Privacy Policy

The Dots Global Limited (‘The Dots’, ‘Dots Connect’, ‘We’ or ‘Us’) take data protection very seriously and are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This policy explains when we are the data controller over your personal data. Our registered office is 10 Great Queen Street Place, London EC4R 1AG and you can view our registration with the Information Commissioner‘s Office here.

This policy (together with OurTerms and Conditions of Useand any other documents referred to in either document) explains how We collect, use and handle any personal information We collect from you when you use Our website atwww.the-dots.com(our ‘Site’), Our mobile app, as well as Apps that include access to our professional network (our ‘App’), both of which together We call Our ‘Services’.

If you are using an App that integrates with our professional network, we are a joint controller with the organisation whose App you are using, as set out in more detail in the Settings page of your App.

Please read the following carefully to understand Our views and practices regarding your personal data and how We will treat it.

COLLECTING YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

Our public-facing professional network exists to help our members and users to advance and develop their careers, and to find career opportunities and talent.
Our individual private ‘white label’ membership communities (also known as ‘White Labels’, ‘White Label Apps’, or ‘Channels’) exist to enable members of private organisations to network online within those communities.

With these two goals in mind, we may collect and process the following data about you:

Information you give us. You may give Us information about you or relating to you:

if you register to become a user of Our Services;
if you send Us a message through Our Services or correspond with Us by telephone in writing or otherwise;
as you visit web pages on Our Website or use Our App;
if you subscribe to one of Our Services;
participate in a discussion board or other social media functions on Our Services;
if you enter a competition, promotion or survey;
if you report a problem to us; and
from any of your activities in connection with your use of Our Services.

Before you can access and use all of Our Service’s features and services, you must register to become a user of Our Services.

To register, We ask that you provide Us with certain personal information, which will generally include your name, address, phone number, email address, date of birth, academic record, profile picture and personal website (each to allow Us to customise your experience), a username and a password created by you. You may also elect to upload materials to your profile that include personal information. Please do not post or add personal data to your profile that you do not want to be publicly available.

Information We collect about you. With regard to each of your visits to Our Services, We may automatically collect the following information:

technical information, including the Internet protocol (IP) address used to connect your computer to the Internet, your login information, browser type and version, time zone setting, your ISP and/or mobile carrier, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, your location (if you are accessing the Services from a mobile device (note that most mobile devices will allow you to prevent location data from being sent to us));
information about your visits, including the full Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to, through and from which you access Our Service (including date and time); products you viewed or searched for; page response times, download errors, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), methods used to browse away from the page, and any phone number used to contact us; and
we use the hCaptcha anti-bot service (“hCaptcha”). This service is provided by Intuition Machines, Inc., a Delaware US Corporation (“IMI”). hCaptcha is used to check whether the data entered on our website (such as on a login page or contact form) has been entered by a human or by an automated program. To do this, hCaptcha analyzes the behaviour of the website or mobile app visitor based on various characteristics. This analysis starts automatically as soon as the website or mobile app visitor enters a part of the website or app with hCaptcha enabled. For the analysis, hCaptcha evaluates various information (e.g. IP address, how long the visitor has been on the website or app, or mouse movements made by the user). The data collected during the analysis will be forwarded to IMI.

Information We receive from other sources.

Others may post, write about and tag ('credit') you, or link to your profile through the Services (known as ‘following’).
You and others may post content that includes information about you on Our Services.
For identification purposes, if you create an account with Us using Facebook or Google’s Gmail's log-in credentials, We may import your public profile image from these sites to use in profile on The Dots, but only if you have authorised these sites to provide this to Us.
Customers and partners may provide data to us, such as email addresses which we use as a data processor on our customers' behalf when they contact you using our platform.
We work closely with third parties (including, for example, business partners, sub-contractors in technical, payment and delivery services, advertising networks, analytics providers and search information providers) and may receive information about you from them. At present these services are provided by the following entities and / or their groups of companies:
- AWS Europe
- Cloudflare, Inc.
- Dropbox, Inc.
- Facebook, Inc. and Facebook Ireland Limited
- Google GSuite
- Google LLC, Google Ireland Ltd
- Groove Apps, LLC
- Mixpanel, Inc.
- Pusher, Inc.
- Rollbar, Inc.
- Seers Group Ltd
- Stream.io, Inc
- Stripe, Inc.
- Xero Ltd

HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION

The purpose for which We use and process your personal data (excluding sensitive personal data) and the lawful basis on which We carry out each type of processing is explained below.

Purposes	Lawful Basis
1. GENERAL USE OF SITE
To create, personalise, provide support and maintain your user account and profile for Our Services.	Legitimate interests
To send you information about your account, the facilities We or Our related companies provide or changes or upgrades that We make to those facilities.	Legitimate interests
To authenticate you and authorise access to Our Services.	Contract
To alert you via email of relevant opportunities and activities (including, without limitation, jobs, workspaces, content and notifications (for example, if another user connects with your profile on the Platform, messages you through the Platform, or ‘likes’ one of your projects)).	Legitimate interests
To allow you to stay in touch, in communication, up to date with, and aware of professional opportunities (including jobs, and events) involving contacts, collaborators and clients. To do so, you can find and ‘Connect’ with the professionals you choose.	Legitimate interests
To suggest ‘connections’ or ‘tags’ for you and others.	Legitimate interests
To process applicant details when applying for a role or when seeking a professional collaborator for a project.	Legitimate interests
To operate a customer helpdesk service to respond to membership queries	Legitimate interests
To log certain security and privacy-related activities that occur on your account in line with our legal obligations	Legal Obligation
To circulate feedback via surveys to our members asking how we can improve The Dots	Consent
2. NETWORKING
To allow you to seek out and be found for career opportunities (public-facing platform) or by your fellow community members (if you have joined a private White Label Channel).	Legitimate interests
To allow you to invite new team members to be credited in your projects, and to join The Dots	Legitimate interests
To promote our members’ profiles, such as promoting your work or profile on The Dots	Legitimate interests
To send you newsletters which you may elect to receive	Consent
To send you requests from a mutually-Connected contact in your network asking for general help or advice	Legitimate interests
To send you email updates from members in the private White Label Channels that you have joined and are a member of	Legitimate interests
3. EVENTS
To provide a platform for you to attend private and public events, and to network with other members at / after those events. By attending events your profile will be visible as an attendee of the event on the public internet. You will have the option of consenting to have your personal data passed to the event sponsors, but that this will require your explicit consent.	Legitimate interests
To promote to you, and enable you to enter competitions (for example to participate in ‘masterclasses’ that We or Our third party partners may put on).	Consent
To send you events & opportunities emails that contain promotions on and behalf of our third party partners.	Consent
4. OTHER STAKEHOLDERS
To process potential applicant details for jobs with The Dots when applying for a role.	Legitimate interests

Except as set out in this Privacy Policy or otherwise agreed by you, We will not share your personal information with third parties (such as marketing companies) or use your personal information other than for Our internal purposes.

We do not store credit card details.

We monitor for and try to prevent security breaches.

ADVERTISING AND COOKIES

We use 'cookies' and similar technologies (e.g. web beacons, pixels, ad tags, and device identifiers) to identify information about your web browser session and personalisation data each time you visit and use Our Services. A 'cookie' is a small data file that will be stored by your web browser when you access Our Services. These cookies do not contain any of your personal information such as name or email, the information stored in the cookie will only identify you to The Dots. Cookies can be used to enhance your use of Our Services, as We use them to help personalise Our delivery of services and material to you, such as information which is most relevant to your profile and interests.

You can set up your browser so that it does not accept Our cookies. You can also manually delete Our cookies from your browser. However, you will not be able to login to Our Services without cookies being enabled on your browser. When browsing without logging in, some features may not behave as intended when cookies are not accepted.

Cookies from other entities – ‘third party’ cookies – may also be set on your devices.

Please see Our Cookie Policy for further information.

HOW WE MAY SHARE YOUR INFORMATION

We may engage third parties to undertake some of Our Services or related services such as hosting, archiving, data security and email communications. We may provide those third parties access to personal information for the sole purpose of them providing their services to us. We will use reasonable endeavours to ensure that those third parties only use your personal information for the specific purposes for which it is provided to them and consistently with this Privacy Policy.

We use others to help provide Our Services (e.g. maintenance, analysis, audit, payments, fraud detection, marketing and development). They will have access to your information as reasonably necessary to perform these tasks on Our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for other purposes.

We may also disclose your personal information:

to analytics and search engine providers that assist Us in the improvement and optimisation of Our Services;
to Our related companies;
to Our professional advisors;
to law enforcement authorities, if We suspect that an unlawful act is being committed or that such disclosure will prevent that unlawful act; or
as otherwise required or authorised by law.

If you apply for a position that is advertised via Our Services, We will provide your contact details to the person or company advertising that position.

Other than the types of disclosures set out in this Privacy Policy or as otherwise agreed by you, We will not disclose your personal information to any third party.

PROCESSING OF PERSONAL DATA OUTSIDE THE EEA

The data that We collect from you may also involve transfer of your personal data to any country, including countries outside the United Kingdom and/or European Economic Area, but that in those cases, except where the relevant country has been determined to ensure an adequate level of data protection by the European Commission or We need to make the transfer in order to perform a contract concluded in your interests, We will ensure that the transferred personal data is protected by a data transfer agreement in the appropriate standard form approved for this purpose by the European Commission or by a binding legal agreement. it may also be processed by our staff operating outside the EEA who work for us. Such staff maybe engaged in, among other the provision of support services or for other services required to enable us to deliver our service to you.

THIRD PARTY WEBSITES

Please be aware that Our Services may contain links to third party websites. If you visit such websites, before providing your personal information on or in connection with those websites, We suggest you review the privacy policy and terms and conditions of use of the third party website.

WHAT ARE MY RIGHTS UNDER DATA PROTECTION LAWS?

You have various other rights under applicable data protection laws, including the right to:

access your personal data (also known as a “subject access request”);
correct incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you;
ask us to erase the personal data we hold about you;
ask us to restrict our handling of your personal data;
ask us to transfer your personal data to a third party;
object to how we are using your personal data; and
withdraw your consent to us handling your personal data.

Where we are a joint controller, you can contact either us or the other joint controller to exercise these rights. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Please keep in mind that privacy law is complicated, and these rights will not always be available to you all of the time.

You may be able to exercise some of these rights directly through the functionality We provide on Our Services. Alternatively, or where that is not possible, or if you wish to ask a question about your rights, please contact Us onhelp@the-dots.com

PERSONAL INFORMATION RETENTION

We may change the terms of Our Privacy Policy from time to time and at any time, and without actual notice to you. Please check this page from time to time to take notice of any changes We make, as these are binding on you.

The criteria We use for retaining different types of personal data, includes the following:

Information	Period
General queries- when you make an enquiry or contact us by email or telephone, we will retain your information for as long as necessary to respond to your queries.	After this period, We will not hold your personal data for longer than 1 year if We have not had any active subsequent contact with you.
Membership data - which will generally include your name, address, phone number, email address, date of birth, academic record, profile picture and personal website, a username and a password created by you.	Account Deletion:We will remove all personal identifiable data belonging to you within 30 days of receiving your request to delete. To legally demonstrate our compliance with the above, we are required to retain a small amount of anonymised contact data for up to 6 years to prove we have correctly executed your request.
Direct marketing- where we hold your personal data on our database for direct marketing purposes.	We will retain your information for as long as we have your explicit consent.

CHILDREN’S PRIVACY

Our Service does not address anyone under the age of 18 ('Children').

We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Child has provided us with Personal Data, please contact us. If We become aware that We have collected personal data from children without verification of parental consent, We will take steps to remove that information from our servers.

CONTACT

Questions, comments and requests regarding this Privacy Policy are welcomed and should be addressed to help@the-dots.com.