Penpal Privacy Policy - Global Penfriends

At Global Penfriends, we strongly believe in protecting the privacy of our Members' personal information. The below legal document indicates how Global Penfriends handles the information you provide to us. You should read it in conjunction with the Global Penfriends Terms and Conditions, of which this Privacy Policy forms part. 1.

Emails from Global Penfriends.
Most users are interested in how we will use their email address to communicate with them, so here's our email promise in plain English: Global Penfriends hate spam and maintain a strong Anti-Spam policy. We will NEVER ever send you unsolicited emails. There will be some emails that we will need to send you to provide you with a good Penpal service. These mails include notifications that you have received a message from a penpal, Virtual Smile notifications, reminders about your membership expiring and a quarterly newsletter. A full list of the types of emails you will receive to help you use the service most effectively (which we call Service Emails) are shown below:

Service Mails Explained
• Validation email - Used to verify your email address when you first register.
• Registration email - These explain how to use the site when you first join.
• Payment receipt - This is sent if you Upgrade your account.
• Renewal notices - A reminder for you to renew your membership.
• Service messages - Notification if website will be unavailable for a period.
• New mail notification - Notice of a new message waiting in your GP inbox.
• Approval/decline messages - Sent after you edit or resubmit your profile.
• Penpal Match Finder mails - Notice of new members (Only if you have it activated)
• Suspension notices - In the event of you breaking any Club rules.

Newsletter
As well as these Service Emails, you will also receive occassional Newsletters (Sent Quarterly at most) These newsletters are usually sent when new functionality is added to the site We only send a newsletter when there is something worthwhile to tell you about, so your inbox will never be overflowing with Global Penfriend mails.

Credit Details
We use Paypal for all credit card processing. Paypal is a respected and trusted Internet Credit card merchant and is designed to protect both buyer and seller. We have used Paypal for many years and have never had a problem with the service they provide. They are very secure and do not allow us to see your credit card number and expiry date - Only Paypal sees this information.

IP Data Collection
Any user that creates a profile on our site will have their IP address stored for the duration of the profile life. This information is used to detect a users Geo-location and is collected for the sole purpose of verification of the profiles stated country. The information is not used for precise location detection.

General Privacy of Contact Details
We guarantee that we will not supply your personal data to a third party for commercial exploitation - thus, you can rest assured that the information you supply in your profile is only going to be used by Global Penfriends.

We will never sell the lists of our Members' email addresses to any third party. It is impossible for your email address to be given out to another user of our Club unless you yourself give the address willingly through the Internal messaging system on our website.

Members who willingly submit their postal addresses for distribution to other penpals must realise that their postal addresses are assessible by any Premium (paying) member of the Global Penfriend Club. It is completely optional whether you display your postal address and we ask any member concerned with privacy should simply not provide this information where asked.

Changes to this Privacy Policy
If we change this Privacy Policy, we will notify you of the changed document in the same way as we notify changes to the Global Penfriends Terms and Conditions.

Are we CCPA Compliant?
Yes we are. Since we do not sell data we collect to any third party or use your data in any other way than to help you find penpals. We conform with the California Consumer Privacy Act which was introduced to stop businesses selling customers personal data. We are very happy this consumer law was introduced and will be happy to see it rolled out all over the world.. finally governments are protecting consumers data.

Collecting only data we need
We review our profile input forms regularly to ensure we are only gathering the information required. We are finding people penpals and we only collect data relevant to this penpal matching process.

Why we need Personal information
Some personal information such as email address is required but only used for contact purposes as explained above.

Keeping your Data accurate
To ensure your personal data is accurate, we promise to provide you the means to review your data and edit it as required.

Never use your Real Name
We always tell members when they register to use an alias for their profile name. By using your real name you may be searchable on google when our site is indexed. Sometimes we receive requests to remove information from orphaned profiles - In these cases the profile owners have forgotten or lost access to the email address they used to register and have forgotten their login credentials. In these cases Global Penfriends must charge an administration fee to remove the profile.

Know your Rights
Did you realise that companies in the US have been charged over incidences of failing to protect individuals personal data. With this in mind, Global Penfriends is doing everything it can to ensure that information you supply to us is treated with respect and due security to ensure that your personal information is safe and secure. If you are providing your personal data on any website - Please ensure that the website has a privacy policy for peace of mind that they will respect your information. We have members of all age groups, from all over the world and we promise to protect our members from any privacy related issues.