Privacy Policy

We at MyPetBuddy respect the privacy of our users’ personal information and our practices reflect our commitment to the safeguarding of personal information. By using the site you understand and agree that we are providing a platform for you to post content, including photos, comments, check-ins, and other materials (“User Content”), to the site and to share User Content publicly. This means that other users may search for, see, use, or share any of your User Content that you make publicly available through the site, consistent with the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. This policy applies to all visitors, users, and others who access the site.

We collect personal information about you that you provide while you use the site. We collect this information during the registration process. There is some information that you must provide and other information that you may provide voluntarily. We will keep some of this information private and will display some to other users. We always let you know which information will be made public and which information will be kept private. Additional information may be gathered during your use of the site, whenever you choose to provide it. If you choose to register for any paid services on the site, we will request sufficient personal identification information to verify your identity.

Certain personal information must be supplied during the registration process, as indicated below, in order to:

  1. enable verified users to login to the site;
  2. verify user identities;
  3. establish user ability to participate in the platform and that they are at least 18 years of age;
  4. guard against potential fraud; and/or
  5. to conduct due diligence or identity verification through partnering with a third party firm.

This personal information includes:

  1. Your first and last name (basic user registration).
  2. Your email address (basic user registration).
  3. Your date of birth (basic user registration).
  4. Your home address and telephone number (verified user registration).
  5. Your Emirates ID or other equivalent identity information (verified user registration).
  6. Profile information that you provide for your user profile and pet profile (which may include but not be limited to a pet picture, gender, breed and age). This information allows us to help your pet and you, or others be “found” on our site.

When you register as a user, we will use this basic personal information to verify your identity in order to participate in certain activities within the platform. We may also ask for additional information about your pet to share with other users and to suggest or recommend third party services related to your pets.

When you register as a user, we will also use your information to facilitate transactions such as:

  1. Generating public profiles on the site;
  2. Maintaining regular communications with users concerning activities, services and transactions related to MyPetBuddy’s services.

In addition, we gather names and email addresses of people who contact us through the platform with questions. We collect this information for the purpose of responding to such inquiries and may use such information for marketing purposes.

We may collect information about the location of your device each time you use our site, or when you otherwise consent to the collection of this information.

Finally, we collect information about our users’ computers and visits to our site, including IP address, geographical location, browser type, referral source, length of visit, and page views through the use of log files. We use this aggregated information in the administration of our site to improve its usability and to evaluate the success of particular marketing/advertising campaigns, search engine optimization strategies and other marketing activities. We use non-identifying and aggregated information to help optimize our site based on the needs of our users. All credit/debit cards’ details and personally identifiable information will NOT be stored, sold, shared, rented or leased to any third parties.

We retain this information to satisfy legal requirements such as recordkeeping, tax and credit reporting, as well as for purposes of fraud prevention, audit and data integrity.

Finding other Users

As a verified User, if you choose, you can use our [Insert Feature Name] feature to locate other people with MyPetBuddy accounts either through (i) your contacts list or (iii) through a search of nearby pets on the site. If you choose to find other users through (i) your device’s contacts list, then MyPetBuddy will access your contacts list to determine whether or not someone associated with your contact is using MyPetBuddy. If you choose to find your friends through a search of nearby pets on MyPetBuddy then simply start the feature “Nearby” and we will perform a search on our service.

Referral Activities

Users may refer friends and affiliate partners may refer clients to the site via email or by completing a simple form to generate an email invitation. This referral occurs independently of our site or an affiliate partner’s site. Information using our form may be stored for the purpose of sending this one-time email, tracking the success of our referral program and for marketing purposes.

Communications from Us

When users register on our site they will receive emails that confirm specific actions they may have requested. These notifications are typically sent to notify them of a change in status, or for legal or security purposes. For example, they will receive notifications confirming their registration, the successful verification of email addresses and/or phone numbers and regarding certain changes to legal agreements. These are mandatory notifications that they generally cannot opt out of receiving. We may also send them responses to emails they send us, if appropriate or applicable. From time to time, we will also send user surveys, requests for user feedback regarding user experience and site operations, newsletters, event notifications, group leader notifications, or marketing offers from us or on behalf of our marketing partners. The completion of these surveys or requests for feedback, receipt of these newsletters or notifications, or acceptance of any offer is strictly voluntary. If you do not wish to receive these surveys or user feedback emails, newsletters, notifications or marketing offers, please opt out of the type of email you do not wish to receive at the [“Notifications”] link of your account profile.

How and When Your Information Is Shared

Information may be shared with other parties in any of the following ways, including but not limited to the following:

  1. Required and optional information about users is displayed on public profiles that each user can update at any time; certain information is optional and they can choose not to supply it and can remove the optional information at any time.
  2. Personal but not personally identifiable information about users can be viewed by all users.
  3. Personal information about users including but not limited to full name, age, sex, type of pet owned, pet name, pet breed and approximate residential location (by neighborhood) about verified users may be displayed to all verified users.
  4. Information is shared directly between verified users. Information shared directly by any verified users may contain personally identifiable information.
  5. If a connection originated through our platform creates an interest between verified users to meet or connect with respect to their pets, we may provide such verified users with personally identifiable and geo-locational information about the verified users.
  6. Information may be shared to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, for the purposes of limiting fraud or any other criminal or alleged criminal act.
  7. Information may be shared with a number of trusted partners that perform vital functions as part of our operations.

For privacy purposes, all basic users may be identified only by their chosen screen names on the site however their profiles may display personal information that they have opted to include. Certain functionality on the site may be limited for the basic users, including but not limited to certain types of communication features and use of third party services. Verified users may have public profiles, prominently displaying a “Verified” sticker, and indicating their verified names and personal information to other verified users, and certain types of communication features and use of third party services may be enabled for such verified users. By choosing to become a verified user you acknowledge and agree that you expressly give us your consent to display personally identifiable information to all other verified users.

MyPetBuddy shall not be responsible or liable in any way whatsoever for any personal information that users may choose to reveal about themselves in their screen names, public profiles or other sections of the site and any consequences that may occur as a result of actions by other users or third parties taken through the use of such information without your consent.

Some information, such as interests, may be made public by default. Some information, such as pet names, pet types, location or [insert other information], will always be visible to other verified users, and may be public, depending on the settings chosen by the verified user.

We may share your information with law enforcement or other government agencies as required by law or for the purposes of limiting fraud. We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process.

MyPetBuddy works with a number of trusted partners that perform vital functions as part of our operations, including platform administrators, identity verification providers, compliance firms, electronic payment service providers, quality assurance agents and companies that distribute our emails for us or collect survey information from our users. Information is shared with these third parties only to the extent necessary for us to operate the site, verify the true identities of users or to perform other specific services. Our partners are also required to keep your information private and secure and use their own respective privacy safeguarding processes.

It is necessary to allow verified users to see information as they evaluate whether to communicate with other verified users. MyPetBuddy will disclose to verified users the information MyPetBuddy reasonably determines to be adequate to protect the privacy of the users.

Where Personal Information May be Accessed

Users can access all of their personal and personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain by logging in to their accounts and going to [“My Account Settings”.] This section of the site is password-protected to better safeguard your information. As a verified user, you may update your password, email address, secret question, screen name, physical address, phone numbers, identity card information, and member page at any time on the site, and if you need to change any other information in your profile or request that we delete/remove your information, they can contact us at support@mypetbuddy.com. To protect your privacy and security, you must contact us at support@mypetbuddy.com to make changes to your sensitive account information.

We will retain and use your information as needed to provide you services, to comply with our legal obligations, to resolve disputes, to enforce our agreements or as otherwise required by law.

Information Collection

Cookies are text files created by a website that store information on users’ computers, such as their preferences when visiting that site. MyPetBuddy uses standard cookies when you sign in, to keep track of your personal session, including some account identifiers so that we can ensure that you are the only person making changes to your account. Cookies are also used to gather statistical data, such as which pages are visited, what is downloaded, the ISP’s domain name and country of origin, and the addresses of sites visited immediately before and after coming to our site, as well as your “click stream” activity (meaning, the paths taken by visitors to our site as they navigate from page to page) and transactional attributes in accordance with information you voluntarily submit in the course of using our site.

 

This anonymous data is aggregated for analysis to ensure proper functioning of our site, in terms of navigation and usability, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. We also use cookies to track your activity on our site as a unique person. We use cookies to make it easier for you to navigate our site. We use a persistent cookie that remains on your hard drive for an extended period of time, so that we can recognize you when they return to our website. You can remove persistent cookies by following directions provided in your Internet browser’s “help” file; however, because we use cookies for our sign-in functionality, if you choose to disable cookies you may not be able to log on to the MyPetBuddy website. All of this information is stored in an encrypted fashion for security reasons, and no personal information about you is stored.

 

We do not acknowledge “do not track” signals or other similar mechanisms whereby a visitor to a website requests that it disables collection of information about the visitor’s online activities over time and across different websites. Additionally, we may permit affiliates and partners to collect such information. For instance, we might do so to track the source of traffic to our website.

 

We use third-party tracking services (e.g., Google Analytics) that use cookies to track non-personally identifiable information about visitors to our site in the aggregate (such as page views and referral page information to track the success of our marketing efforts to bring people to our site as well as overall site performance).

Links to Other Sites

We may offer links to partners’ sites. We make the decision to provide links to these sites based on the quality of information provided at the time the links are enabled, and we make every effort to monitor the continuing quality of content provided on these sites. However, these external sites are not subject to this Privacy Policy. Furthermore, MyPetBuddy has no control over the content of these sites. We suggest the consultation of the privacy policies on these sites before users provide them with any personal information.

Social Media Features

Our website includes social media features and widgets [(“Features”)], including but not limited to features such as the Facebook Like button or similar buttons for Instagram and Twitter. These Features may collect your IP address, which page you are visiting on our site, and may set a cookie to enable the Features to function properly. Features are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our website. Your interactions with these Features are governed by the privacy policy of the company providing it.

MyPetBuddy Security Policy

MyPetBuddy takes steps to safeguard users’ personal and personally identifiable information through physical, electronic and operational policies and practices. All data is considered confidential. Data can only be read or written through defined service access points, the use of which is password-protected. The physical security of the data is achieved through a combination of network firewalls (there is no direct communication allowed between the database server and the Internet) and servers with hardened operating systems are all housed in a secure facility. Access to the system, both physical and electronic, is controlled and limited. Further, we also equip our servers with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate technology to ensure that when you connect to our website you are actually on our site. SSL also ensures that all data entered into the website is encrypted. To verify that SSL is being used, look for the key or padlock icon on your browser. For further encryption protection, we use a 256-bit secure browser for logins and transactions.

Identity Theft

Although MyPetBuddy has a stringent process in place to prevent unwanted parties from using fraudulently acquired identities, the possibility of fraudulent activity is nonetheless possible. MyPetBuddy will work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute persons who have committed identity theft. If you are a user who suspects that you have interacted with a person who has committed identity theft, please contact your local law enforcement first, and then email us at support@mypetbuddy.com and include the all the relevant information and the reason you suspect identity theft. MyPetBuddy shall conduct its own internal good faith investigation of the allegations and notify you of the results as they become available, as well as any actions we may have taken or plan to take.

Compromise of Personal Information

In the event that personal information is compromised as a result of a breach of security, MyPetBuddy will promptly notify those persons whose personal information has been compromised by email, or as otherwise required by applicable law.

Secure Data Center

We store all sensitive information on a secure data center hosted by Amazon Web Services.

Passwords

At a minimum, we require the use of both numbers and letters in your password. We have also instituted secure steps by which users can regain access to their accounts should they forget their passwords, including the use of a security question. Your password is not known to any employee or third party with whom we may partner, and we will never ask for your password. You should never share your passwords with anyone, and if you ever receive an email purporting to come from MyPetBuddy that asks for your password, you should immediately report this to MyPetBuddy.

What Users Can Do

To protect your account, we send automatic notifications confirming certain actions taken on your account. We do this for your own protection so that you can be sure that no one else is making changes to your account without your knowledge. However, the security offered through these notifications can be undermined if other people have access to your account.

MyPetBuddy will never ask for your login information. In general, you can protect yourself against phishing by never providing personal or login information via an email.

Changes to This Policy

If we make updates to this Privacy Policy, we will update it with the changes and revise the “last updated” date posted at the bottom of this Privacy Policy. Any updates to the Privacy Policy become effective when we post the updates on the site. If we make any material changes we will notify you by means of a notice on this site prior to the change becoming effective. Your use of the site following the update to the Privacy Policy means that you accept all such new terms and policies.

For additional information, or if users have any questions regarding this policy or the privacy practices at MyPetBuddy, please submit your questions or comments directly to support@mypetbuddy.com via email. Any personal information you submit in respect of such questions will be used solely to respond to your requests.

You can also send questions or comments to:

MyPetBuddy
Attn: Privacy Policy Coordinator
Address: Abu Dhabi, 2406, ResCo-worker02, 24th Floor, Al Sila Tower
Email: support@mypetbuddy.com

Last Updated: 19 December 2019