Scope and Consent

This Privacy Policy describes our collection, use, disclosure, retention, and protection of your personal information. It applies to any Village site where this Privacy Policy appears in the footer, and to any Village application, service, website (including www.village.co and www.villa.ge) or tool (collectively "Services") where this Privacy Policy is referenced, regardless of how you access or use them, including through mobile devices. Village Market Limited ("Village", "we" or "us" or “our”), c/o Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe (Europe) LLP, 107 Cheapside, London EC2V 6DN, United Kingdom, registered in England and Wales with number 09839656 is the data controller and operator.

By using our Services or registering for an account with us, you are accepting our Terms of Use, this Privacy Policy and our Cookies Policy, and you are consenting to our collection, use, disclosure, retention, and protection of your personal information as described in this Privacy Policy.

You are contracting with Village (the data controller) which is responsible for the collection, use, disclosure, retention and protection of your personal information in accordance with our global privacy standards as well as applicable national laws. Village may transfer your personal information to third party processors in other countries including other members of the Village corporate family as described in this Privacy Policy. We may process and retain your personal information on our servers in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world where our data centres are located.

Personal Information

"Personal information" is information that can be associated with a specific person and could be used to identify that specific person whether from that data or from that data and other information that Village has or is likely to have access to. We do not consider personal information to include information that has been made anonymous or aggregated so that it can no longer be used to identify a specific person, whether in combination with other information or otherwise.

Changes to this Policy

We may amend this Privacy Policy at any time by posting an updated Privacy Policy with the amended terms on this site. The amended Privacy Policy will be effective immediately after it is first posted on our Website. This Privacy Policy is effective as of 23^rd July 2021.

Global Privacy Standards

Village complies with global privacy standards known as Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs) which are our commitment to protect your personal information and honour our privacy obligations regardless of where your personal information is collected, processed, or retained within our corporate family.

Village is a Village Market, Inc. company. That means we treat your personal information everywhere within our Village Market, Inc. corporate family according to European Union privacy standards. 

Collection

We collect, process, and retain personal information from you and any devices (including mobile devices) you may use when you: use our Services, register for an account with us, provide us information on a web form, update or add information to your account, participate in community discussions, chats, or dispute resolution, or when you otherwise correspond with us regarding our Services.

The personal information we collect includes the following:

Personal information you give us when you use our Services or register for an account with us

• Any identifying information such as your name, profile pictures, description, addresses, telephone numbers or email addresses when you register for an account with us.
• Buying or selling information you provide during a transaction, or other transaction-based content that you generate or is connected to your account as a result of a transaction you are involved in.
• Other content that you may generate, or that is connected to your account and your use of our website and Services including your use of the following website functions: including My Shop (Create Account, Edit Item, Edit My Shop), Chats, Sell, Build, Group, My Alerts, Links, or the Help section.
• Financial and billing information (such as credit card or bank account numbers) in connection with a transaction which is held by our trusted payment processing service providers.
• You may also provide us with your information by submitting a web form, updating or adding information to your account, through your participation in community discussions, chats, dispute resolution, or when you otherwise correspond with us regarding our Services.
• You may provide us, all in accordance with applicable laws, the phone numbers and email addresses in your mobile address book on a regular basis, including those of both the users of our Services and your other contacts. You confirm you are authorized to provide us such numbers. We ask your permission before syncing your contacts. We store your contacts in order to notify you as soon as one of your contacts signs up for Village and to properly display names in notifications.
• To help you organize how you communicate with others, we may help you identify your contacts who also use Village, and you can create, join, or get added to groups, and such groups get associated with your account information. You give your groups a name. You may choose to provide a group profile picture or description.
• Additional information we are required or authorized by applicable national laws to collect and process in order to authenticate or identify you or to verify the information we have collected.

Personal information we collect automatically when you use our Services or register for an account with us

• We also collect information about your interaction with our Services, your advertising preferences, and your communications with us. This is information we receive from the devices (including mobile devices) you use when you use our Services, register for an account with us, provide information on a web form, update or add information to your account, participate in community discussions, chats, or dispute resolution, or when you otherwise correspond with us regarding our Services. This information includes the following: device ID or unique identifier, device type, ID for advertising, and unique device token.
• We collect device location information if you use our location features, like when you choose to browse listings nearby, and for diagnostics and troubleshooting purposes such as if you are having trouble with our app's location features. We use various technologies to determine location, including IP, GPS, Bluetooth signals, and information about nearby Wi-Fi access points, beacons, and cell towers. Keep in mind that most mobile devices allow you to control or disable the use of location services by any application on your mobile device in the device's 'Settings' menu.
• We collect information about your activity on our Services, like service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (including how you use our Services, your Services settings, how you interact with others using our Services, and the time, frequency, and duration of your activities and interactions), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports. This also includes information about when you registered to use our Services, the features you use like our messaging, posting or groups features, profile photo, about information, whether you are online, when you last used our Services (your "last seen"), and when you last updated your about information.
• We collect device and connection-specific information when you install, access, or use our Services. This includes information like hardware model, operating system information, battery level, signal strength, app version, browser information, and mobile network, connection information including phone number, mobile operator or ISP, language and time zone, and IP, device operations information, and identifiers like device identifiers.
• Computer and connection information such as statistics on your page views, traffic to and from the sites, referral URL, ad data, your IP address, your browsing history, and your web log information.
• We use cookies to operate and provide our Services, including to provide our Services that are web-based, improve your experiences, understand how our Services are being used, and customize our Services. For example, we use cookies to provide Village for web-based services. Additionally, we may use cookies to remember your choices, like your language preferences, to provide a safer experience, and otherwise to customize our Services for you. For more information about our use of these technologies and how to control them, see our notice on Cookies Policy.

Personal information from other sources

• We may supplement the personal information we collect with information from third parties and add it to your account information including but not limited to demographic information that is publicly available, additional contact information, credit check information, and information from credit bureaus, as allowed by applicable national laws.
• We may allow you to share information with social media sites, or use social media sites to create your account or to connect your account with the respective social media site. Those social media sites may give us automatically access to certain personal information retained by them about you (e.g., content viewed by you, content liked by you, and information about the advertisements you have been shown or may have clicked on, etc.). If you provide us with access to any site with video content, then you agree that we may share your video viewing with, or obtain information about your video viewing from, third-party social media sites for at least two years or until you withdraw consent. You control the personal information you allow us to have access to through the privacy settings on the applicable social media site and the permissions you give us when you grant us access to your personal information retained by the respective social media site about you. By associating an account managed by a social media site with your account and authorizing us to have access to this information, you agree that we may collect, use and retain the information provided by these social media sites in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
• If you give us personal information about someone else, you must do so only with their explicit and prior consent. You have to inform them how we collect, use, disclose, and retain their personal information according to our Privacy Policy.

Use and Retention

We use the personal information we collect to: provide and improve our Services, provide you with a personalized experience on our sites (especially, by offering you services and items that you may like), contact you about your account and our Services, provide you with customer service, provide you with personalized advertising and marketing, and detect, prevent, mitigate, and investigate fraudulent or illegal activities.

We retain your personal information as long as it is necessary and relevant for our operations. In addition, we may retain personal information from closed accounts to comply with national laws, prevent fraud, collect any fees owed, resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigation, enforce our Terms of Use and take other actions permitted or required by applicable national laws.

We may use and retain your personal information as follows:

Provide, improve, and personalize our Services

• Provide access to and use of our Services.
• Offer you site content that includes items and services that you may like.
• Keep track of your Alerts, Likes and to manage your ads.
• Give you access to your internal messages and other features.
• Provide you with credit offers and opportunities on behalf of other members of our Village corporate family and their financial institution partners.
• Customize, measure, and improve our Services.
• Provide other services requested by you as described when we collect the information.
• We may use geo-location information to provide you with location based services (such as advertising, search results, and other personalized content).

Contact you about your account and provide you customer service

• Contact you to notify you regarding your account, to troubleshoot problems with your account, to resolve a dispute, to collect fees or monies owed, to poll your opinions through surveys or questionnaires, or as otherwise necessary to provide you customer service.
• Contact you as necessary to enforce our Terms of Use, applicable national laws, and any agreement we may have with you.
• For these purposes we may contact you via email, telephone, text messages, and postal mail. When contacting you via telephone, to ensure efficiency, we may use auto-dialled or pre-recorded calls and text messages as described in our Terms of Use. Message and data rates may apply.

Personalize our advertising and marketing communications

• Personalize, measure, and improve our advertising based on your advertising customization preferences.
• Contact you, either via email, telephone, text messages, and postal mail in order to: offer you coupons, discounts and special promotions, and inform you about our Services and those of our Village Market, Inc. corporate family. We will use the contact information you have provided to contact you by e-mail, SMS text and/or telephone if you have consented to such contact. Message and data rates may apply.
• Deliver targeted marketing, service updates and promotional offers based on your communication preferences.

Prevent, detect, mitigate, and investigate fraudulent or illegal activities

• Prevent, detect, mitigate, and investigate fraud, security breaches, potentially prohibited or illegal activities.
• Enforce our Privacy Policy, Terms of Use or other policies.

We retain your personal information as long as it is necessary and relevant for our operations. In addition, we may retain personal information from closed accounts to comply with national laws, prevent fraud, collect any fees owed, resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigation, enforce our Terms of Use and take other actions permitted or required by applicable national laws. After it is no longer necessary for us to retain your personal information, we dispose of it in a secure manner according to our data retention and deletion policies.

Choice

You have a choice about how we use your personal information to communicate with you, to send you marketing information, how we provide you with customized and relevant advertising, and whether you want to stay signed into your account.

Communication preferences

You can control the methods by which we may contact you in Settings. There, you can also change your password.

Marketing

If you do not wish to receive marketing communications from us, you can unsubscribe using the link in the email you receive, change your marketing preferences in Settings, or indicate your communication preferences in a direct communication to us by contacting help@villa.ge.

Signed in

When you sign into your account on our Services, we may give you the option to stay signed in to your account for a certain period of time. If you are using a public or shared computer, we encourage you not to choose to stay signed in. You or any other user of the computer/browser you signed in on will be able to view and access most parts of your account and take certain specific actions during this signed in period without any further authorization. The specific actions and account activities that you or any other user of this computer/browser may take include:

• Listing or enquiring about an ad
• View My Shop
• Edit My Shop
• View my Likes
• Send member-to-member messages
• Manage Links

You can typically end your signed in session by either signing out and/or clearing your cookies. If you have certain browser privacy settings enabled, simply closing your browser may also end your signed in session. If you are using a public or shared computer you should sign out and/or clear your cookies when you are done using our Services in order to protect your account and your personal information.

Withdraw consent

If you withdraw your consent for the use or disclosure of your personal information for purposes set out in this Privacy Policy you may not have access to all our Services and we might not be able to provide you all of the Services and customer support offered to our users and authorized under this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use.

Access

We take steps to ensure that the personal information we collect is accurate and up to date, and that you have the ability to access and make corrections to it.

Once you make a public posting, you may not be able to change or remove it. Upon your request, we will close your account and remove your personal information from view as soon as reasonably possible, based on your account activity and in accordance with applicable national laws.

You can update or correct your personal information on your own Village account or if you do not have a Village account, you may request that we correct or update your information at legal@villa.ge.

You can request a copy of the personal information that Village holds about you by contacting us at legal@villa.ge and we will let you know if any fees apply. Where you have a statutory right to request access or request the modification or erasure of your personal information, we can still withhold that access or decline to modify or erase your personal information in some cases in accordance with applicable national laws, but will give you reasons if we do so.

Disclosure

We may disclose your personal information to other members of the Village corporate family or to third parties. This disclosure may be required for us to provide and to provide you access to our Services, to comply with our legal obligations, to enforce our Terms of Use, to facilitate our marketing and advertising activities, or to prevent, detect, mitigate, and investigate fraudulent or illegal activities related to our Services. We minimize the amount of personal information we disclose to what is directly relevant and necessary to accomplish the specified purpose. As stated above, we do not disclose your personal information to third parties for their marketing and advertising purposes without your consent.

We may disclose your personal information to the following parties and for the following purposes.

Village Market, Inc. corporate family members, who may use it to:

• Provide joint content and services (like registration, transactions, and customer support).
• Help detect and prevent potentially fraudulent and illegal acts, violations of our Terms of Use, and data security incidents and breaches.
• Provide you personalized advertising.
• Guide decisions about their products, sites, applications, services, tools, and marketing communications. Members of our Village corporate family will use your personal information to send you marketing communications only if you have consented to receive such communications from them.

Service Providers and financial institutions partners

• Third party service providers who help us to provide our Services, payment processing services, assist us in providing customized advertising, to assist us with the prevention, detection, mitigation, and investigation of potentially illegal acts, violations of our Terms of Use, fraud and/or security breaches, bill collection, affiliate and rewards programs, co-branded credit cards and other business operations.
• Third party financial institution partners who may offer financial products to you, for them to provide joint content and services (such as, registration, transactions and customer support). These third party financial institution partners will use your personal information to send you marketing communications only if you have requested their services.

Law enforcement, legal proceedings, and as authorized by law

• To comply with our legal requirements, enforce our Terms of Use, respond to claims that a listing or other content violates the rights of others, or protect anyone's rights, property or safety.
• To law enforcement or governmental agencies, or authorized third-parties, in response to a verified request relating to a criminal investigation or alleged or suspected illegal activity or any other activity that may expose us, you, or any other of our users to legal liability. We will only disclose information we deem relevant to the investigation or inquiry, such as name, address, city, state, postcode, telephone number, email address, User ID history, IP address, fraud complaints, bidding and listing history.
• To credit agencies or bureaus as authorized by applicable national laws (e.g. information on late or missed payments or other defaults on your account that may be reflected in your credit report or file).
• To third parties involved in a legal proceeding, if they provide us with a subpoena, court order or substantially similar legal procedure, or we otherwise believe in good faith that the disclosure of information is necessary to prevent imminent physical harm or financial loss or to report suspected illegal activity.

We may transfer your information to data processors outside the European Economic Area in accordance with applicable data protection laws and regulations. In some of these countries, the privacy and data protection laws may differ from those in the country where you live.

Change of Ownership

If we were to merge with or be acquired by another company, we may share information with them in accordance with our global privacy standards. Should such an event occur, we will require that the new combined entity follow this Privacy Policy with respect to your personal information. If your personal information will be collected, used, disclosed, or retained for any purposes not covered in this Privacy Policy, you will receive prior notification of the processing of your personal information for the new purposes.

Security

We protect your information using appropriate technical and administrative security measures to reduce the risks of loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure and alteration. Some of the safeguards we use are firewalls and data encryption, physical access controls to our data centres, and information access authorization controls.

If you believe your account has been abused, please contact help@villa.ge

Important Information

This section describes some additional important information related to your use of our Services.

There are just a few more pieces of important privacy information related to your use of our Services that we need to cover:

When you share your personal information on our sites or applications - what happens?

Other users may have access to the information you share on Village including feedback, ratings and associated comments and any information you chose to share in your profile or your listings.

Your User ID is displayed throughout Village and is available to the public. It is connected to all of your Village activity. Notices sent to other users about suspicious activity and notice violations on our sites refer to User IDs and specific items. So if you associate your name with your User ID, the people to whom you have revealed your name will be able to personally identify your Village activities.

To help protect your privacy, we allow only limited access to other users' contact, shipping and financial information as necessary to facilitate your transactions and collect payments. However, when users are involved in a transaction, they have access to each other's name, User ID, email address and other contact and shipping information.

How you should use the information you receive on Village

When you are in a transaction with another user we may provide you with the personal information of the other user (such as his/her name, account ID) to complete the transaction. We encourage you to inform the other user about your privacy practices and respect his/her privacy. In all cases, you must give the other user a chance to remove himself/herself from your database and give him/her a chance to review what information you have collected about them.

You may use the personal information that you have access to only for Village transaction-related purposes, or for other services offered through Village (such as fraud complaints, and member-to-member communications), and for purposes expressly consented by the user to whom the information relates. Using personal information of other users that you have access to for any other purpose constitutes a violation of our Terms of Use.

Unwanted or threatening email

We do not tolerate abuse of our Services. You do not have permission to add other users to your mailing list (email or postal), call, or send him/her text messages for commercial purposes, even if this user purchased something from you, unless the user has given his/her explicit consent. Sending unwanted or threatening email and text messages is against our Terms of Use. To report Village-related spam or spoof email please notify us at help@villa.ge

Children's Privacy

Our websites are general audience websites, and our Services are not intended for individuals under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from users in this age group.

Third Party Privacy Practices

This Privacy Policy addresses only the use and disclosure of personal information we collect from you. If you disclose your information to others, or if you are directed to a third party website, their privacy policies and practices will apply.

We cannot guarantee the privacy or security of your information once you provide it to a third party and we encourage you to evaluate the privacy and security policies of your trading partner before entering into a transaction and choosing to share your information. This is true even where the third parties to whom you disclose personal information are bidders, buyers or sellers on our sites.

Questions or Complaints

If you have a question or a complaint about this Privacy Policy or Village’s privacy standards or information handling practices, you can contact us at legal@villa.ge

If you do not think our response is satisfactory, contact your privacy regulator. For any other questions or complaints please contact help@villa.ge