Privacy Policy

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CultureMee is a family owned company based in Limerick, Ireland. If you have any comments on these terms of service & privacy policy, feel free to email CultureMee at info@culturemee.com. This is a legally binding document between you and CultureMee (“we” or “us”) that affects your rights and governs your use of the CultureMee content platform. Please read it carefully, because it affects your legal rights. If you choose to retain and use the CultureMee mobile app (the “App”) and Website (the “Website”), you are accepting that these terms of service are legally binding on you.

Interpretation

In these terms, the following words and phrases shall be interpreted as stated in this section unless plainly intended otherwise. The word “including” shall be interpreted to mean “including without limitation.” Any word implying a gender shall incorporate any and all genders including neuter. The word “or” shall be interpreted to mean “and/or.” Any word implying a singular or plural shall be interpreted to apply to the singular and the plural.

Big Picture: Your Data and How We Protect It

Your data and the protection of it is something that we take very seriously.  

You place your trust in how we here in CultureMee are protecting your data, so firstly thank you for putting your trust in us. 

From our side, our mission is to help bring the beauty of culture to the world, but we can’t do this unless we have the oxygen of a business that can be sustainable. So longer term we need the commercial flexibility to be able to share some of the insights from this data with commercial partners down the line (such as offering more targeted ads to third party companies for example).

If you have any suggestions or questions, then please contact us directly at info@culturemee.com. 

Information That We Collect

We collect information from time to time to provide better services to all of our users. Some of the information helps you use our website (e.g. Location services), some of the information might help us understand what parts of our website users like the most or least (e.g. To help us find out what is or is not working for you our users) and some of it might help us better understand how people understand culture and travel for example. We collect information in the following ways: 

1. Information you give us. 

In previous versions of our app and website for example, when you logged into your CultureMee Account, we would ask for personal information, like your name, email address, and country to store with your account. We needed to access this information to enable you to take full advantage of the sharing features we offer, such as seeing where your friends have travelled and to use the compare your culture section. 

2. Information we get from your use of our services. 

We collect information about the services that you use and how you use them, like when you use our website for culture tips or watch a video on our CultureMee video platform. This information may include: Device information, Log information (e.g. such as crashes, system activity, hardware settings, browser type, etc.), Location information (e.g. for location services), Local storage (e.g. for CultureMee website data caches), Cookies and similar technologies (we and our partners may use various technologies to collect and store information when you visit CultureMee, and this may include using cookies or similar technologies to identify your browser or device. We also use these technologies to collect and store information when you interact with services we may offer to our partners.) 

How We Use Information That We Collect

We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones and to protect CultureMee and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content - like giving you more relevant cultural information based on where you’re from (e.g. Compare your culture graphs which compare your culture to the culture you’re travelling to). 

If you have a CultureMee Account, we may display your Profile name, Profile photo, and actions you take on CultureMee or on third-party applications connected to your CultureMee Account in our services, including displaying ads and other commercial contexts. We will respect the choices you make to limit sharing or visibility settings in your CultureMee Account. When you contact CultureMee, we keep a record of your communication to help solve any issues you might be facing. We may use your email address to inform you about our services, such as letting you know about upcoming changes or improvements. We use information collected from cookies and other technologies, like pixel tags, to improve your user experience and the overall quality of our services. 

We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those set out in this Privacy Policy. CultureMee processes personal information on our servers in many countries around the world. We may process your personal information on a server located outside the country where you live.

In addition to the above, the website may do any or all of the following with your content: apply filters to enhance media; collate, reorder or arrange media for narrative or aesthetic purposes; ask you questions about the Content; save Content locally or remotely, including potentially on servers located within or transmitting via the United States; enhance the content with hashtags or other metadata; aggregate feedback on the Content from social media platforms; process and display social media interactions; send you push notifications regarding the Content (if you have allowed this); display the Content to other users of the Website (e.g. Displaying culture videos to other users or the public who may or may not be connected to you on CultureMee); use the Content to send you customized sponsored third-party content (but sponsored content will be clearly labelled).

Accessing And Updating Your Personal Information 

Whenever you use our services, we aim to provide you with access to your personal information. If that information is wrong, we strive to give you ways to update it quickly or to delete it - unless we have to keep that information for legitimate business or legal purposes. 

Information That We Share 

We do not share personal information with companies, organisations and individuals outside of CultureMee unless one of the following circumstances applies: 

With your consent 

We will share personal information with companies, organisations or individuals outside CultureMee when we have your consent to do so. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information. 

For external processing 

We provide personal information to our affiliates or other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we have a partnership with Hofstede Insights, one of the world’s leading culture consultancies, and we may ask their help from time to time to help conduct joint research and/or other commercial initiatives to help for example improve our understanding of culture and the services we offer to our users.

For legal reasons 

We will share personal information with companies, organisations or individuals outside Google if we have a belief in good faith that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to: 

- meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request. 

- enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations. 

- detect, prevent or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues. 

- protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of CultureMee, our users or the public, as required or permitted by law. We may also provide Content to companies for example in the travel, tourism or culture industries to promote their products and services. We may be compensated by social media platforms or other third parties for providing the Content. In no event will you be entitled to any further compensation for the Content other than as provided in this Privacy Policy.

We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners – like publishers, advertisers or connected sites. For example, we may share information publicly to show trends about the general use of our services. 

If CultureMee is involved in a merger, acquisition or asset sale, we will continue to ensure the confidentiality of any personal information and give affected users notice before personal information is transferred or becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Information Security 

We work hard to protect CultureMee and our users from unauthorised access to or unauthorised alteration, disclosure or destruction of information that we hold. 

In particular: 

- Many of our services use encryption technology (e.g. Firebase). 

- We have email verification steps in place (e.g. You get sent confirmation emails to confirm your email address).

- We review our information collection, storage and processing practices, including physical security measures, to guard against unauthorised access to systems. 

- We restrict access to personal information to relevant employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us. They may be disciplined or their contract terminated if they fail to meet their obligations.

We make all reasonable efforts to protect the security of your Content. However, we cannot be responsible nor liable for data breaches, accidents or the actions of third parties, with or without malicious intent.

We will however promise to inform any users of any and all serious data breaches as soon as we are able do so.