit our site, we’ll track:

  • Products you’ve viewed: we’ll use this to, for example, show you products you’ve recently viewed
  • Location, IP address and browser type: we’ll use this for purposes like estimating taxes

We’ll also use cookies (see our Cookie Policy) to keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing our site.

When you purchase from us, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details and optional account information like username and password. We’ll use this information for purposes, such as, to:

  • Send you information about your account and order
  • Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints
  • Process payments and prevent fraud
  • Set up your account for our store
  • Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
  • Improve our store offerings
  • Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them

If you create an account, we will store your name, address, email and phone number, which will be used to populate the checkout for future orders.

We generally store information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we will store order information for 10 years for tax and accounting purposes. This includes your name, email address and billing and shipping addresses.

We will also store comments or reviews, if you choose to leave them.

Who on our team has access

Members of our team have access to the information you provide us. For example, Administrators can access:

  • Order information like what was purchased and when it was purchased
  • Customer information like your name, email address, and billing and shipping information.

Our team members have access to this information to help fulfill orders, process refunds and support you.

Payments

We accept payments through PayPal. When processing payments, some of your data will be passed to PayPal, including information required to process or support the payment, such as the purchase total and billing information.

Please see the PayPal Privacy Policy for more details.

Profile Data

When you register for the site, you may be asked to provide certain personal data for display on your profile. The “Name” field is required as well as public, and user profiles are visible to any site visitor. Other profile information may be required or optional, as configured by the site administrator.

User information provided during account registration can be modified or removed on the Profile > Edit panel. In most cases, users also have control over who is able to view a particular piece of profile content, limiting visibility on a field-by-field basis to friends, logged-in users, or administrators only. Site administrators can read and edit all profile data for all users.

Activity

This site records certain user actions, in the form of “activity” data. Activity includes updates and comments posted directly to activity streams, as well as descriptions of other actions performed while using the site, such as new friendships, newly joined groups, and profile updates.

The content of activity items obey the same privacy rules as the contexts in which the activity items are created. For example, activity updates created in a user’s profile is publicly visible, while activity items generated in a private group are visible only to members of that group. Site administrators can view all activity items, regardless of context.

Activity items may be deleted at any time by users who created them. Site administrators can edit all activity items.

Messages

The content of private messages is visible only to the sender and the recipients of the message. With the exception of site administrators, who can read all private messages, private message content is never visible to other users or site visitors. Site administrators may delete the content of any message.

Source: MailChimp for WooCommerce

When shopping, we keep a record of your email and the cart contents for up to 30 days on our server. This record is kept to repopulate the contents of your cart if you switch devices or needed to come back another day. Read our privacy policy here.

Akismet

We collect information about visitors who comment on Sites that use our Akismet anti-spam service. The information we collect depends on how the User sets up Akismet for the Site, but typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself).