Please read this Privacy & Data Policy carefully. By visiting and using this site, you agree that your use of our site, and any dispute over our online privacy practices, is governed by this Privacy & Data Policy and our Terms and Conditions.
Who we are
Our website address is: https://myfamilyfinder.co.uk
The My Family Finder database serves as a mutual consent vehicle for reuniting long lost family members with those family members searching for their lost/missing relatives and does not provide counselling services, search assistance or perform an investigation to locate individuals.
Voluntary registration by adults over 18 years of age, desiring contact or reunion with their family members, is deemed legal consent for contact between parties to a match. Submission of a registration fee to join our database grants permission for the data of the person registering to be held in an electronic format on our securely store database and shared free of charge with members of the public who are searching for long lost family members. Members of the public searching will only be able to view the details of those registrants that match their search criteria and will only see the information about the registrant that you, the registrant, have chosen to be made public.
Website users under the age of 18
This site is not intended for children/adults under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect any personal information from a child/adult under 18. If we become aware that we have inadvertently received personally identifiable information from a user under the age of 18 as part of the site, we will delete such information from our records.
Media
If you upload an avatar/profile image to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behave in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Data collected to manage your membership
At checkout, we will collect your name, email address, username, and password. This information is used to setup your account for our site. If you are re-directed to an offsite payment gateway to complete your payment, we may store this information in a temporary session variable to setup your account when you return to our site.
At checkout, we may also collect your billing address and phone number. This information is used to confirm your credit card. The billing address and phone number are saved by our site to pre-populate the checkout form for future purchases and so we can get in touch with you if needed to discuss your order.
At checkout, we may also collect your credit card number, expiration date, and security code. This information is passed to our payment gateway to process your purchase. The last 4 digits of your credit card number and the expiration date are saved by our site to use for reference and to send you an email if your credit card will expire before the next recurring payment.
When logged in, we use cookies to track some of your activity on our site including logins, visits, and page views.
This website collects and uses personal information for the following reasons:
Site visitation tracking
Like most websites, this site uses Google Analytics (GA) to track user interaction. We use this data to determine the number of people using our site, to better understand how they find and use our web pages and to see their journey through the website.
Although GA records data such as your geographical location, device, internet browser and operating system, none of this information personally identifies you to us. GA also records your computer’s IP address which could be used to personally identify you but Google do not grant us access to this. We consider Google to be a third party data processor.
GA makes use of cookies, details of which can be found on Google’s developer guides. FYI our website uses the analytics.js implementation of GA.
Disabling cookies on your internet browser will stop GA from tracking any part of your visit to pages within this website.
Cookies
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
We use a cookie to show success and failure messages to logged-in users, in response to certain actions. These cookies contain no personal data, and are deleted immediately after the next page load.
We use cookies on member and activity directories to keep track of a user’s browsing preferences. These preferences include the last-selected values of the sort and filter dropdowns, as well as pagination information. These cookies contain no personal data, and are deleted after 24 hours.
Relevant legislation
Along with our business and internal computer systems, this website is designed to comply with the following national and international legislation with regards to data protection and user privacy:
UK Data Protection Act 1988 (DPA)
EU Data Protection Directive 1995 (DPD)
EU General Data Protection Regulation 2018 (GDPR)
This site’s compliance with the above legislation, all of which are stringent in nature, means that this site is likely compliant with the data protection and user privacy legislation set out by many other countries and territories as well.
Profile data
When you register and create a profile on My Family Finder, you may be asked to provide certain personal data for display on your profile. The “First Name” field is required as well as public, and user profiles are visible to any site visitor. Other profile information may be required or optional, as configured by the site administrator and the registered user can.
User information provided during account registration can be modified or removed on the Profile > Edit panel. In most cases, users also have control over who is able to view a particular piece of profile content, limiting visibility on a field-by-field basis to public or registrant only. Site administrators can read and edit all profile data for all users. It is the registrants responsibility to decide what supplied information it makes available to the public or keeps private.
Who we share your data with
If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.
Registrations are stored in digital form and are not shared with any other person/organisation. Information provided by registrants is private. Their names and identifying information is not available online unless the registrant decides to make them so by use of the online tools. My Family Finder does not sell or share data with other companies, agencies, organisations, individuals or corporations.
We use a third party to process personal data on our behalf. This third party has been carefully chosen and complies with the legislation set out in the Relevant legislation section above. This third party is based in the USA and are EU-U.S Privacy Shield compliant.
Google (Privacy policy)
Storage of your data
All information we gather on our the My Family Finder website is stored within databases to which only we and services providers are provided access. However, as effective as the stringent security measures implemented by us may be, no physical or electronic security system is impenetrable. While we will endeavour to keep your information as secure as possible, we cannot guarantee the security of our site’s servers or databases, nor can we guarantee that information you supply will not be intercepted while being transmitted to us over the internet.
All traffic (transferral of files) between this website and your browser is encrypted and delivered over HTTPS.
Should you choose to contact us using the contact form on our Contact us page or an email link, none of the data that you supply will be stored by this website or passed to/be processed by the third party data processor mentioned in this Privacy & Data Policy. Instead, the data will be collated into an email and sent to us over the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Our SMTP servers are protected by TLS (sometimes known as SSL) meaning that the email content is encrypted using SHA-2, 256-bit cryptography before being sent across the internet. The email content is then decrypted by our local computers and devices.
How long we retain your data
For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. A registered users information is stored on our website for as long as they are a registered member. On cancellation of a registrants membership, all their data will be deleted. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have a registered account on this site you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Registrants are held responsible for all information provided on their profile form and any documentation attached thereto. It is the responsibility of the registrant to keep their contact information up to date so that My Family Finder does not incur additional costs and time trying to locate registrants when a match, or possible match, occurs.
Data breaches
We will report any unlawful data breach of this website’s database or the database(s) of any of our third party data processors to any and all relevant persons and authorities within 72 hours of the breach if it is apparent that personal data stored in an identifiable manner has been stolen.
My Family Finder contact information
If you have any questions about this Privacy & Data Policy, our Terms and Conditions or you wish to be removed from our database, please contact us via our Contact Page or email hello[at]myfamilyfinder.co.uk
This Privacy & Data Policy may change from time to time inline with legislation or industry developments. We will not explicitly inform our clients or website users of these changes. Instead, we recommend that you check this page occasionally for any policy changes. Specific policy changes and updates are mentioned in the change log below.
This Privacy Policy was updated on 1st July, 2021.