Privacy Policy

About us

Where this Privcy Policy Applies

Informatin We Collect

How We Use Your Information and Data

How We Share Information

This is Join Gaybar’s Privacy Policy. Good to see you here!

This document explains how we collect, store, use and protect your information. It also explains how and with whom we share your information. And everything in simple, understandable language. We highly recommend that you read this Privacy Policy together with our Terms and Conditions, which explain the rights and responsibilities that apply to our services.

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@joingaybar.com.

This Privacy Policy applies from December 5, 2021. It is updated as of June 30, 2022.

About Us

Where this Privacy Policy Applies

Information We Collect

How We Use Your Information and Data

How We Share Information

Data Transfers Across Borders

Your Rights

Security

How Long We Keep Your Information

Privacy and Age

Changes to this Privacy Policy

1. About Us

Our app is called Join Gaybar, and it is owned and run by a company called Bloksberg Technologies AS. We use “Join Gaybar”, “us”, “we”, etc. interchangeably throughout this document. Bloksberg Technologies AS is responsible for your information under this Privacy Policy. Formally, we are the “data controller.” The company’s details are:

BLOKSBERG TECHNOLOGIES AS (org. nr. 928229742)

Postboks 4443 Nydalen

0403 Oslo

Norway

contact@joingaybar.com

2. Where This Privacy Policy Applies

Bloksberg Technologies runs a smartphone application (Join Gaybar) and a website (www.joingaybar.com). We’ll refer to these as our “Service” or “Services” in this document.

This Privacy Policy applies to all our Services, unless otherwise stated (in which case we’ll make sure you are aware of it). Links to this Privacy Policy will be easily accessible on our Services.

3. Information We Collect

Our Service is about helping you be at the right place at the right time, so that you can cross paths with people you are attracted to. Therefore, we need to collect some information about you. For example, we need basic details about who you are and what you’re looking for in potential partners. We also need to collect your geolocation to show you relevant profiles and to make sure you can check in at the right places. As you use our Services, we collect information about how you use them, and we may collect some information about you from third parties. An example of collection from third parties is when you connect to our Services with a social media account.

Below, we describe what information we collect. If you are wondering why we collect this information, check out section 4 where we explain how we use your information and what legal bases we rely on for its processing.

Registering your account

When you download Join Gaybar and register your account, we collect some “registration information” about you:

Email address.
Password.
Name/nickname.
Gender identity.
Partner preferences.
Date of birth.
Location.

You may change this information at any time by logging into your account. The exception is your date of birth (it will always remain the same) and your location (it will update automatically). It is your responsibility to keep your information up to date. E.g. if you change your email address or phone number, you should update this in your profile settings.

Information on your profile

As you complete your profile, it’s possible to share more information. The more you share, the better service we can provide, as we can better match you with people who fit your preferences. You choose how much and which types of information you want to share. Information you can share may for example be your:

Personality traits.
Work.
Education.
Height.
Interests.
Hobbies.
Likes and dislikes.
Photos.

With some notable restrictions set out in our Terms and Conditions, you may share whatever information you deem relevant. We will process the information that you choose to share with us. In the interest of protecting you from abuse and misuse by malicious actors, we encourage you to think carefully through what you share on your profile, and advice that you DO NOT put email addresses, URLs, instant messaging details, phone numbers, full names or addresses, credit card details, national identity numbers, drivers’ license details and other sensitive information on your profile. We also encourage you not to share this information when interacting with other users in chat conversations or on venue storyboards.

Information to verify your account

We do not want fake and fraudulent users on our platform (they tend to have malicious motives). This is both to ensure the security of you as a user and to ensure the security and integrity of our systems. In this process, we may ask you for the following information:

Phone number.
Email address.

Location information

Join Gaybar tries to bring people together out in the real world, and to do that well we need to collect your geolocation (that’s your longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates). Depending on your device, we may collect this through different means. This may be:

GPS (or another provider, like GALILEO, GLONASS or BeiDou).
WiFi.
Bluetooth.

If you permit it, we will also collect your geolocation in the background – that is, when the app is not open. This is to improve your user experience, as such data makes the check-ins in the map more accurate. This will only happen with your consent. If you want to make changes to whether we can collect your location data, you can do so the following way:

Android: Settings --> Location --> Join Gaybar --> Permissions --> Location

iPhone: Settings --> Privacy --> Location services --> Join Gaybar

Information about your device

To provide you with our Services, we sometimes need information about your hardware and software:

IP-address.
Device type.
App version.
Notification tokens.
Settings specific to your device and apps settings.
Operating system and its version.
Details related to potential malfunction of our Services.
Cookies generated by us.

If you permit it, we may also collect information from your contact lists in order to enable you to invite people to join you in the app.

Information related to in-app purchases

If you purchase a paid service (a one-time purchase or a subscription) this will be facilitated by the Android and iOS platforms. Your payment will then be a matter between you and the platform provider, and they will be responsible for the processing of your information. We will not have access to your payment information.

Information about your activity on our Services

We collect information about how you use our Services as part of our operations:

General user statistics.
When you log in and out.
What features you click on.
Check-in trends: locations, timestamps, etc.
Story posts, comments, and other interactions.
Who you like, dislike, give Gold hearts to.
Who likes, dislikes, gives Gold hearts to you.
In-app purchases and subscriptions.
Chat interactions with other users.
Links you click on, including links that redirect to external third-party sites.

Surveys, focus groups, interviews, etc.

Sometimes we may ask you for your feedback, for instance through a survey, focus group or a customer interview. When you participate in such activities, we collect the information that you provide as part of that interaction.

If your experience with our Service is positive, we may ask you if you want to participate in promoting the Service by sharing your story with the wider community through an advertisement campaign. If you accept, we collect information about you and some of the experiences you have with our Service. This is of course entirely voluntary, and we will not collect any such information unless you agree to participate.

Customer support

If you need to contact our support team, we will collect the information you give us during the interaction. This is so that we can help you solve any issues you are experiencing. Sometimes we also use such information to train our support teams, so that we can provide quality support to our users more generally. In such cases, we collect the following information:

IP address.
Email address.
Phone number.
All communications that emerge as part of the interaction.

Should you need us to communicate with other people for you, we must of course collect the information you give us about other people. This is necessary for us to assist you with your request.

We keep communications that emerge as a result of you contacting customer support for up to 6 years after you delete your account. This is to assist you if you contact us about your previous communications, and in case a claim arises in relation to the support. The storage period can vary in particular because of different limitation period between countries we operate in. The data stored includes any information that concerns complaints that you make about other users or that other users make about you.

Cookies and similar technologies

You may have heard the term “cookies”. Cookies are small pieces of information that are stored in your browser or device so that it becomes easier to authenticate you, remember your preferences, analyze traffic on our Services and produce content that may be of interest to you. We use cookies and other similar technologies (e.g. web beacons) for these purposes. You can read our Cookie Policy for more information about this and how you can control our use of cookies.

Information we receive from others

Sometimes we receive information about you from others. For example:

Other users may contact us about you.

4. How We Use Your Information and Data

So why are we collecting all this information? Well, it is mainly so that we can provide and improve our Services to you and earn revenue by displaying ads and promotions. We also need to ensure your security.

To be specific, these are the main ways in which we process your information:

To administer your account and provide our Services to you:

Set up your account and administer it.
Connect you with our support team and help solve your requests.
Facilitate transactions.
General communication with you over our Services.

To connect you with users you may be interested in:

Look at your profile, preferences and activity on our Service, so that we can show profiles we think are interesting to you and show your profile to people we think will find you interesting. We need to enable you and other users to check into public places on a map to increase the chance that you’ll be at the same place at the same time.

To ensure seamless functionality across devices:

If you are using multiple devices for our Services, we want the experience to be the same on each one. To do this, we look at your device identifiers and link these to data from your previous interactions in our Service, so that each device starts off where the last one left off.

To help you experience new Services:

If we develop new applications or features, and you want to sign up for these, we may use your information to make the transition as simple and efficient as possible. For instance, some information from one Join Gaybar account may make the completion of the account on another Join Gaybar Service much more convenient, in which case we will do that transfer for you.
Help you manage your account on new Services and applications.

To ensure compliance with applicable law:

Make sure we follow relevant laws and regulations.
Support law enforcement if we are required to.
Make sure that our rights are protected – e.g. our terms of Service.

To improve and develop new Services:

Sometimes we want your feedback on our Services. If so, we need to set up surveys or groups of users, and we will use your information to ask for your help.
We want our Services to be as good as possible, and sometimes we will look at users’ behavior and response to certain features to improve them.
If users’ behavior or input indicate that new features or Services are needed, we will consider developing them. In order to discover such needs, we must look at users’ data and communicate with them.

To market our Services and earn revenue:

If you agree, we will reach out to you via e.g. email or social media to give you information about products or Services.
We display ads, promotions, and the like from our business partners to earn revenue. Personal data about you is not shared with our business partner.

To avoid fraudulent, illegal and other unwanted behavior:

Take care of unwanted activity on our Services.
Look at data to develop effective measures to deter, contain and deal with such activities.
Keep data from previous incidents to prevent future incidents.

Data	Source	Why we collect and use these data	Legal basis
Name; birthdate; phone number; email address; password; gender identity; partner preferences; location	Name, birthdate, phone number and email address are provided to us by you. Location data are obtained from the device that you use to access our Services.	To be able to provide the most basic functions in Join Gaybar.	Contractual necessity
Information that you choose to contribute to your profile. Examples include sexual preferences; gender identity; photos; interests; education; occupation; height; etc.	You provide these data to us.	To facilitate for interactions and networking on the Join Gaybar platform.	Consent
Phone number; if necessary, photo provided as part of profile verification; geolocation; device information	You provide the data to us, with the exception of geolocation and device data. These data are obtained from the device that you use to access our Services.	To verify your identity and prevent fraud and to ensure the safety and security of Users.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in detecting fraudulent accounts, such that we may contribute to the safety and security of our users.
Email address; phone number.	You provide these data to us.	To send you marketing information about our offers and services.	Consent
WiFi access points. Location data when you use our Service (if you give permission)	We obtain these data from the device that you use to access the service (if you give your permission).	To showcase other users near you and correctly display check-ins in the map.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in providing this functionality as part of our Services.
Logs and data on how you use our Service. Examples include IP address; browser type; referring domain; pages accessed; mobile carrier; search terms; photos.	You upload photos to us. We acquire log and usage data from the device that you use to access our Services.	To do research and development so we can improve our Services.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in analysing and understanding how users are accessing and using our Services such that we can improve functionality and security across our Services.
Email address; IP address; social media name; phone number; all communications that emerge as part of the interaction.	Email address, social media name and phone number and communications are provided by you when you contact us. We acquire your IP address from the device that you use to get in touch with us.	To help solve issues or other queries that you have regarding our Services.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in responding to users’ enquiries to ensure that we provide a good service and efficiently solve issues.
Email address; phone number; IP address; IP session information.	You provide email address, username and phone number to us. We acquire the remaining data from the device that you use to access our Services.	To block accounts that are likely producing spam or engaging in other unwanted activities.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in preventing behaviour that goes against our rules, both to ensure a safe and secure environment for our users and to ensure the security of our Services.
Name; user registration data; profile information; content of chat messages; content of venue stories; photos.	You provide all these data to us by using our Service.	To investigate and potentially block users for violating our Terms and Conditions.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in preventing unauthorised behaviour and to maintain the security of our Services.
Name; IP address; email address; mobile phone number; cardholder name; payments received; type of payment; user ID; country.	Your name, email address, mobile phone number and card details are provided by you. We acquire your IP address from the device that you use to contact us. We acquire your payment data from your interactions with our Services.	To prevent fraud by blocking financial transactions.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in preventing fraudulent transactions and to maintain the security of our Services.
Location; age; gender identity; information that you have provided on your profile; check-in trends; your profile likability.	You provide age, gender identity and information on your profile. We obtain location data from the device that you use to access our Service. We derive check-in trends and profile likability from your interaction with our Service.	To show you targeted promotion cards, segmented ads, and the like on our Services. We do not share personal data about you with our advertising partners to show you these ads etc.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in displaying advertisements and the like to allow us to generate advertising revenue.
Data about your visits to our website or app and action taken on these; IP address (and your estimated location based on your IP address); age; device ID.	Age and gender identity are provided by you. We acquire the remaining data from the device or browser that you use to access our Services.	To show ads on third-party sites and networks and measure how effective those ads are.	Consent. You control what permissions you give in your Privacy Settings and Cookies Settings and via your browser or device privacy settings (if the manufacturer of your device makes this possible, for example Apple devices using iOS 14.5).
Email address; phone number; information provided in surveys etc.	You provide these data to us.	To get in touch with you to conduct user surveys and obtain your feedback. Also, to contact you over participation in marketing campaigns.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in carrying out user research so that we can develop better functionality and improve our Services. Participation is voluntary.
Any information that is relevant to the issue.	We may obtain this information directly from you, acquire it from your device or from third parties, depending on the nature of the information and the matter.	To defend ourselves from legal claims, protect our legal rights and to protect people from harm.	Legitimate interests. We have a legitimate interest in protecting our legal rights, defending against legal claims and protecting our users and third-parties from harm.

5. How We Share Information

The goal with Join Gaybar is that you’ll find yourself in the right place at the right time for meeting potential partners more often than if you did not use our Service. Therefore, most of the information about you that we share, we share with other users. That said, sometimes we share users’ info with third parties who help us operate our Services. In such circumstances, there are agreements that specify what the partner will get access to and what it is allowed to do with the information. We may also share some user information with other Trobetho-owned companies and in some cases legal authorities.

In what situations may data be shared?	What data are disclosed?
Join Gaybar is part of the Trobetho Group. Sometimes we rely on other Trobetho companies for data processing. In such cases, we share user information with them. Sometimes, we also share information with Trobetho-owned companies in the interest of audits, financial reporting as well as compliance with other legal obligations. If users violate our Terms and Conditions or we receive evidence of criminal behavior or other unwanted activities, we may share information about such users to other Trobetho-owned companies to have them banished from all our Services.	Email address, phone number, password, name/nickname, date of birth, location, profile content, IP address and IP session information, username, user ID, transaction/ payment data (e.g. transaction IDs), device type, operating system, crash logs, browser type, specific device and app settings, version and language settings, time zone, cookies, MAC-address/IMEI, device sensor data (e.g. compass), likes, dislikes, Gold hearts, chat interactions, venue story interactions, link interactions, in-app purchases, subscriptions.
If Join Gaybar or any of its affiliates are involved in some sort of corporate transaction – for example a sale, acquisition, merger, restructuring, divesture, reorganization, dissolution or bankruptcy – we may transfer your information as part of that process.	This could include all personal data that we hold about you.
We may be obligated by law to share your information. This broadly happens in three instances. First, when we have to comply with a legal process – e.g. a court order, subpoena, search warrant, investigation by the authorities. Second, to help prevent or detect criminal activity. And third, to protect the security of another human being. There are also a few other situations in which we may share your information: If disclosing information is necessary to safeguard our legal rights and the legal rights of our users, partners and other third parties. If the enforcement of our agreements with you require us to disclose information, we may do so. The same applies if disclosure is necessary for the investigation, prevention, damage control of illegal activities, potential fraud or other misconduct.	This could include all data that we hold on you.
When you choose to share information on our Service, this means that information will be shared with other users. The information we are talking about is what is visible on your public profile and information that you choose to share with other users when you are in direct contact with them. When you check into a location, other users will also be able to see this in their maps (your identity remains unknown until a match checks in at the same place and unlocks you). It is important that you think carefully about what kind of information you want other users to see, because you (or we) cannot control what other people do with that information once it’s out there.	Any information that you publish on your public profile, content you publish in chat messages or venue storyboards, check-in locations in real-time.
Our moderators will get access to information so that they can keep our Services free of content that goes against our Terms and Conditions.	User registration details, profile content, content of chat and venue storyboards and images.
We collaborate with trusted third parties to operate our Services. The nature of this collaboration is primarily cloud storage and computing, app management and analytics and website operations. We share data with them so that they can perform maintenance, analyses, marketing, support services, and cybersecurity operations for us. They are not allowed to use your data for anything outside the defined scope of the processing activities they perform for us.	Could involve all data.

Some information is of what is called a “non-personal” character, which means that the information, in itself, does not reveal who you are. This would be things like information about your device, general behavior data, demographic data and some forms of geolocation data. Information that is of a more personal character can be put into a non-human readable form (scrambled, hashed). We may use and share both personal data, non-personal data, and scrambled personal information under the circumstances described above, in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

6. Data Transfers Across Borders

In some cases, sharing of information across borders occurs. When data are transferred from one jurisdiction to another, we make sure that legal safeguards are in place to ensure the privacy and security of your data. We strive to conduct all our processing in the European Economic Area (EEA), but sometimes it may be necessary to transfer data to countries outside this region. When this happens, we use standard contract clauses that are approved by the European Commission to ensure that the privacy and security of your data are maintained all the way.

7. Your Rights

Let us be clear: you should be in control of what happens with the information we hold on you. Therefore, we encourage you to make good use of the following toolkit:

Edit profile and app settings. Your edit profile page and account settings enable you to access, change or delete information that you have provided to us as part of setting up and enriching your profile. These settings are fairly straightforward, but if you have any questions, contact us at support@joingaybar.com.
Device settings. Your smartphone has a permission system that controls certain kinds of actions, such as location services and push notifications. You can use these settings to control if you want us to collect certain types of data or display notifications from us. Of course, be aware that our Services will not have much functionality if you restrict certain permissions, e.g. location services.
Deletion. There is an option to delete your account on our Services. This functionality is available in the account settings menu.

In addition to this, if you reside in certain jurisdictions please note that you may have the following rights:

The right to access. You have the right to request us for information about and copies of data that we keep about you.
The right to rectification. You have the right to request that we correct any information you believe is inaccurate. You also have the right to request us to complete the information you believe is incomplete.
The right to erasure. You have the right to request that we erase your personal data, under certain conditions.
The right to restrict processing. You have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
The right to object to processing. You have the right to object to our processing of your personal data, under certain conditions.
The right to data portability. You have the right to request that we transfer the data that we have collected to another organization, or directly to you, under certain conditions.

If you make a request, we will generally respond to you within one month, although in some situations it may take up to three months. If you want to exercise any of these rights, contact us at privacy@joingaybar.com.

Keep in mind that we may need you to produce proof of your identity before we can meet some of these requests. Furthermore, in certain cases we can reject some requests, for instance if the request is illegal or it may threaten to compromise our intellectual property or other commercial secrets, or it may infringe upon another user’s privacy. It may be the case if you request information about another user – as part of your interaction through our Service. We may then require that the other user produces written consent to us before any information is disclosed to you. If you file an objection to our processing of your personal information, we may not be able to accommodate it if doing so implies that we will no longer be able to provide our Service to you.

Also keep in mind the following:

If you want to stop all further information collection, you can uninstall our Service from your device. If you do this, the unique identifier that is associated with your device will continue to be stored by us. This is because if you re-install the application on the same device, we can connect your identifier with your previous activities on the app. You can find out more about how long we store data below.
In some countries, for instance in the European Union, you are entitled to file a complaint with a data protection authority if you are worried that we are not processing your personal information as we should. Note that the data protection authority in question will depend on where you live or where you work or where we are established. For example, in Norway the data protection authority is Datatilsynet.

8. Security

Protecting your information and account from unauthorized access, changes, sharing or destruction is one of our highest priorities. Our security philosophy is centered around a defense-in-depth mindset, where we are building multiple perimeters to make sure your information is secure. However, we cannot promise that your personal information will not be compromised by malicious actors. Therefore, we again ask you to pay close attention to the information you publish through our Service and follow our Security Guidelines.

If we have reason to think that our systems have been compromised or are under attack, we may temporarily make our Service unavailable to you. If you think that someone has compromised your account or information, you must let us know immediately at security@joingaybar.com.

9. How Long We Keep Your Information

We have no interest in holding onto your personal information longer than necessary: we only keep it for as long as we need it to run our Services and as permitted by law. If you choose to delete your account, we will keep your information for three months, so that if you change your mind, you may continue to use our Service where you left.

When you delete your account, we delete or anonymize (scramble) your information after these three months. If you are inactive for two years, we do the same – even if your account has not been deleted. There are a few exceptions to this:

Some information must be kept longer to comply with certain laws.
We must keep some information to show our compliance with certain laws if we are audited (e.g. some consent records are kept for five years).
If there is an unresolved issue that requires us to keep some information until it is resolved, we will keep the information.
Some information is kept in order to support our business interests. Examples include user safety and security as well as fraud prevention. If a user is banned from our Services, we will keep that information to prevent the person from opening another account.

11. Privacy and Age

As you know, our Services are not open to users under the age of 18 years. Therefore, we do not intend to collect personal information from people under 18 years of age. If you come across a user that you suspect is under 18 years old, please report that user immediately through the report functionality in our Service.

12. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may change the content of this policy from time to time. If these changes involve material changes, we’ll make sure to notify you through e.g. an email or a notification on our Services.

The current version will always be available at www.joingaybar.com/privacy.

13. Contact Us

If there is something that remains unclear about this Privacy Policy, please reach out to us with your questions at privacy@joingaybar.com.