Privacy Policy

1. Scope

This Privacy Policy describes how we handle your personal information for our services on the Rentlord website. We collect, use, and share personal information to help the Rentlord website work and to keep it safe.By accepting the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Use in registration, you expressly consent to our collection, storage, use and disclosure of your personal information as described in this Privacy Policy. You agree that Rentlord Limited may process your personal information to deliver the services Rentlord provides under the Terms of Use and according to the principles laid down in this Privacy Policy. For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998, to the extent that we use your personal data for Rentlord's business or other purposes (for example, to process a payment to us in connection with certain services), the data controller in relation to your personal data is Rentlord Limited. In other circumstances, where you make personal data available over the Website for your own purposes (for example, when submitting content and other materials to a discussion group on the Website) or simply to enable us to process a transaction on your behalf, you will remain the data controller in respect of that use of the personal data. This Privacy Policy is effective upon acceptance for new users from 15 May 2011.

2. Your information

When you create a Rentlord account, you provide some personal information, such as your name, username, password, and email address. Some of this information, for example, your name and username, is listed publicly on our Services, including on your profile page and in search results. Any additional information that you provide, such as a biography, your location, or a picture, would be accessible by the public. We may use your contact information to send you information about our Services or to market to you. You may unsubscribe from these messages by following the instructions contained within the messages or the instructions on our web site. If you email us, we may keep your message, email address and contact information to respond to your request. Providing the additional information described in this section is entirely optional.

3. Collection

Rentlord may collect, periodically check and update any personal data you choose to submit on the Rentlord Website, including but not limited to your name and age; your email address, physical address, telephone number and other physical contact information; your financial information, such as credit card and / or bank account numbers; your location, photograph, rental history and references and feedback from other users;  transactional information based on your activities on the Website and content you generate or that relates to your Profile); Member communications, discussions, and correspondence through our Website, feedback, information provided in connection with any dispute and / or its resolution and other correspondence sent to us or via the Website; other information from your interaction with the Website, and our services, content and advertising, including computer and connection information, statistics on page views, traffic to and from the Website, ad data, IP address and standard web log information; additional information we may ask you to submit at any time to authenticate yourself or if we believe you are or may be in breach of Website terms and conditions or policies. For example, we may ask you to send us an ID or bill to verify your address, or to answer additional questions online to help verify your identity or ownership of a Vehicle you list; information from other companies, such as demographic and navigation data; and other supplemental information from third parties (for example, if you incur a debt to Rentlord we may ask you to send us additional information, such as your driver's licence, credit card statement, or a recent utility bill or other information confirming your address, or to answer additional questions online to help verify your information).

4. Marketing

We don't sell or rent your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent. We may combine your information with information on other users and information we collect from other companies and use it to improve and personalise our services, content and advertising. If you don't wish to receive marketing communications from us or participate in our ad-customisation programs, please indicate your preference by emailing contact@rentlord.com.

5. Use

Our primary purpose in collecting personal information is to provide you with a safe, smooth, efficient, and customised experience. You agree that we may use the personal data you have submitted to Rentlord to:

(i) provide the services (which will include sharing some of your personal data with other Members and third parties in accordance with this Privacy Policy) and any customer support that you request;

(ii) determine your Rentlord trust rating on the basis of the feedback and references provided by other users about previous rents you have entered into with them

(iii) resolve disputes, collect Fees, and troubleshoot problems;

(iv) investigate and / or take action to prevent prohibited or illegal activities, and enforce our Terms & Conditions;

(v) maintain, customise, measure and improve our services, the Website, and the content and advertising made available on or by means of the Website and / or our services;

(vi) tell you about our services, engage in targeted marketing, and provide service updates and promotional offers based on your communication preferences;

(vii) compare information for accuracy, and verify it with third parties such as the Land Registry, insurance companies and / or credit rating agencies; and

(viii) to make suggestions to you and other users on Rentlord for the ‘furture rental market’. For example, if you submit the information that your current rental period would end in a certain time period, Rentlord would send you suggestions of rental properties with rental periods starting in the corresponding period.

6. Our Disclosure of Your Information

We may disclose personal information to respond to legal requirements, enforce our policies, respond to claims that a listing or other content infringes the rights of others, or protect anyone's rights, property, or safety.

We may also share your personal information with:

(i) Service providers under contract who help with our business operations (such as fraud investigations, bill collection, affiliate and rewards programs and customer support).

(ii) Other Rentlord users, whether located within the United Kingdom or abroad. For example, where you are involved in a transaction with another user, the other user may view your email address and obtain your contact information and postal address to help complete the transaction.

(iii) Other third parties to whom you explicitly ask us to send your information (or about whom you are otherwise explicitly notified and consent to when using a specific service).

(iv) We may disclose information pursuant to court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United Kingdom where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Terms of Use. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.The personal information we disclose may include your User ID and User ID history, name, city, county, telephone number, email address, fraud complaints and bidding and listing history or anything else that we deem relevant.

(v) Other business entities, should we plan to merge with or be acquired by that business entity. (Should such a combination occur, we will require that the new combined entity follow this privacy policy with respect to your personal information. If your personal information will be used contrary to this policy, you will receive prior notice.)

7. Information You Share on Rentlord

Your user ID is displayed throughout Rentlord (and so available to the public) and is connected to all of your Rentlord activity. However, you are able to post on ‘Our Neighbourhood’ anonymously by selecting the ‘post anonymously’ option.

If you access our sites from a shared computer or a computer in an internet café, certain information about you, such as your user ID, may also be visible to other individuals who use the computer after you.

8. Using Information from Rentlord

Rentlord enables you to share personal information to create contracts with one another. We encourage you to disclose your privacy practices and respect the privacy of other users. We cannot guarantee the privacy or security of your information and therefore we encourage you to evaluate the privacy and security policies of another user before entering into a transaction or contract and choosing to share your information with them. When users are involved in a transaction, they may have access to each other's name, User ID, email address and other contact information. In all cases, you must comply with data protection laws, and give other users a chance to remove themselves from your database and a chance to review what information you have collected about them.

You agree to use user information only for:

• Rentlord transaction-related purposes that are not unsolicited commercial messages;

• using services offered through Rentlord (e.g. escrow, postage and fraud complaints); or

• other purposes that a user expressly chooses.

9. Cookies

We use "cookie" technology to collect additional website usage data and to improve our Services, but we do not require cookies for many parts of our Services such as searching and looking at public user profiles or lists. A cookie is a small data file that is transferred to your computer's hard disk. Rentlord may use both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with our Services, to monitor aggregate usage by our users and web traffic routing on our Services, and to improve our Services. Most Internet browsers automatically accept cookies. You can instruct your browser, by editing its options, to stop accepting cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit.

10. No Spam, Spyware or Spoofing

We and our users do not tolerate spam. You are not licensed to add other Rentlord users to your mailing list (email or physical mail) without their express consent. You may not use our communication tools to send spam or otherwise send content that would breach our Terms of Use. We automatically scan and may manually filter messages to check for spam, viruses, phishing attacks and other malicious activity or illegal or prohibited content, but we do not permanently store messages sent through these tools.

11. Account Protection

Your password is the key to your account. Use unique numbers, letters and special characters, and do not disclose your Rentlord password to anyone. If you do share your password or your personal information with others, remember that you are responsible for all actions taken in the name of your account. If you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personal information and may be subject to legally binding actions taken on your behalf. Therefore, if your password has been compromised for any reason, you should immediately notify Rentlord and change your password.

12. Accessing, Reviewing, Changing and Deleting Your Personal Information

You can see, review and change most of your personal information by signing on to Rentlord. You must promptly update your personal information if it changes or is inaccurate. Once you make a public posting, you may not be able to change or remove it. Upon your request to Customer Service, we will close your account and remove your personal information from view as soon as reasonably possible, based on your account activity and in accordance with applicable law. We do retain personal information from closed accounts to comply with law, prevent fraud, collect any fees owed, resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our Rentlord User Agreement, and take other actions otherwise permitted by law. Please note that even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on Rentlord. If you have given third party websites access to your information on Rentlord, they may retain your information to the extent permitted under their terms of service or privacy policies.  But they will no longer be able to access the information through our Platform after you disconnect from them. Removed and deleted information may persist in backup copies for up to 90 days, but will not be available to others.

13. Security

Your information is stored on our servers located in the United States. We treat data as an asset that must be protected and use lots of tools (encryption, passwords, physical security, etc.) to protect your personal information against unauthorised access and disclosure. However, as you probably know, third parties may unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications, and other users may abuse or misuse your personal information that they collect from the site. Therefore, although we work very hard to protect your privacy, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information or private communications will always remain private.

14. Third Parties

Except as otherwise expressly included in this Privacy Policy, this document addresses only the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. If you disclose your information to others on our sites or other sites throughout the internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the information you disclose to them. Rentlord does not control the privacy policies of third parties, and you are subject to the privacy policies of those third parties where applicable. We encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others.

15. General

We may amend this Privacy Policy at any time by posting the amended terms on this site. All amended terms automatically take effect 30 days after they are initially posted. In addition, we will notify you via email at the address you provide to Rentlord. If our help pages do not answer the questions you may have related to the Privacy Policy, you may contact Rentlord Customer Support.

Last updated: 25 December 2011