Privacy Policy

Since our service helps you lend items to other people and borrow theirs, we have to give other people information about you, and about things you own and things you want. This privacy policy tells you about our approach to personal information, what information we collect, what we do with it, and what choices we give you about these things.

1 Our approach to personal information
We believe that although anonymity is a useful and important thing in many applications on the web, it also has drawbacks when it tempts people to behave badly. Since our service is all about helping people to share things they own with others, we believe that providing incentives to good behaviour and transparent information about behaviour are both crucial to making our service effective. As a result, we try to balance two principles in our handling of personal information: keeping your information private enough to prevent you from being annoyed or troubled by others, and giving out enough information about you to make it easy for you to borrow items from others and lend them yours. These principles are not easy to reconcile, and we welcome your advice and comments on how to find the right balance. Please let us know these by sending email to privacy@lendaround.com or use our contact form.

2 Our legal obligations and rights

2.1 Courts
Like all companies, we are obliged to submit to the courts in jurisdiction where we operate. We may therefore use information we collect or that is provided by you to comply with subpoenas, court orders, or other legal processes.

2.2 Our legal rights
We may also use any such information to establish or exercise our legal rights, or defend against actual or threatened legal claims.

2.3 Fraud prevention
We may also use any such information if we believe it necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding (a) illegal activities which could give rise to a liability to us or to third parties; (b) fraud or threats of violence; (c) breach of our terms of service.

2.4 Overriding section
The section on our legal rights and obligations is the most important part of this privacy policy. If it conflicts with any other section, then this one will prevail.

3 What information we collect, and how we use it

3.1 Friends' email addresses
The first piece of information we are likely to collect about you is your name and email address, because one of our existing users sent you an emailed invitation through our service. We retain this information after contacting you so that our users can keep track of the people they have invited.

3.2 Contact details from inquiries
If you contact us by email or phone to ask questions about our service, we may retain your contact details and may contact you again in future to tell you about services we are offering that we think may be interesting to you. We will not sell or rent this information to third parties.

3.3 Registration information
We collect the personal information you provide, and use it to contact you about our service and about future services we might offer. To make our service useful to you, we also need to share it with others. Here is what we collect and what we do with it.

3.3.1 First and last name
We show your first and last names to other users when you list items that you have or wish for, and when you review or rate items on our site.

3.3.2 Email address
When you invite someone else to use our service, ask to borrow an item of theirs, or offer to send an item to them, we tell them your email address so that they can contact you directly if there are problems in the transaction. When you give us an email address, we send a message to this address in order to verify that you actually have access to it. We also send you emails in connection with loans, and to notify you about new items added to the service that you may be able to borrow. We will also send you email about new services we hope to offer, but will give you the opportunity to opt out of receiving further such emails.

3.3.3 Password
We ask you to enter a password so that others cannot get unauthorized access to your private information. We store this password only in encrypted form, which means that although we can verify whether a string of characters you present matches this password, we do not know what your password is ourselves and cannot inform you of it.

3.3.4 Postal address
When an item is sent to or from you, we provide your postal address to the other person involved to increase the chance of safe delivery or return to sender.

3.3.5 Same-address users
Because we offer parents and guardians the right to control their children's access to our service, information you provide may be shared with your parent or guardian if you are under 18. Because we also allow concerned parents to find out the names of users of our service at their address, we may share your name and the fact that you have registered on our site with others at the same address as you.

3.4 Profile
We also invite you to provide more information about yourself on your profile page. Since people are more confident about lending their property to people if they know more about them, we believe that the profile information you provide can help you to lend and borrow more easily. Your publicly visible profile page will exclude your family name and the place you live by default. We aim in future to give you more control over what appears in your public profile.

3.5 Reviews
We encourage you to rate and review items on our web site. Any reviews that you write will be public, and may be retrieved by bots or other software. This could result in information you include in reviews being found through search engines. You should be particularly careful not to include any personally identifying information in reviews, such as your name, contact details, or place of work or education.

3.6 Activity information
After you register, we collect and maintain information about your site activity, including items you list, request, lend, borrow and review, and details of problems arising from transactions or promised transactions. We share this information with other users to help them lend and borrow items, and to decide whether they think you are trustworthy.

3.7 Verification information
To make it easier for you to contact other people to lend to and borrow from, we provide tools that allow you to retrieve the contact information of people you already know from your accounts with third-party web mail providers or contact managers, such as Yahoo! Mail or Plaxo. To help you retrieve this information, we ask for your user name and password. We do not cache or store this information, and have no access to it after you have used it.

3.8 Web site usage
To make our web site more effective and to safeguard the security of our servers and our users, we maintain logs that track the IP numbers, browser details and computer preferences of users of our web site, together with information on the pages they visit. We also share this information with Google Analytics, a third-party service that provides us with analytical data about use of our web site.

4 How we will not use your information
Without asking your permission, we will not sell or rent your personal information to third parties.

5 Cookies

5.1 Session cookies
As you pass from page to page our web site, we use session cookies to identify you as the same site visitor who viewed a previous page. This practise, which is standard across the Internet industry, allows us to make the experience of visiting out site more convenient for you while ensuring that your personal information is not shown to others. These cookies are destroyed when you end the visit and close down your web browser.

5.2 Persistent cookies
To save you the trouble of re-entering your user name and password each each time you visit our web site, we give you a 'Remember me' option which will place a 'persistent cookie' on your computer. This cookie is an encrypted random string of characters that identifies you as entitled to access the details of your account. We advise you not to choose this option on a computer that is shared with others, unless the separate users of the machine have separate secure data areas and passwords, and never on a public machine such as in an Internet café.

6 Amending your information
We are committed to keeping the information we hold about you accurate and up to date. If you notice an error in this information, please contact us at dataerrors@lendaround.com or let us know via our contact form. We will make a good-faith judgment about the correctness of the information you alert us to, and make amendments if and to the extent that we reasonably consider them appropriate. You may not change comments made about you by others.

7 Removing your information

7.1 Requesting removal
Because our service involves the lending of items between users, you may not ask us to remove personal information about you while you have outstanding items borrowed from others or lent to others.

7.2 Buffer period
In order to provide a buffer period to resolve issues about damage to items, we retain your personal information for 90 days after the return of lent and borrowed items.

7.3 Removal after buffer
If you would like us to remove your information after this period, then please contact us by email at removeinfo@lendaround.com or use our contact form.

8 Changes to this privacy policy

8.1 Changes to policy
If we make changes to this privacy policy, we will notify you by email or by placing a notice at least seven days in advance on our home page or prominently elsewhere on our web site.

8.2 Merger
If our company merges with or is acquired by a third party, it is likely that your information will become subject to a different privacy policy. In this event, we will notify you before the transfer either by email or by placing a notice on our home page or prominently elsewhere on our web site.

9 Questions about this privacy policy
If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at privacy@lendaround.com or use our contact form.