PRIVACY POLICY

Effective Date: July 1, 2020

HOUZTALK.COM (“HOUZTALK” or “we”) values your privacy. At our website, https://www.houztalk.com (the “Site”), we provide a social information sharing network for business professionals. In this Privacy Policy (“Policy”), we describe how we collect, use, and disclose information that we obtain from you when you visit our Site and use our products and services (“Services”).

By visiting the Site, or using any of our Services, you acknowledge that your personal information (information about an identified or identifiable individual, like your name or email address) will be handled as described in this Policy. Your use of our Site or Services, and any dispute over privacy, is subject to this Policy and our Terms and Conditions, including its sections on limitations on damages and the resolution of disputes. ‘HouzTalk’ Terms and Conditions are incorporated by reference into this Policy.

The Information We Collect About You

We may collect information about you directly from you and from third parties.

The type of information that we collect about you varies based on your interaction with our Site and our Services.

Information We Collect Directly From You. We will collect information directly from you when you interact with certain portions of our Site, contact us, and use our Services.

Registration/Account Creation. Specifically, we require registration and/or account creation to access certain features of our Site (e.g., to post a review or make a comment). You may register with our Site by providing your email address. If, however, you seek to post a review or make a comment, then you must create an account by using your log in credentials for certain social networking sites (currently LinkedIn®). HOUZTALK will store your LinkedIn® profile information as part of your HouzTalk profile, and we may share your profile information with third parties as described below under “How We Share Your Information”. We may later offer additional means of registration or collect additional information as part of the account registration process.

As part of your user profile, you may (but are not required) to submit additional information, including, for example, your picture, a “headline” describing you, name, country, city, state, industry, job type, department, expertise, or other demographic data.

Other Features. We will request additional information from you to access certain features. You may submit reviews of third parties’ products/services on our Site, as described in more detail below. If you want to download a document, access a free trial or if you request to be contacted by a vendor, we will ask you for additional information, including but not limited to your phone number, your company, your title and other information pertinent to the action that you are taking on the Site.

Information We Collect Automatically. We may automatically collect the following information about your use of our Site or Services through cookies, web beacons, and other technologies: your browser type and operating system; web pages you view; links you click; your IP address; the length of time you visit our Site and or use our Services; the referring webpage that led you to our Site; and a unique code assigned to your browser or device. Please see the discussion below entitled “Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms” for additional Information.

Information that We Collect About You from Social Networking Sites. When you log into our Site using your social networking credentials, we will request access to your profile and your email address. If you seek to use other features of our Services, such as to invite your colleagues to join our Site, we will request additional permissions from you. We will request your permission before accessing the information in your social networking site. If you decline to grant us permission, we may be unable to perform the service that you request.

We store some information that we receive from social networking sites with other information that we collect from you with your approval. The social networking site controls the information that it collects from you. For information about how the social networking site may use and disclose your information, including any information you make public, please consult its privacy policy. We have no control over how any third party site uses or discloses the personal information it collects about you.

Information We Collect From Other Third Parties. We also may collect personal information about you from other third parties, including internet service providers; operating systems and platforms; data brokers; data analytics providers, social media networks such as LinkedIn, and public records.

How We Use Your Information

We use your information, including your personal information (collectively “information”) for the following purposes:

To provide our Services.

To communicate with you about your use of our Services, to respond to your inquiries, to fulfill your orders, and for other customer service purposes, which may include communicating with you via email.

To tailor the content and information that we may send or display to you, personalized help and instructions, and to otherwise personalize your experiences while using the Site or our Services.

For customer loyalty programs.

For marketing and promotional purposes to send you news, newsletters, or marketing materials about HouzTalk products or services that may interest you, or special offers (such as incentives for reviewing products or services you’ve used) from us or from companies listed on our Site. We also may use the information that we learn about you to assist us in advertising our Services in various forums, including on third party websites, on social media sites, among other means. You may opt-out of HouzTalk marketing emails at any time in your communication preferences.

To better understand how users access and use our Site and Services, both on an aggregated and individualized basis, to improve our Site and Services and respond to user desires and preferences, and for other research and analytical purposes.

To address legal requirements.

To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Service, or other illegal activities, or to otherwise establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights.

How We Share Your Information

We may share your information as follows:

HouzTalk Users. Registered users may control certain privacy settings on our Site. As a default, your full profile (your “Profile Information”) will be available to all visitors to our Site, including non-registered users. You may change this setting to provide more or less visibility by logging into your account and choosing your preferred privacy setting. If you change your privacy settings to hide your name and company name, all visitors to our Site will still be able to see the size and industry of your company and your job type and department (should you choose to provide this information) (your “Demographic Profile”).

Your Social Networking Contacts. If you grant the requested permissions, we will have access to your contacts at the various social networking sites, and, with your express consent, we may invite your contacts to join our Site and our Services.

Service Providers. We may disclose the information we collect from you to third party vendors, service providers, contractors or agents who perform functions on our behalf, such as data storage and hosting providers, email service providers, analytics providers, network and system management providers, communications tools, IT support providers, CRM providers, incentive providers, and accounting services.

Companies Listed on the HouzTalk Site. We may share your review(s) with the companies or providers of the products/services that you reviewed or with the companies listed on our site. Some of the listed companies are customers of our Services. The scope of information that we will share depends on the privacy settings on your review(s) at the time the sharing happens.

Updates to your privacy settings may take up to 24 hours to be fully implemented, but they will not have retroactive effect. For example, if we share a review with the company whose product you reviewed, we will include your name if you have not marked the review as “Anonymous”. If you later change the review to “Anonymous”, this will not cause deletion of your name from that company’s record of your review, as they received it prior to that change. The same is true for other updates that you make to a review after we first share it with the company: although we may provide them with the updated content, this does not cause deletion of the original version from their records.

These entities may use your Profile Information to market their products and services to you, as well as to post your review on their website or otherwise use the content in your review, subject to the privacy settings on each of your reviews.

The providers of the products/services listed on our Site, and their partners, may use the technology described in the “Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms” section of our Privacy Policy on their pages of our Site to collect information for analytics and advertising purposes. Controls for this data collection are described in that section of our Privacy Policy and are different from the email preference settings and the review privacy settings described above.

Other Third-Parties. We may disclose non-personally identifiable information, derived from Information We Collect Automatically (see above), to our customers or partners to provide them audience analytics and other capabilities.

We also may share your information with the following persons and for the following purposes:

Business Transfers. If we are acquired by or merged with another company, if substantially all of our assets are transferred to another company, or as part of a bankruptcy proceeding, or in anticipation of any such activities, we may transfer the information we have collected from you to the other company.

In Response to Legal Process. We also may disclose the information we collect from you in order to comply with the law, a judicial proceeding, court order, or other legal process, such as in response to a court order or a subpoena.

To Protect Us and Others. We also may disclose the information we collect from you where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Service or this Policy, or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.

Aggregate and De-Identified Information. We may share aggregate or de-identified information about you with third parties for marketing, advertising, research or similar purposes.

Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms

We and our third party service providers, as well as some of the companies whose products/services are listed on our Site, use cookies and other tracking mechanisms to track information about your use of our Site or Services. We combine this information with other personal information we collect about you to develop a more complete profile about you, to improve your experience on our Site, to assist us with advertising and marketing, and as described in this Policy.

Cookies. Cookies files that are transferred to your device through your web browser for record-keeping purposes.

Disabling Cookies. Our Site will not function properly without cookies enabled. At a minimum, certain cookies must be allowed in order to preserve your identity as you navigate the Site while logged in. If you wish, you can logoff from the Site once you are done and then delete any cookies that remain. You can use the controls described further below in this Privacy Policy to restrict the use of certain cookies.

Web Beacons, Pixel Tags and Other Technologies. We use web beacons, such as clear GIFs (also known as web bugs or pixel tags), which are tiny graphics that can gather information from your device, including by reading or writing cookies. Clear GIFs are embedded invisibly on web pages or in e-mails. We and our third party service providers also use clear GIFs in HTML e-mails, to help us track e-mail response rates, measure the success of our marketing campaigns, identify when our e-mails are viewed and track whether our e-mails are forwarded. Clear GIFs are also used on our Site for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy.

To learn more about interest-based advertising generally, or to excercise certain choices regarding targeted, interest-based ads by some of our current ad service partners, you can visit aboutads.info/choices from each browser you use.

Third Party Analytics

We use automated devices and applications to evaluate usage of our Site. We also may use other analytic means to evaluate our Services. We use these tools to help us improve our Services, performance and user experiences. We may combine this information with other information we collect from our users. To opt out of Google Analytics, Google also allows you to install a Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on on many types of browsers.

Third-Party Ad Networks

We use third parties such as ad networks to serve advertisements on our Site and on third-party websites or other media (e.g., social networking platforms). This enables us and these third parties to target advertisements to you for products and services in which you might be interested. Third-party ad network providers, advertisers, sponsors and/or traffic measurement services may use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (including clear GIFs and other tracking technologies) to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content to you. These third-party cookies and other technologies are governed by each third party’s specific privacy policy, not this one. We may provide these third-party advertisers with information, including Personal Information, about you.

Users in the United States may opt out of many third-party ad networks. For example, you may go to the Digital Advertising Alliance (“DAA”) Consumer Choice Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having information used by DAA companies. You may also go to the Network Advertising Initiative (“NAI”) Consumer Opt-Out Page for information about opting out of interest-based advertising and their choices regarding having information used by NAI members.

Opting out from one or more companies listed on the DAA Consumer Choice Page or the NAI Consumer Opt-Out Page will opt you out from those companies’ delivery of interest-based content or ads to you, but it does not mean you will no longer receive any advertising through our Site or on other websites. You may continue to receive advertisements, for example, based on the particular website that you are viewing (i.e., contextually based ads). Also, if your browsers are configured to reject cookies when you opt out on the DAA or NAI websites, your opt out may not be effective. Additional information is available on those sites.

Note that if you replace, change, upgrade or reset your browser or device, or delete your cookies, you may need to use these opt-out tools again.

Third-Party Links

Our Site and Services may contain links to third-party websites. For example, occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third party products or services on our Site. These third parties have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of those linked sites, including their information practices.

User Generated Content

Our Site is a forum for users to share their experience with various products and services. To this end, we invite registered users to post reviews on our Site. Please note, however, that if you post reviews to our Site, then all of the information that you post in the review will be attributed to, depending on your privacy settings, either your Profile Information or your Demographic Profile. If you share your Profile Information, your full identity will be publicly visible from our Site unless you change this in your privacy settings. Please also note your Demographic Profile will be available to all visitors to our Site. If you post your own content on our Site or Services, your posting may become public, and we cannot prevent such information from being used in a manner that may violate this Policy, the law, or your personal privacy. You are responsible for the accuracy of any information contained in your postings.

Security of Your Personal Information

We have implemented some precautions to protect the information we collect from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Please be aware that despite our efforts, no data security measures can guarantee 100% security.

You should take steps to protect against unauthorized access to your password, phone, and computer by, among other things, signing off after using a shared computer, choosing a robust password that nobody else knows or can easily guess, and keeping your log-in and password private. We are not responsible for any lost, stolen, or compromised passwords or for any activity on your account via unauthorized password activity.

Children

The HOUZTALK website is not directed to children under 16 years old, and we do not market to or knowingly collect any personal information from a child under the age of 16.

Updates to Profile Information

You may log into your account at any time to update your profile information. Please note that copies of information that you have updated, modified or deleted may remain viewable in their original form in cached and archived pages of the Site for a period of time and may have been shared with users or other third parties prior to your update, modification, or deletion of the information. Certain third parties (such as search engines that visit our web site) might continue to publish the original versions of the information. We are unable to update, modify, or delete information that was previously shared with a third party or that has otherwise been cached or archived by a third party. The same thing is true for changes you make to the privacy settings for a review, as described in the “Your Reviews” section above.

Your Personal Information Rights

We may send periodic promotional emails to you. You may opt-out of such communications by following the opt-out instructions contained in the e-mail. Please note that it may take up to 10 business days for us to process opt-out requests. If you opt-out of receiving emails about recommendations or other information we think may interest you, we may still send you e-mails about your account or any Services you have requested or received from us.

Contact Us

If you have questions about the privacy aspects of our Services or would like to make a complaint, please contact us at care@houztalk.com or at the following address:

HOUZTALK.COM

Attn: Privacy Manager

101E, South Point mall, Sector 53, Golf Course Road, Gurugram, Haryana- 122002

Changes to this Policy

This Policy is current as of the Effective Date set forth above. We may change this Policy from time to time, so please be sure to check back periodically. We will post any changes to this Policy on our Site. If we make any changes to this Policy that materially affect our practices with regard to the personal information we have previously collected from you, we will endeavor to provide you with notice of such change by highlighting the change on our Site, or by sending an email to registered users at the last address of record.