This privacy policy describes how we handle your personal information. We collect, use, and share personal information to help the Gumtree website (“Gumtree”) work and to keep it safe (details below). In formal terms, Gumtree.com Limited, 5 New Street Square, London EC4A 3TW, acting itself and through its subsidiaries, is the “data controller” of your personal information. This policy is effective January 1st, 2009.
Collection. Information posted on Gumtree is obviously publicly available. Our servers are located in the Netherlands, United States and China. The laws on holding personal data in the United States may be less stringent than the laws applicable to the UK but Gumtree will hold and transmit your information in a safe, confidential and secure environment. If you choose to provide us with personal information, you are consenting to the transfer and storage of that information on our servers in the Netherlands, United States and China. We collect and store the following personal information:
- email address, physical contact information, and (depending on the service used) sometimes financial information;
- computer sign-on data, statistics on page views, traffic to and from Gumtree and ad data (all through cookies – you can take steps to disable the cookies on your browser although this is likely to affect your ability to use the site);
- other information, including users IP address and standard web log information.
Use. We use users’ personal information to:
- provide our services
- resolve disputes, collect fees, and troubleshoot problems;
- encourage safe trading and enforce our policies;
- customise users’ experiences, measure interest in our services, improve our services and inform users about services and updates;
- communicate and customise marketing and promotional offers to you according to your preferences;
- do other things for users as described when we collect the information.
Disclosure. We don’t sell or rent your personal information to third parties for their marketing purposes without your explicit consent. We may disclose personal information to respond to legal requirements, enforce our policies, respond to claims that a posting or other content violates other’s rights, or protect anyone’s rights, property, or safety (for example, if you submit false contact details or impersonate another person, we may pass your personal information to any aggrieved third party, their agent or to any law enforcement agency). We may also share personal information with:
- Members of the eBay Inc. corporate family — like eBay or PayPal—to provide joint content and services (like registration, transactions and customer support), to help detect and prevent potentially illegal acts and violations of our policies, and to guide decisions about their products, services and communications. Members of our corporate family will use this information to send you marketing communications only if you’ve requested their services
- service providers who help with our business operations.
Cookies. We or our service providers may place "cookies" (a "cookie" is a small files placed on the hard drive of your computer) and “web beacons” (a “web beacon” is an electronic image, called a single-pixel or clear GIF placed in the web page code) on your computer when you visit portions of Gumtree. Most cookies are "session cookies," meaning that they are automatically deleted from your hard drive at the end of a session, for example, when you close your browser. We may use permanent or session cookies to help analyse our web page flow; customise our services, content and advertising; measure promotional effectiveness, and promote trust and safety. You can block our cookies by changing the settings on your browser (Find out more about Accepting and Deleting Cookies (hyperlink), but doing so may prevent us from delivering certain services to you.
You may encounter cookies from third parties on certain pages of the site that we do not control. We use third-party ad-serving technologies, to serve ads, and they may place cookies on your computer. We do not allow these third parties to collect any personal information through the use of cookies in ads.
Using Information from Gumtree. You may use personal information gathered from Gumtree only to follow up with another user about a specific posting, not to send spam or collect personal information from someone who hasn’t agreed to that.
Communications and email tools. You agree to receive marketing communications from us unless you tell us that you prefer not to receive such communications. If you don't wish to receive marketing communications from us, simply indicate your preference by following the directions provided with the communication.
You may not use our site or communication tools to harvest addresses, send spam or otherwise breach our Terms of Use or Privacy Policy. We may automatically scan and manually filter messages sent via our communication tools for malicious activity or prohibited content, but we do not permanently store such messages. If you use our tools to send content to a friend, we don’t permanently store your friends’ addresses or use or disclose them for marketing purposes. To report spam from other users, please contact us here.
Access, Modification, and Deletion. You can see, modify or erase your personal information by reviewing your posting or account status page. Contact us here to review any personal information we store that is not available on Gumtree. There may be a charge associated with such requests but these will not exceed the amounts permitted by law. We delete personal information when we no longer need it for the purposes we described earlier. We retain personal information as permitted by law to resolve disputes, enforce our policies; and prevent bad guys from coming back.
Security. We use lots of tools (encryption, passwords, physical security) to protect your personal information against unauthorized access and disclosure, but as you probably know, nothing’s perfect, so we make no guarantees.
General. We may update this policy at any time, with updates taking effect when you next post or 30 days after we post the updated policy on the site, whichever is sooner. If we or our corporate affiliates are involved in a merger or acquisition, we may share personal information with another company, but this policy will continue to apply. If you have any questions about this policy please contact us here.
Privacy Policy updated November 2008