Privacy policy

Effective date: 09.24.2020

Welcome to SciMatch’s Privacy Policy. Thank you for taking the time to read it.

We appreciate that you trust us with your information and we intend to always keep that trust. This starts with making sure you understand the information we collect, why we collect it, how it is used and your choices regarding your information. This Policy describes our privacy practices in plain language, keeping legal and technical jargon to a minimum.

It goes without saying, we can’t help you develop meaningful connections without some information about you, such as basic profile details and the types of people you’d like to meet. We also collect information generated as you use our services, for example access logs, as well as information from third parties, like when you access our services through a social media account. If you want additional info, we go into more detail below.

Information you give us

You choose to give us certain information when using our services. This includes:

When you create an account, you provide us with at least your login credentials, as well as some basic details necessary for the service to work, such as your gender and date of birth.
When you complete your profile, you can share with us additional information, such as details on your personality, lifestyle, interests and other details about you, as well as content such as photos and videos. To add certain content, like pictures or videos, you may allow us to access your camera or photo album. Some of the information you choose to provide us may be considered “special” or “sensitive” in certain jurisdictions, for example your racial or ethnic origins, sexual orientation and religious beliefs. By choosing to provide this information, you consent to our processing of that information.
When you participate in surveys or focus groups, you give us your insights into our products and services, responses to our questions and testimonials.
When you choose to participate in our promotions, events or contests, we collect the information that you use to register or enter.
If you contact our customer care team, we collect the information you give us during the interaction. Sometimes, we monitor or record these interactions for training purposes and to ensure a high quality of service.
If you ask us to communicate with or otherwise process information of other people (for example, if you ask us to send an email on your behalf to one of your friends), we collect the information about others that you give us in order to complete your request.
Of course, we also process your chats with other users as well as the content you publish, as part of the operation of the services.

Information we receive from others

In addition to the information you provide us directly, we receive information about you from others, including:

Other Users. Other users may provide information about you as they use our services. For instance, we may collect information about you from other users if they contact us about you.
Social Media. You may be able to use your social media login (such as Facebook Login) to create and log into your SciMatch account. This saves you from having to remember yet another username and password and allows you to share some information from your social media account with us.
Other Partners. We may receive info about you from our partners, for instance where SciMatch ads are published on a partner’s websites and platforms (in which case they may pass along details on a campaign’s success).

Information collected when you use our services

When you use our services, we collect information about which features you’ve used, how you’ve used them and the devices you use to access our services. See below for more details:

Usage Information. We collect information about your activity on our services, for instance how you use them (e.g., date and time you logged in, features you’ve been using, searches, clicks and pages which have been shown to you, referring webpage address, advertising that you click on) and how you interact with other users (e.g., users you connect and interact with, time and date of your exchanges, number of messages you send and receive).
Device information. We collect information from and about the device(s) you use to access our services, including: hardware and software information such as IP address, device ID and type, device-specific and apps settings and characteristics, app crashes, advertising IDs (such as Google’s AAID and Apple’s IDFA, both of which are randomly generated numbers that you can reset by going into your device’ settings), browser type, version and language, operating system, time zones, identifiers associated with cookies or other technologies that may uniquely identify your device or browser (e.g., IMEI/UDID and MAC address); information on your wireless and mobile network connection, like your service provider and signal strength; information on device sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and compasses.
Other information with your consent. If you give us permission, we can collect your precise geolocation (latitude and longitude) through various means, depending on the service and device you’re using, including GPS, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections. The collection of your geolocation may occur in the background even when you aren’t using the services if the permission you gave us expressly permits such collection. If you decline permission for us to collect your geolocation, we will not collect it. Similarly, if you consent, we may collect your photos and videos (for instance, if you want to publish a photo, video or streaming on the services).

We use and may allow others to use cookies and similar technologies (e.g., web beacons, pixels) to recognize you and/or your device(s).

Cookies: We and our service providers and business partners use “cookies” to keep track of some types of information while you are visiting SciMatch or using our services. “Cookies” are very small files placed on your computer, and they allow us to count the number of visitors to our Website and distinguish repeat visitors from new visitors. They also allow us and third parties we work with to save user preferences, track user trends, and advertise to you. We use both session and persistent cookies on our Website; session cookies expire at the end of a particular visit to our Website, while persistent cookies (also called stored cookies) remain active until you disable them through your browser settings, or until a pre-set expiration date. We rely on cookies for the proper operation of SciMatch; therefore if your browser is set to reject all cookies, SciMatch may not function properly. Without this information, we will not be able to provide you with all of the requested services, and any differences in services are related to your information.

Web Beacons: “Web beacons” (also known as “clear gifs” and “pixel tags”) are small transparent graphic images that are often used in conjunction with cookies in order to further personalize SciMatch for our users, collect a limited set of information about our visitors, and advertise to our users. We may also use web beacons in email communications in order to understand the behavior of our customers, such as whether an email has been opened or acted upon.

The main reason we use your information is to deliver and improve our services. Additionally, we use your info to help keep you safe and to provide you with advertising that may be of interest to you. Read on for a more detailed explanation of the various reasons we use your information, together with practical examples.

To administer your account and provide our services to you

Create and manage your account
Provide you with customer support and respond to your requests
Complete your transactions
Communicate with you about our services, including order management and billing

To help you connect with other users

Analyze your profile, activity on the service, and preferences to recommend meaningful connections to you and recommend you to others
Show users’ profiles to one another

To ensure a consistent experience across your devices

Link the various devices you use so that you can enjoy a consistent experience of our services on all of them. We do this by linking devices and browser data, such as when you log into your account on different devices or by using partial or full IP address, browser version and similar data about your devices to help identify and link them.

To provide new SciMatch services to you

Register you and display your profile on new SciMatch features and apps
Administer your account on these new features and apps

To serve you relevant offers and ads

Administer sweepstakes, contests, discounts or other offers
Develop, display and track content and advertising tailored to your interests on our services and other sites
Communicate with you by email, phone, social media or mobile device about products or services that we think may interest you

To improve our services and develop new ones

Administer focus groups and surveys
Conduct research and analysis of users’ behavior to improve our services and content (for instance, we may decide to change the look and feel or even substantially modify a given feature based on users’ behavior)
Develop new features and services (for example, we may decide to build a new interests-based feature further to requests received from users)

To prevent, detect and fight fraud or other illegal or unauthorized activities

Address ongoing or alleged misbehavior on and off-platform
Perform data analysis to better understand and design countermeasures against these activities
Retain data related to fraudulent activities to prevent against recurrences

To ensure legal compliance

Comply with legal requirements
Assist law enforcement
Enforce or exercise our rights, for example our Terms

To process your information as described above, we rely on the following legal bases

Provide our service to you: most of the time, the reason we process your information is to perform the contract that you have with us. For instance, as you go about using our service to build meaningful connections, we use your information to maintain your account and your profile, to make it viewable to other users and recommend other users to you.
Legitimate interests: we may use your information where we have legitimate interests to do so. For instance, we analyze users’ behavior on our services to continuously improve our offerings, we suggest offers we think might interest you, and we process information for administrative, fraud detection and other legal purposes.
Consent: from time to time, we may ask for your consent to use your information for certain specific reasons. You may withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us at the address provided at the end of this Privacy Policy.

Since our goal is to help you make meaningful connections, the main sharing of users’ information is, of course, with other users. We also share some users’ information with service providers and partners who assist us in operating the services and, in some cases, legal authorities. Read on for more details about how your information is shared with others.

With other users

You share information with other users when you voluntarily disclose information on the service (including your public profile). Please be careful with your information and make sure that the content you share is stuff that you’re comfortable being publicly viewable since neither you nor we can control what others do with your information once you share it.

With our service providers and partners

We use third parties to help us operate and improve our services. These third parties assist us with various tasks, including data hosting and maintenance, analytics, customer care, marketing, advertising, payment processing and security operations.

We may also share information with partners who distribute and assist us in advertising our services. For instance, we may share limited information on you in hashed, non-human readable form to advertising partners.

We follow a strict vetting process prior to engaging any service provider or working with any partner. All of our service providers and partners must agree to strict confidentiality obligations.

For corporate transactions

We may transfer your information if we are involved, whether in whole or in part, in a merger, sale, acquisition, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, bankruptcy or other change of ownership or control.

When required by law

We may disclose your information if reasonably necessary: (i) to comply with a legal process, such as a court order, subpoena or search warrant, government / law enforcement investigation or other legal requirements; (ii) to assist in the prevention or detection of crime (subject in each case to applicable law); or (iii) to protect the safety of any person.

To enforce legal rights

We may also share information: (i) if disclosure would mitigate our liability in an actual or threatened lawsuit; (ii) as necessary to protect our legal rights and legal rights of our users, business partners or other interested parties; (iii) to enforce our agreements with you; and (iv) to investigate, prevent, or take other action regarding illegal activity, suspected fraud or other wrongdoing.

With your consent or at your request

We may ask for your consent to share your information with third parties. In any such case, we will make it clear why we want to share the information.

We may use and share non-personal information (meaning information that, by itself, does not identify who you are such as device information, general demographics, general behavioral data, geolocation in de-identified form), as well as personal information in hashed, non-human readable form, under any of the above circumstances. We may also share this information with third parties (notably advertisers) to develop and deliver targeted advertising on our services and on websites or applications of third parties, and to analyze and report on advertising you see. We may combine this information with additional non-personal information or personal information in hashed, non-human readable form collected from other sources.

We want you to be in control of your information, so we have provided you with the following tools:

Access / Update tools in the service. Tools and account settings that help you to access, rectify or delete information that you provided to us and that’s associated with your account directly within the service. If you have any questions on those tools and settings, please contact our customer care team for help at info@scimatch.com.
Device permissions. Mobile platforms have permission systems for specific types of device data and notifications, such as phone book and location services as well as push notifications. You can change your settings on your device to either consent or oppose the collection of the corresponding information or the display of the corresponding notifications. Of course, if you do that, certain services may lose full functionality.
Deletion. You can delete your account by using the corresponding functionality directly on the service.

We want you to be aware of your privacy rights. Here are a few key points to remember:

Reviewing your information. Applicable privacy laws may give you the right to review the personal information we keep about you (depending on the jurisdiction, this may be called right of access, right of portability or variations of those terms). You can request a copy of your personal information by emailing us at info@scimatch.com or via the functionality of the services.
Updating your information. If you believe that the information we hold about you is inaccurate or that we are no longer entitled to use it and want to request its rectification, deletion or object to its processing, please contact us by emailing us at info@scimatch.com or via the functionality of the services.

For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we may ask you to provide proof of identity before we can answer the above requests.

Keep in mind, we may reject requests for certain reasons, including if the request is unlawful or if it may infringe on trade secrets or intellectual property or the privacy of another user. If you wish to receive information relating to another user, such as a copy of any messages you received from him or her through our service, the other user will have to contact our Privacy Officer to provide their written consent before the information is released.

Also, we may not be able to accommodate certain requests to object to the processing of personal information, notably where such requests would not allow us to provide our service to you anymore. For instance, we cannot provide our service if we do not have your date of birth.

Uninstall. You can stop all information collection by an app by uninstalling it using the standard uninstall process for your device. If you uninstall the app from your mobile device, the unique identifier associated with your device will continue to be stored. If you reinstall the application on the same mobile device, we will be able to re-associate this identifier to your previous transactions and activities.
Accountability. In certain countries, including in the European Union, you have a right to lodge a complaint with the appropriate data protection authority if you have concerns about how we process your personal information. The data protection authority you can lodge a complaint with notably may be that of ~~your habitual residence, where you work or~~ where we are established.

If you are a California resident, you can request a notice disclosing the categories of personal information about you that we have shared with third parties for their direct marketing purposes during the preceding calendar year. To request this notice, please email us at info@scimatch.com or via the functionality of the services. Please allow 30 days for a response. For your protection and the protection of all of our users, we may ask you to provide proof of identity before we can answer such a request.

We work hard to protect you from unauthorized access to or alteration, disclosure or destruction of your personal information. As with all technology companies, although we take steps to secure your information, we do not promise, and you should not expect, that your personal information will always remain secure.

We regularly monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks and regularly review our information collection, storage and processing practices to update our physical, technical and organizational security measures.

We may suspend your use of all or part of the services without notice if we suspect or detect any breach of security. If you believe that your account or information is no longer secure, please notify us immediately by emailing to info@scimatch.com.

We keep your personal information only as long as we need it for legitimate business purposes and as permitted by applicable law. To protect the safety and security of our users on and off our services, we implement a safety retention window of three months following account deletion. During this period, account information will be retained although the account will of course not be visible on the services anymore.

In practice, we delete or anonymize your information upon deletion of your account (following the safety retention window) or after two years of continuous inactivity, unless:

we must keep it to comply with applicable law (for instance, some “traffic data” is kept for one year to comply with statutory data retention obligations);
we must keep it to evidence our compliance with applicable law (for instance, records of consents to our Terms, Privacy Policy and other similar consents are kept for five years);
there is an outstanding issue, claim or dispute requiring us to keep the relevant information until it is resolved; or
the information must be kept for our legitimate business interests, such as fraud prevention and enhancing users’ safety and security. For example, information may need to be kept to prevent a user who was banned for unsafe behavior or security incidents from opening a new account.

Keep in mind that even though our systems are designed to carry out data deletion processes according to the above guidelines, we cannot promise that all data will be deleted within a specific timeframe due to technical constraints.

For use of SciMatch you may provide us and upload to SciMatch your face images (photo or video). In order to make possible for you to use certain functions of SciMatch, we will process (provided by you) human face images through Vision algorithms that will provide us information such as human faces’ position, their topology on your image and/or video frame, and the numerical representations of the detected faces. Images (photo or video), that you provide us in or through SciMatch, and/or other information related to human faces obtained from your images (photo or video) and/or through the use of machine learning technologies, are the “Face Data”. The Face Data shall be considered the Personal Data. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in other Sections of this Privacy Policy in relation to the Personal Data, WE DO NOT:

use the Face Data for advertising, or marketing purposes, or to otherwise target a User in a similar manner
use the Face Data to attempt, facilitate, or encourage third parties to identify anonymous Users or reconstruct User profiles based on the Face Data
transfer, share, sell, or otherwise provide the Face Data to advertising platforms, analytics providers, data brokers, information resellers or other such parties. You hereby express your informed written consent on processing of your Face Data as described in this Section 12 of the Privacy Policy

We do use Face Data to learn your character traits and facilitate matches with other SciMatch users as well as to enable some functionalities of the app such as Celeb crush (previously named Type Matcher), Profile Verification Information.

Profile Verification Information

For safety and security and to ensure you have the best possible user experience, we require Users to verify their accounts and might ask to carry out photo verification. We want to make sure you are not a robot! And we also want to avoid fake SciMatch accounts being created which can be used for malicious activities and cybercrime – they threaten the SciMatch network and spoil things for everyone. This verification might be required by us for the prevention of fraud. You can also verify your photo on a voluntary basis (to add the blue ‘verified’ badge to your profile).

If you choose to verify your profile photo, we will scan each photo that you submit. The scan may include the use of facial recognition technology so that we can compare the photo you submit to your profile photo, to help ensure that you are who you say you are. We do not add the verification photos to your profile. We retain the scans so that we can verify you in the future and for our record-keeping purposes until we no longer need them for such purposes or for two years after your last interaction with us, whichever occurs first. After the applicable retention period expires, we take commercially reasonable steps to permanently and securely delete the scans from our systems.

What data does the app collect through the TrueDepth API?

The SciMatch app utilizes the TrueDepth API to capture face image of users with a straight head and to monitor their head and face movements to ensure accurate capture of face image. For this to work, the app requires access to the user’s device camera. The only use of this information is to track the user’s head and face so that the user can control accurately capture their face image. It's important to note that this data is solely used to improve app functionalities and user experiences.

What are the intended purposes for collecting this data?

The Face Data gathered serve as the foundation for creating user personality profiles, a critical component of our dating app aimed at facilitating more accurate romantic matches inside the app.

Will this data be shared with third parties, and where will it be stored?

None of the information collected by the TrueDepth API ever leaves the user's device nor is it persistently stored on the device. SciMatch will not store, or retain, any data captured by the TrueDepth camera on our servers or use customer face data for any purpose other than the app’s core functionality or will not share with any third parties and only use to improve user experiences. This data shall be considered the Personal Data. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in other Sections of this Privacy Policy in relation to the Personal Data, WE DO NOT:

use the TrueDepth API Data for advertising, or marketing purposes, or to otherwise target a User in a similar manner;
use the TrueDepth API Data to attempt, facilitate, or encourage third parties to identify anonymous Users or reconstruct User profiles based on the TrueDepth API Data;
transfer, share, sell, or otherwise provide the TrueDepth API Data to advertising platforms, analytics providers, data brokers, information resellers or other such parties. You hereby express your informed written consent on processing of your TrueDepth API Data as described in this Section 13 of the Privacy Policy.

Privacy policy

1. Where This Privacy Policy Applies

2. Information We Collect

3. Cookies and Other Similar Data Collection Technologies

4. How We Use Information

5. How We Share Information

6. Your Rights

7. Residents of California

8. How We Protect Your Information

9. How Long We Retain Your Information

10. Children’s Privacy

11. Nondiscrimination

12. Use of Face Data

14. Privacy Policy Changes

15. How to Contact Us