Gitch Privacy Policy

Welcome to the Gitch Privacy Policy (“Policy”)! This explains how we collect, store, protect and share your information, and with whom we share it. We suggest you read this in conjunction with our Terms and Conditions of Use.

Whilst you’re enjoying the Gitch mobile application (including the desktop version) (“App”) and our website gitch.xyz, we collect some information about you. In addition, you may choose to use the App or Site to share information with other Gitch members. We may also need to share your information sometimes.

Gitch App and Site are global, and your information will be sent to and used in the United States and the UK regardless of the country you reside in. This Policy explains how we protect your personal data when we transfer it overseas, so please read very carefully!

OOO "Biverlid"- 220033, Belarus. Minsk, Timiryazeva 121/3, ofis 35-13

Owner contact email: info@gitch.xyz

When you download the App and create an account (“Account”), we may collect certain information (“Registration Information”) about you, such as:

• Name;
• Email address;
• Mobile number;
• Gender identity;
• Date of birth;
• Height;
• Sexual preference;
• Photographs;
• Location

Once you register, you will be able to review and change this information at any time just by logging in to Gitch.

The information we collect helps to enhance the App and verify our Users (robots are not welcome!). Registration Information such as your sexual preference, name may be visible to other Users who view your profile page.

For users who are California residents, the data we may collect falls within the following categories of “personal information,” as defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA):

• A. Identifiers, such as name and location;
• B. Personal information, as defined in the California customer records law, such as contact (including email and telephone number) and financial information;
• C. Characteristics of protected classifications under California or federal law (if you choose to provide them), such as age, gender identity, marital status, sexual orientation, race, ancestry, national origin, religion, and medical conditions;
• D. Commercial information, such as transaction information and purchase history;
• E. Biometric information, such as faceprint;
• F. Internet or network activity information, such as browsing history and interactions with our Sites and App;
• G. Geolocation data, such as mobile device location;
• H. Audio, electronic, visual and similar information, such as photos and videos;
• I. Professional or employment-related information, such as work history and prior employer;
• J. Non-public education information; and
• K. Inferences drawn from any of the personal information listed above to create a profile or summary about, for example, an individual’s preferences and characteristics.

Profile Information
We recommend and encourage you (and all our members) to think carefully about the information you disclose about yourself. We also do not recommend that you put email addresses, URLs, instant messaging details, phone numbers, full names or addresses, credit card details, national identity numbers, drivers’ licence details and other sensitive information which is open to abuse and misuse on your profile. When you post information about yourself or use the messaging function to communicate with other Users, the amount of personal information you share is at your own risk.

If you have given Gitch access to your location in your device settings, when you use your mobile, we will collect information about WiFi access points as well as other location information about your longitude and latitude and may save your device’s coordinates to offer certain features to you. This information helps us identify your physical location and we may use it to personalise the App and make it easier for you to interact with other Users, by enabling the general locality information to be displayed to Users seeing your profile and showing you the profiles of other Users who are near you.

If you have given Gitch access to your location services, but wish to turn them off, you can do so by the following methods:

• iPhone app — settings, privacy, location services, Gitch
• Android — settings, location, Gitch, permissions, location

Device Information
We may collect information about your device when you use the App including the unique device identifier, device model, and operating system, for a number of purposes, as set out here. In addition, if you permit us to do so, the App may access your device’s address book solely in order to add someone to your contacts.

Links
We may keep track of how you interact with links available on Gitch, including third party services by redirecting clicks or through other means. We may share aggregate click statistics such as how many times a particular link was clicked on.

Cookies and similar technologies
When you visit our Site or when you use our App, we may collect personal data from you automatically by using cookies or similar technologies. A cookie is a small file that can be placed on your device or browser that allows us to recognise and remember you. If you would like to find out more about cookies, including how we use them and what choices are available to you.

Subscription Information
If you purchase a Diamond Subscription, we may collect and process additional information related to your subscription, such as payment details (processed through third-party services), subscription status, and transaction history. This information is used to manage your subscription, provide access to premium features, and comply with applicable legal and financial obligations.

The main reason we use your information is to deliver and improve our services. Additionally, we use your info to help keep you safe, and to provide you with advertising that may be of interest to you. Read on for a more detailed explanation of the various reasons for which we use your information, together with practical examples.

A. To administer your account and provide our services to you

• Create and manage your account
• Provide you with customer support and respond to your requests
• Communicate with you about our services

B. To help you connect with other users

• Recommend you other members to meet
• Show members’ profiles to one another

C. To provide new Gitch services to you

• Register you and display your profile on new Gitch features and apps
• Administer your account on these new features and apps

D. To operate advertising and marketing campaigns

• Administer sweepstakes, contests, discounts or other offers
• Perform and measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on our services and marketing campaigns promoting Gitch off our services
• Communicate with you about products or services that we believe may interest you

E. To improve our services and develop new ones

• Administer focus groups, market studies and surveys
• Review interactions with customer care teams to improve our quality of service
• Understand how members typically use the services to improve them (for instance, we may decide to change the look and feel or even substantially modify a given feature based on how members react to it)
• Develop new features and services (for example, we may decide to build a new interests-based feature further to requests received from members).

F. To prevent, detect and fight fraud and other illegal or unauthorized activities

• Find and address ongoing, suspected or alleged violations of our Terms of Use, notably through the review of reports and interactions between members
• Better understand and design countermeasures against violations of our Terms of Use
• Retain data related to violations of our Terms of Use to prevent against recurrences
• Enforce or exercise our rights, for example our Terms of Use
• Communicate to individuals who submit a report, what we’ve done as a result of their submission

G. To ensure legal compliancess

• Comply with legal requirements
• Assist law enforcement

H. To provide and manage subscription services

• Enable access to Diamond Subscription features, such as profile highlighting, hiding age and location, removing ads, unlimited connection requests, changing location, and creating events.
• Manage billing and payment processing for Diamond Subscriptions.
• Notify you of changes to your subscription, pricing, or premium feature availability.

I. To display and manage advertisements

• Show personalized or non-personalized advertisements to users.
• Analyze user behavior to improve the relevance and effectiveness of advertisements.
• Limit or remove advertisements for users with an active Diamond Subscription.

To process your information as described in this Privacy Policy, we rely on the following legal bases:

• Provide our service to you: The reason we process your information for purposes A, B and C above is to perform the contract that you have with us. For instance, as you go about using our service to build meaningful connections, we use your information to maintain your account and your profile, make it viewable to other members and recommend other members to you and to otherwise provide our free and paid features to you and other members.
• Legitimate interests: We process your information for purposes D, E and F above, based on our legitimate interest. For instance, we analyze users’ behavior on our services to continuously improve our offerings, we suggest offers we think might interest you and promote our own services, we process information to help keep our members safe and we process data where necessary to enforce our rights, assist law enforcement and enable us to defend ourselves in the event of a legal action.
• Comply with applicable laws and regulations: We process your information for purpose G above where it is necessary for us to comply with applicable laws and regulations and evidence our compliance with applicable laws and regulations. For example, we retain traffic data and data about transactions in line with our accounting, tax and other statutory data retention obligations and to be able to respond to valid access requests from law enforcement. We also keep data evidencing consents members give us and decisions they may have taken to opt-out of a given feature or processing.
• Consent: If you choose to provide us with information that may be considered “special” or “sensitive” in certain jurisdictions, such as your sexual orientation, you’re consenting to our processing of that information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. From time to time, we may ask for your consent to collect specific information such as your precise geolocation or use your information for certain specific reasons. In some cases, you may withdraw your consent by adapting your settings (for instance in relation to the collection of our precise geolocation) or by deleting your content (for instance where you entered information in your profile that may be considered “special” or “sensitive”). In any case, you may withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us at the address provided at the end of this Privacy Policy.

Since our goal is to help you make meaningful connections, the main sharing of members’ information is, of course, with other members. We also share some members’ information with service providers and partners who assist us in operating the services. Read on for more details about how your information is shared with others.

• With other members
  You share information with other members when you voluntarily disclose information on the service (including your public profile). Please be careful with your information and make sure that the content you share is stuff that you’re comfortable being visible.
  If you choose to limit the audience for all or part of your profile or for certain content or information about you, then it will be visible according to your settings.
  If someone submits a report involving you (such as a claim you violated our Terms of Use), We may communicate to the reporter actions, if any, we took as a result of their report.
  If you purchase a Diamond Subscription, we may share limited information with third-party payment processors to facilitate transactions and ensure compliance with applicable financial regulations. This may include information such as transaction amounts, payment methods, and your account ID.
• With our service providers and partners
  We use third parties to help us operate and improve our services. These third parties assist us with various tasks, including data hosting and maintenance, analytics, customer care, marketing, advertising, payment processing and security operations. We also share information with partners who distribute and assist us in advertising our services. For instance, we may share limited information on you in hashed, non-human readable form to advertising partners.
  We follow a strict vetting process prior to engaging any service provider or working with any partner. Our service providers and partners must agree to strict confidentiality obligations.
• Sharing functionality
  You may share other members’ profiles and they may share yours with people outside of our services, using the sharing functionality.
• For corporate transactions
  We may transfer your information if we are involved, whether in whole or in part, in a merger, sale, acquisition, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, bankruptcy or other change of ownership or control.
• With law enforcement / when required by law
  We may disclose your information if reasonably necessary: (i) to comply with a legal process, such as a court order, subpoena or search warrant, government / law enforcement investigation or other legal requirements; (ii) to assist in the prevention or detection of crime (subject in each case to applicable law); or (iii) to protect the safety of any person.
• To enforce legal rights
  We may also share information: (i) if disclosure would mitigate our liability in an actual or threatened lawsuit; (ii) as necessary to protect our legal rights and legal rights of our members, business partners or other interested parties; (iii) to enforce our agreements with you; and (iv) to investigate, prevent, or take other action regarding illegal activity, suspected fraud or other wrongdoing.
• With your consent or at your request
  We may ask for your consent to share your information with third parties. In any such case, we will make it clear why we want to share the information.
  We may use and share non-personal information (meaning information that, by itself, does not identify who you are such as device information, general demographics, general behavioral data, geolocation in de-identified form), as well as personal information in hashed, non-human readable form, under any of the above circumstances. We may combine this information with additional non-personal information or personal information in hashed, non-human readable form collected from other sources.

We want you to be in control of your information, so we want to remind you of the following options and tools available to you:

• Access / Update tools in the service. Tools and account settings can help you access, rectify or remove information that you provided to us and that’s associated with your account directly within the service. If you have any question on those tools and settings, please contact us support@gitch.xyz
• Device permissions. Mobile platforms can have permission systems for specific types of device data and notifications, such as phone contacts, pictures, location services, push notifications and advertising identifiers. You can change your settings on your device to either consent or oppose the collection or processing of the corresponding information or the display of the corresponding notifications. Of course, if you do that, certain services may lose functionality.
• Uninstall. You can stop all information collection by an app by uninstalling it using the standard uninstall process for your device. Remember that uninstalling an app does NOT close your account. To close your account, please use the corresponding functionality on the service.
• Account closure. You can close your account by using the corresponding functionality directly on the service.

We also want you to be aware of your privacy rights. Here are a few key points to remember:

• Reviewing your information. Applicable privacy laws may give you the right to review the personal information we keep about you (depending on the jurisdiction, this may be called right of access, right of portability, right to know or variations of those terms). You can exercise this right by putting in such a request on support@gitch.xyz
• Updating your information. If you believe that the information we hold about you is inaccurate or that we are no longer entitled to use it and want to request its rectification, deletion, object to or restrict its processing, please contact us support@gitch.xyz

For your protection and the protection of all of our members, we may ask you to provide proof of identity before we can answer the above requests.

Keep in mind, we may reject requests, including if we are unable to authenticate you, if the request is unlawful or invalid, or if it may infringe on trade secrets or intellectual property or the privacy or other rights of someone else. If you wish to receive information relating to another member, such as a copy of any messages you received from them through our service, the other member will have to contact us to provide their written consent before the information is released. We may also ask them to provide proof of identity before we can answer the request.

Also, we may not be able to accommodate certain requests to object to or restrict the processing of personal information, notably where such requests would not allow us to provide our service to you anymore. For instance, we cannot provide our service if we do not have your date of birth and thus cannot ensure that you are 18 years of age or older.

In certain countries, including in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, you have a right to lodge a complaint with the appropriate data protection authority if you have concerns about how we process your personal information. You can find information about your data protection regulator in the European Economic Area here, and in the United Kingdom here. The data protection authority you can lodge a complaint with may be that of your habitual residence, where you work or where an alleged infringement took place.

We keep your personal information only as long as we need it for legitimate business purposes and as permitted by applicable law. If you decide to stop using our services, you can close your account and your profile will stop being visible to other members. Note that we will close your account automatically if you are inactive for a period of two years. After your account is closed, we will delete your personal information, as laid out below:

1. To protect the safety and security of our members, we implement a safety retention window of three months following account closure, or one year following an account ban. During this period, we keep your information in the event that it might be necessary to investigate unlawful or harmful conducts. The retention of information during this safety retention window is based on our legitimate interest as well as that of potential third-party victims.

2. Once the safety retention window elapses, we delete your data and only keep limited information for specified purposes, as laid out below:

• a) We maintain limited data to comply with legal data retention obligations: in particular, we keep transaction data for 10 years to comply with tax and accounting legal requirements, credit card information for the duration the user may challenge the transaction and “traffic data” / logs for one year to comply with legal data retention obligations. We also keep records of consents members give us for five years to evidence our compliance with applicable law.
• b) We maintain limited information on the basis of our legitimate interest: we keep customer care records and supporting data as well as imprecise location of download/purchase for five years to support our customer care decisions, enforce our rights and enable us to defend ourselves in the event of a claim, information on the existence of past accounts and subscriptions, which we delete three years after the closure of your last account to ensure proper and accurate financial forecasting and reporting, profile data for one year in anticipation of potential litigation, for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims, and data necessary to prevent members who were banned from opening a new account, for as long as necessary to ensure the safety and vital interests of our members.
• c) Finally, we maintain information on the basis of our legitimate interest where there is an outstanding or potential issue, claim or dispute requiring us to keep information (in particular if we receive a valid legal subpoena or request asking us to preserve data (in which case we would need to keep the data to comply with our legal obligations) or if data would otherwise be necessary as part of legal proceedings).

For users with active Diamond Subscriptions, we retain subscription-related information for the duration of your subscription and for a period of up to five years after its termination, unless a longer retention period is required by law.

Our services are restricted to individuals who are 18 years of age or older. We do not permit individuals under the age of 18 on our platform. If you suspect that a member is under the age of 18, please use the reporting mechanism available on the service.

Our service does not target individuals under the age of 18, and we do not knowingly display personalized advertisements to such individuals.

We use third-party payment providers (e.g., App Store, Google Play, PayPal) to process subscription transactions. We do not store full payment details, such as credit card numbers. The third-party payment providers process payments securely and comply with applicable laws and industry standards.

If you have concerns about how your payment data is processed, please refer to the privacy policies of the respective payment providers.

We want you to be able to access Gitch wherever you happen to be in the world. To enable us to provide that service, we operate a global network of servers including in the US, UK, EU, and (for Users located in Russia) Russia. The hardware is located in third-party data centres but is owned by the OOO “Biverlead”. Data collected by Advertising Partners and other Service Providers may also be held outside the UK and the European Economic Area. We ensure that the data is adequately protected by ensuring that valid, legal mechanisms are in place such as: EU approved model clauses (which can be found here), and implementing robust contractual standards.

Effective date. This Privacy Policy was last updated on 12 January 2025.

If we make any material changes to how we handle subscription-related information or introduce new data processing practices related to premium features, we will notify you in advance, as required by applicable law.

Effective Date: 12 January 2025

At Gitch, we are committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of all our users, particularly protecting children from any form of exploitation or abuse. This policy outlines our standards and procedures to combat child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) and promote a safe environment for all users.

We maintain a strict zero-tolerance policy against any form of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or exploitation. Any user or content found to be engaging in or promoting such activities will face immediate account termination and will be reported to the relevant authorities.

Our services are strictly limited to individuals aged 18 years or older. We do not allow minors to register, use, or interact with the Gitch platform. If a minor is found to have created an account, their account will be terminated immediately.

Gitch requires all users to confirm they are at least 18 years old. We may, at our discretion, request users to complete an age verification process by submitting a valid government-issued identification document (such as a passport, national ID card, or driver’s license) to confirm their date of birth. Failure to provide such documentation upon request will result in account suspension or termination.

• Proactive Monitoring: Gitch employs automated tools and manual reviews to detect and remove any content that violates our child safety standards.
• Reporting: Users can report any suspicious or inappropriate behavior directly within the app. Our team investigates all reports promptly and takes necessary action.
• Collaboration with Authorities: We cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies and child protection organizations to identify and prosecute offenders.

• Identity Verification: We require users to provide accurate personal information during registration and use additional measures to verify their identities.
• Content Moderation: All user-generated content is subject to strict moderation to ensure compliance with this policy.
• Education: We educate our users about online safety and responsible behavior through in-app notifications and resources.

We ensure that any data collected to enforce this policy is handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy and applicable data protection laws, including GDPR and CCPA.

If you have any concerns about the safety of our platform or wish to report a violation of this policy, please contact us:

• Email: info@gitch.xyz
• Phone: +375297060811

We may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in laws, technology, or business practices. Any significant updates will be communicated to our users in advance.

Additional Measures Introduced:

• Prohibition of CSAM: Explicitly defined and emphasized our zero-tolerance policy towards child exploitation.
• Reporting Mechanism: Introduced clear channels for reporting suspicious activities.
• Educational Resources: Committed to promoting user awareness about safety.

This policy ensures that Gitch aligns with the highest standards of child safety and complies with Google Play’s requirements for apps in social and dating categories.