Muddy Matches Privacy Policy

At Muddy Matches, we fully understand how important your privacy is and are firmly committed to protecting your personal information and informing you how we handle it.

This Privacy Policy explains in detail the types of personal information we may collect about you when you interact with us. It also explains how we'll store and handle that data, and keep it safe.

We have comprehensively reviewed our Privacy Policy so as to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR"), which takes effect on 25th May 2018.

The Muddy Matches website is owned and operated by Muddy Matches Limited, incorporated in England and Wales under company number 05822840. Muddy Matches Limited is the "data controller" as defined by the GDPR. Our registered office address is Manor Close, Podington, Wellingborough, Northants NN29 7HP.

We are currently registered with the Information Commissioner's Office ("ICO") under the Data Protection Act 1998 under number Z9484159 and will continue to pay any applicable annual charge.

You can contact us in any of the following ways:

By email: info@muddymatches.co.uk

By post: Muddy Matches Limited, Paddock View, Grange Farm, Farndish, Wellingborough, Northants NN29 7HJ.

Our aim is to introduce you to like-minded people, and to help like-minded people find you.  We also try to ensure that Users of our site are genuine.  The information you give us during the registration process helps us to help you. We also need to be able to respond to any queries you may have once you become a Member.

Contract

Most of the personal information we process is to perform our side of the contract you enter into when you join Muddy Matches.  Please see our Terms and Conditions for more information.

Consent

For some of the more sensitive personal information that you provide to us – such as your sexual preferences, religion and ethnicity - we also need your explicit consent.  This can be withdrawn at any time by cancelling your membership.

Legitimate interests

Sometimes, we may wish to contact you for other purposes, for example to inform you of events you may be interested in.  We believe we have a legitimate interest in doing this, but you may always choose to opt out.

While you don't need to sign up to do a basic search, you will need to register if you want to unlock more of the website's features, publish a Profile, or make contact with other Members.

Registered Member

When you register as a Member on our website, we require you to give us a certain amount of information, including your gender, sexuality, date of birth, first name, surname, email address and password.  Only your chosen name, age, gender and sexual preference will later appear in your Profile. Other information is used for management purposes. Your password details will be encrypted in our database.

You will be asked to confirm that you have read and agree to the Muddy Matches Terms and Conditions and this Privacy Policy to confirm your consent.

We will then contact you to confirm your registration, to discuss your account and to tell you of the further benefits you can access by adding a Profile and becoming a Subscriber.

Member with a Published Profile

Once registered, you will be invited to publish a Profile, where you will be asked to give your location (country, county, nearest town and postcode).   Your postcode won't be published, but it enables searching by location.

We also ask for some more information about your background.  This includes questions about your religion (if any) and ethnicity.  If you'd rather not answer either of these questions, please select "prefer not to say".

We then ask for other basic information about your appearance and you will be invited to add some photos, but this is not compulsory.

Finally, we ask you to tell us about yourself in your own words.  We reserve the right to edit this before publication, but, if you do choose to give further sensitive information about yourself, it is up to you.

You will then be asked to confirm again that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy.  Clicking "Finish" signifies that you agree that we may publish your Profile once we have checked it, including all the information you have given us.

Subscriber

If you want to exchange messages with other Members, or see who's viewed your Profile or added you to their Favourites, you will need to become a Subscriber.  All our payments are processed by our card-processing partners, SagePay, Paypal and Chargebee, and the details you provide are not stored on our servers.

Each time you visit the website, we will automatically log your IP address (a unique address for your computer or other access device). This is used to help diagnose problems with our server and administer the site, and to help identify you and the choices you have made. It may also be used to gather broad demographic information.

Nowhere on the website do we knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 18, as we require that all Users are at least 18 years old.

If you give us other information about you, such as photos posted on our social media channels, we will assume that you're happy for this information to be published on our site, unless you tell us.

Also, there may be times when you contact us about your account.  We will use the information you give us only for the purposes of managing your account.

Not all the information you give us will be published in your Profile.  Some bits, such as your surname and email address, are needed so that we can contact you when necessary regarding our service (including approving your Profile and photograph(s), communicating with you regarding your membership, advising you that you have received a message from another Member and responding to queries or complaints); for administration and accounting; and to help ensure that the content and services that we offer are tailored to your needs and interests.

Your personal information is also used to operate a Member directory through which other Members can contact you. If you do not wish to be included in this directory, you may at any time choose to either "hide" your Profile or terminate your membership and have your details permanently deleted.

By completing our registration process, you are agreeing for us to process your personal information to the extent necessary to enable us to provide you with the level of service you have chosen, and to operate the website for the purposes for which it is reasonably intended.

As part of this, you will also be consenting to us processing data of a more sensitive personal nature, for example, your sexual preferences, and, if applicable, your ethnicity and religious beliefs.  Information of this nature is given greater protection in the GDPR.

Our usual method of communication will be by email.  Any such correspondence will be stored on file with access limited to our authorised staff members.

For further details of the types of emails that we send you, please go to the Communication Settings in your account, where you can choose which emails you would like to receive.

We may share your personal information with our agents, representatives, contractors and service providers in order to operate the website and provide you with a service (including, for example, remote data backup of your personal information).  Our relationships with our suppliers are governed by contracts which restrict what they can do with Member information.

If you wish to subscribe to one of our packages, you will be automatically directed to our secure server.  Your payment details will be processed by our card-processing partners, Sage Pay and Chargebee. We will not pass on any information to them other than that required to facilitate your transaction. All information supplied to these card-processing partners shall be governed by their data protection and privacy policy.

We may from time to time receive requests for information about Members of our website, from the police and other authorities (such as, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, social services and other local and central government bodies). We will always consider such requests carefully, recognising that we have an obligation not to pass on your information without a lawful justification.  Where appropriate, we may ask the authority in question to seek a court order.

We do our utmost to ensure the security of our systems and protect your personal information.

Security procedures include the use of firewalls, backup measures, limiting access to data to relevant personnel only and password protecting all machinery holding personal data. Furthermore, Members' passwords are stored one-way encrypted in our database, we secure access to all transactional areas of our website using ‘https' technology and all sensitive data is secured by SSL encryption.

We regularly monitor our system for possible vulnerabilities and attacks, and we carry out penetration testing to identify ways to further strengthen security.  Internet security, however, is a complex topic and no system can be said to be 100% secure. In the unlikely event of a security breach, we would endeavour to react as quickly as possible to remedy the problem, and will notify you if there is a breach of your personal data that might expose you to serious risk.

You can freely update all of your personal information by logging in and editing your Account and/or Profile.  If your personal information becomes inaccurate, please do update it.

We use Google Analytics to gain a better understanding of our users' behaviour and preferences. For further information about how this works, please see "How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services" at https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites?hl=en-GB&gl=uk

In particular, we have enabled Google Analytics Advertising Features, specifically Google Analytics Demographic and Interest Reporting. Demographics reports will provide us with age, gender and household income data for users of our website, and Interest reports will provide us with hobbies and interests data. For further information about how this works, please see "About Advertising Features" at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3450482?hl=en

Both tools involve the use of "cookies". For further information on this, please refer to our Cookie Policy https://www.muddymatches.co.uk/info/cookies

You may opt out of the automated collection of information by Google Analytics by visiting https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/. We are unable to perform the opt-outs on your behalf.

We're based in the UK but sometimes your personal information may be transferred to a "third country" outside the European Economic Area, to the United States for example. Our site is "hosted" by a mainstream web hosting service provider and it is common practice for information to be hosted in multiple locations.  Our dealings with them are governed by approved contractual agreements, and we are satisfied that suitable safeguards are in place.  The European Commission has published a list of countries which have adequate data protection rules, which can be found here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/data-transfers-outside-eu/adequacy-protection-personal-data-non-eu-countries_en

We will store your personal information for as long as you are a Member.  On cancellation of your membership you will cease to be a Member and we will keep all your personal information on our records for up to a period of three years to enable us to respond to any queries or complaints.

At the end of that retention period, your data will either be deleted completely or anonymised, for example by aggregation with other data so that it can be used in a non-identifiable way for statistical analysis and business planning.

If you would like to exercise any of the following rights, please write to us at info@muddymatches.co.uk.

The right to access personal data

You may ask us to confirm whether we are processing any personal data concerning you, and, if so, to give you access to that data and certain basic information.

The right to rectification

If you believe that any information we hold about you is inaccurate or incomplete, please tell us, and we will rectify it as soon as we can.

The right to erasure ("the right to be forgotten")

You may request the deletion or removal of personal data where there is no longer a good reason for them to be processed.

The right to restriction of processing

You have the right to block the processing of personal data in certain circumstances.  If so, we will be allowed to store the data but not further process it.

The right to data portability

This allows you to obtain and reuse your personal data for your own purposes across different services.  You can ask to receive the personal data which you have provided to us, in a commonly-used and machine-readable format.  You also have the right to ask us to transmit the data to another controller directly.

The right to withdraw consent

You have the right to withdraw consent at any time by cancelling your membership.

The right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority

The Information Commissioner's Office is the data protection authority for the United Kingdom, and you have the right to complain to them at any point.

You can contact them by calling 0303 123 1113 or visit www.ico.org.uk/concerns (opens in a new window; please note we can't be responsible for the content of external websites).

If you are based outside the UK, you have the right to lodge your complaint with the relevant data protection regulator in your country of residence.

Like most websites, we store information about you in a 'cookie', which is a small file that is sent from our web server to your computer.   We use cookies to keep track of things such as your chosen set up of the website, your login or registration identification, you login time and any of your preferences as a User.  For more information about the ways we use cookies, please visit https://www.muddymatches.co.uk/info/cookies.

This website contains links to third party websites but we are not responsible for the privacy policies of these sites, or for the way in which information about their users is treated.  This Privacy Policy only applies to information collected by our website, and your use of third party websites is subject to privacy policies posted on those websites.

This website makes your Profile available to its Users. Please remember that any information that is disclosed in these areas becomes public information and you should exercise caution when deciding to disclose your personal information.

We strictly respect your privacy and any message sent is private correspondence between you and the sender/recipient. We do, however, reserve the right to monitor your correspondence for any reason including: (1) to conform or comply with applicable laws; (2) to protect and defend our rights or property; (3) to protect the personal safety of other Users or the public.

It is likely that we will need to update this Privacy Policy from time to time.  We will notify you of any significant changes, by email and by posting a notice on the website, and you are welcome to come back and check it whenever you wish.  Each time that you use the website, or provide us with information, by doing so you are accepting the practices described in this Privacy Policy at that time.

We hope this Privacy Policy has been helpful in explaining the way we handle your personal data and your rights to control it.

If you have any further questions, please get in touch us by emailing info@muddymatches.co.uk or writing to us at Muddy Matches Ltd, Paddock View, Grange Farm, Farndish, Nr Wellingborough, Northants, NN29 7HJ.