Needless to say, for us at CircleMe data is important, and among this, your data is of the utmost importance. It’s since the beginning of CircleMe (now more than 7 years) that we care about your personal data and do all is necessary to keep it safe and, of course, private. We do this with passion and commitment.

For this reason, this month, motivated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [(EU) 2016/679] which comes into effect today, we have dedicated some time to improve our services and its related Privacy Policies.

You know, you might have been bombarded by e-mails and other messages regarding the GDPR effect (and that is annoying, no doubt!), but we believe that the GDPR is actually a great step in the right direction, for any digital citizen. For this reason, we welcome and embrace it, with the hope that we will always do what is required (and more!) to comply to all its requirements.

So, how did we start doing this practically? Well, let us tell you what we did.

WE COMMUNICATE TERMS BETTER

No doubt communication is key, and often trying to understand what is written in the fine-prints of terms and policies is a total nightmare. We will try to stay away from incomprehensible legal text, or at least, when we cannot avoid it, we will try to help with some simplifications along the sides.

So, in short these are some key points related to how we deal with your personal data:

1. We use the data to make CircleMe awesome. Our objective is to provide you with a service (CircleMe) that gets you the best digital experience based on your interest-profile. For this reason, we need to ask you about your interests (and other personal data) to provide you with a service you will love.
2. Your data is, in fact, yours! You are in control of your data in more than one ways: you can decide how much data you provide us; you can edit your data; you can deactivate your account (if you want to take some time off the platform and hide all your information); you can permanently delete all your data and you can even ask you to export your data (for use in other ways).
3. We will always ask permission to use your data appropriately. This means that you might have to ‘tick’ several boxes instead of just one, but we do it for transparency and to clarify that there are different uses of this data. Depending on the case, we use your personal data to make CircleMe work well for you; we use it to communicate with you; we use it to create intelligence on people’s interests; we use it to learn how to improve our services.
4. We do not sell your personal data. We are a business, and might do deals where aggregated forms of data are shared with partners, but we do not sell data that cannot be anonymized. Hope you appreciate our transparency.
5. Data is gone if not used. We will delete your data if you stop using our services for a prolonged amount of time.
6. Data safety in our minds. Good security measures are in place since years to protect your data, but we are making them even more robust. Rest also assured that in the unfortunate event of a data breach, we will inform you and the authorities within 48-72 hours.

We certainly do home that you appreciated these bullet points, and that they were comprehensible enough. Obviously below you will find all the details related to these points, by visiting our Privacy Policy.

WE HAVE A REVISED PRIVACY POLICY

Pretty simply, as mentioned above, now you can read our revised Privacy Policy which we have aligned with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Please note that if you have any question or doubt about it, you can ready out to us at any moment by writing to privacy@circleme.com. Our staff will respond to you in a timely fashion.

WE IMPROVED OUR SERVICE CIRCLEME

Aligned with our company philosophy of “continuous improvement”, in the past weeks our team focused on improving many areas of the site also to ensure better and more transparent communication.

You will find tweaks in our registration process as well as in our communication (by email and internal to the platform) and in additional notification opportunities within the platform.

Perhaps, at times, the notifications might appear a bit overwhelming, but our goal is just to ensure that in this transition period all our users (which are now in the hundreds of thousands) will get all the needed information from us. Once we feel that all our community has been informed, you will see a decrease in the number of these notifications.

TO WRAP UP ON THE PERSONAL DATA DAY…

Frankly, we are very happy that the European Community gave us the chance to dedicate more time to this delicate and important topic of personal data protection. We hope that this step is the first significant one in the direction to give increasing power and clearer awareness to the digital citizen, all across the web.

Now, time to enjoy the immense Internet again!