BirchPlace Privacy Policy

Children who are under 18 years old are not allowed to use our services.

We ask that children DO NOT use our site in any way.

About BirchPlace and the information we collect
BirchPlace is a live internet-based network that provides software to communicate and build relationships.

In our online registration, we ask you to provide us with certain information such as your date of birth. In addition, we may also collect your address, credit card, and bank information only from those who wish to acquire memberships.

At your own discretion, you may choose to post additional facts about yourself on your profile, such as your sexual-orientation, marital status, etc. While some members freely elect to include their names in their profile, it is not requested or required, and the BirchPlace Terms & Conditions forbids posting postal address contact information for any reason.

In the course of using our site, we automatically track certain information such as your IP addresses and email addresses. Most advanced web sites collect this sort of information. We may tie your IP address to your personally identifiable information. If you choose to post messages in our Advice Columns, chat rooms or other message areas, we will only display such information about you as you choose to reveal. If you use a bulletin board or chat room on this site, you should be aware that any personally identifiable information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. Once posted, you cannot change or remove any public postings made in our chat rooms or other message areas. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums. We reserve the right to terminate the accounts of visitors who use these services in a manner inconsistent with our Terms & Conditions.

If you send us personal correspondence, such as emails, or if other users or third parties send us correspondence about your activities or postings on the site, we may collect such information into a file which is only accessed by our own authorized employees. We may also collect other users' comments about you in our complaints department.

A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's computer tied to information about the user. We use session ID cookies. A session ID cookie simply terminates once a user closes the browser. Some of our business partners use cookies on our site (for example, advertisers). However, we have no access to or control over these cookies, once we have given permission for them to set cookies for advertising.

Our Use of Your Information
We internally use personally identifiable information of our users to improve our marketing efforts, to statistically analyze site usage, to process member payment and monetary transactions, to comply with applicable law, to improve our content and product offerings as well as to customize our site's content and layout. We believe these uses allow us to improve our site and better tailor your online experience to meet your needs. We use personally identifiable information to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems and enforce our User Agreement.

We may also use personally identifiable information about you to deliver information to you that, in some cases, are targeted to your interests, such as targeted banners and promotions.

We send periodic informational updates to our members via email. We send email advertisements to those who opted in to receive such advertisements or otherwise in compliance with the Can-Spam Statute.

Our disclosure of your information
We DO NOT sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party without your permission.

In order to maintain a healthy community, BirchPlace cooperates with all law enforcement inquiries and with all third parties to enforce their intellectual property or other rights.

We reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Web site. We use a credit card processing company to bill you for goods and services. These companies do not retain, share, store or use personally identifiable information for any other purposes.

Chat Room and general abusive behaviour
If you cause abuse in our chat rooms, we reserve all rights to publish and distribute to any third party any information about you, this includes your chat-logs, IP address, email address, photo, telephone numbers - including sending this information to the relevant law authorities and ISPs. Please do not cause abuse in our chat rooms or forums. It WILL come back and bite you! Here are some examples of a few idiots who like to threaten TVs etc, but can barely afford to top up their mobile phone cards, or string an English sentence together.

Timewasters
We maintain a directory of reported known timewasters that escorts and others can refer to before agreeing to meet someone - this contains email addresses and mobile telephone numbers. By accessing our network of sites to book and escort with no intention of showing up, can mean that they sometimes report this information to us for our 'members-only' Timewasters page. By access pages on our web site to make contact with escorts or members, you hereby give them full permission to pass your email and/or mobile number to us if they receive abuse, harassment or no-shows. Please use commonsense and avoid getting reported as a timewaster.

Security
BirchPlace has security measures in place to protect and prevent the loss, misuse, and alteration of the information under our control. BirchPlace uses industry standard efforts to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal identifiable information such as firewalls.

Your use of other users' information
You may not use other user’s information for commercial purposes, to spam, to harass, or to make unlawful threats. BirchPlace reserves the right to publish the information of those who misuse other user’s information or who otherwise violate the BirchPlace Terms & Conditions.

Control of your password
You may not disclose your password to any third parties or share it with any third parties. If, despite the foregoing, you lose control of your password, you may lose substantial control over your personally identifiable 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 change your password.

Reviewing and Changing Your Personally Identifiable Information
Once you register, you will be able to review and change much of your personally identifiable information at BirchPlace including:

• Your profile information
• Your email address
• Your password

Please promptly update your information if it changes by logging in to your account and following the screen prompts. We strongly urge you to periodically change your password to help reduce the risk of unauthorized access to your account information.

Upon your request, we will remove your credit card number and credit card expiration date from our main databases. To make this request, email us at Customer Service. We will retain in our files information, including credit card information, you have requested to remove in some circumstances, such as to resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, comply with Credit Card Merchant Banking and Association Agreements, enhance security and reduce fraud.

Third Party Collections of Information
Our policy only addresses the use and disclosure of information we collect from you. To the extent that you disclose your information to other parties on our system or other sites throughout the Internet, different rules may apply to their use or disclosure of the personal information you disclose to them. While BirchPlace is working closely with our partners to ensure the highest privacy to you, we encourage you to ask questions before you disclose your personal information to others.

We may use third-party advertising companies to serve ads on our behalf. These companies may employ cookies and action tags (also known as single pixel gifs or web beacons) to measure advertising effectiveness. If you would like more information about this practice and your choices, click here.

How to delete your profile
You can modify or delete your information from our database, by logging into your profile and then choosing the Edit Profile button. Then scroll down to the section on the page with the button to delete your Profile. Once deleted, your profile is gone forever - we do not keep your profile in a retrievable state to protect your privacy.

updated 30 January, 2009

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