Privacy Policy

INTRODUCTION

Our mission is to provide a platform for support and exchange between people and businesses. In order to provide this exchange platform, we need to collect and process some of your information.

We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy, and we wrote this policy to help you understand what information we collect, how we use it and what choices you have about it. We welcome questions and comments on this policy – they should be directed to hello@economyofhours.com.

We also recommend you take a look at our Terms and Conditions (for Business Membership & Individual Membership depending on whether you signed up on behalf of a business/organisation, or as an individual). These cover all aspects of your Echo membership, including your use of the Echo web platform and any exchanges you may carry out with other Echo members.

WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?

We collect information in a number of different ways, including;

Information that you voluntarily submit when you sign up to and use Echo, including:

• Your name, postcode and email address
• Your profile picture
• Offer and request listings
• Feedback
• Customer service requests
• Transactions carried out through the site.

Technical information when you use the website, including:

• Traffic data, location data, weblogs and other communication data, and the resources that you access.
• IP address, operating system and browser type, for system administration and to report aggregate information to our advertisers.
• Cookies, to help provide a good experience on our website. For detailed information on the cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them see our Cookie policy.

Other information you may voluntarily provide, for example:

• Responses to surveys or feedback questionnaires
• Application forms for our events and programmes

WHAT WE DO WITH THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT

Echo is operated by Civic Ltd. Civic Ltd is is a company registered in the UK (company number 10861766), and operates on an entirely not-for-profit basis. We will never use your data and information commercially, nor will we sell it or share it with third parties.

We use information held about you for three primary purposes: (1) To provide, improve and develop the Echo platform and services. (2) To create and maintain a trusted and safer environment. (3) To provide you with information and communications directly related to your membership of Echo.

(1) To provide, improve and develop the Echo platform.

• Enable you to access and use the Echo platform
• Enable you to contact other Echo members
• Enable you to access and use listing, messaging and transaction services
• Provide customer service
• Send you service or support messages, such as updates, security alerts, and account notifications
• Notify you about any changes to our service
• Identify and analyse market trends in order to measure our impact and improve, develop and customise Echo’s services.

(2) To create and maintain a trusted and safer environment.

• Detect and prevent fraud, spam, abuse, security incidents, and other harmful activity
• Comply with our legal obligations
• Resolve any disputes with any of our users.

(3) To provide you with information and communications directly related to your membership of Echo.

• Send you news and information directly related to your membership of Echo. This may include: information about your membership, service updates, information about what you can access as part of your Echo membership. You can unsubscribe from these communications at any time by updating your communication preferences or contacting hello@economyofhours.com.
• Personalize, measure, and improve our communications with you.‍

‍CHOICES YOU HAVE ABOUT YOUR INFORMATION

Our goal is to give you simple and meaningful choices regarding your information. If you have a Echo account, many of the choices you have are built directly into your account. For example, you can:

• Edit or remove information in your profile at any time
• Edit or remove offers or requests that you have posted at any time
• Link or unlink your Echo account from other services (like Facebook, Google or LinkedIn)
• Select your communication preferences for system notifications (within the preference centre in your profile)
• Select your communication preferences for informational communications (within our Mailchimp preference centre)

You can also close your account at any time or receive support on editing or amending your account or updating your communication preferences by contacting hello@economyofhours.com.

HOW WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION SAFE

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers, and we use strict procedures and security features to keep your data safe and prevent unauthorised access.

Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password, which enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

HOW AND WHEN WE SHARE INFORMATION

We do not disclose any information about identifiable individuals to third parties, but we may where necessary disclose some information in an aggregated format, where no individual can be identified.

There are a few exceptional circumstances in which we might need to disclose your personal information to third parties:

• In the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets.
• If Civic Ltd or substantially all of its assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by it about its customers will be one of the transferred assets.
• If we restructure our organisation, for instance, by setting up a new organisation to run the time bank or by transferring the time bank to a different organisation, in which case we may disclose your personal data to that new company or that other organisation.
• If we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply our User Agreement and other agreements; or to protect our rights, property or safety, or those of our customers, member or others.

HOW LONG WE KEEP YOUR INFORMATION

We keep your information only as long as we need it to provide Echo services to you and fulfil the purposes described in this policy. This is also the case for anyone that we share your information with and who carries out services on our behalf. When we no longer need to use your information and there is no need for us to keep it to comply with our legal or regulatory obligations, we’ll either remove it from our systems or depersonalize it so that we can’t identify you.

OUR POLICY ON CHILDREN’S INFORMATION

Echo is for use by people aged 18 and over, as set out in our terms and conditions. Therefore, we do not process any information belonging to or pertaining to children.

YOUR OPTIONS

You have options in relation to the information that we have about you described below. To exercise these options, please contact us. As a member of Echo, you can:

• Access the information we hold about you.
• Have your information corrected or deleted. You can update your information at any time via your profile. If you have problems updating the information or if you would like us to delete it, contact us.
• Object to us processing your information. You can ask us to stop using your information, including when we use your information to send you email communications. You can do this at any time by emailing hello@economyofhours.com.

HOW AND WHEN WE MAKE CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

This policy will be reviewed and updated on a regular basis to ensure its compliance with the prevailing legislation at the time. Questions, comments and requests regarding this privacy policy are welcomed and should be addressed to hello@economyofhours.com

For the purpose of the General Data Protection Regulation (2018), the data controller is Civic Ltd, Impact Hub Islington, 27 Dingley Place, London, EC1V 8BR (Company No. 10861766).

Civic Ltd is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (Reg no. A8616446).

Last updated: March 2020