This privacy policy best describes how and when Talking Mental Health will collect, use and share your information when you use our services.

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If you have any questions or comments about this our privacy policy, please contact us at contact@talkingmentalhealth.com.

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Information collection and use

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Talking Mental Health collects information about users through its various email notifications, buttons and widgets. For example, information is sent to Talking Mental Health whenever a member uses the site, publishes a story or interacts with another story. 

 

When using any of our services, you consent to the collection, transfer, manipulation, storage, disclosure and other uses of your information as described in this privacy policy. Irrespective of which country you reside in or supply information from, you allow Talking Mental Health to use your information in the United Kingdom and any other country where Talking Mental Health may choose to operate.

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• Basic Account Information

 

When a member registers for the site, basic account information is collected. This includes their username (which can be anything, including their real name), their email address and a password.

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In the future, you may be required to provide your phone number, for example, to use Talking Mental Health on your phone and to help us prevent spam, fraud or abuse. 

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Your chosen username is listed publicly on our services if you choose to make your profile public, including in our Members directory, on your profile page and in search results. 

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• Additional information

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You may provide us with profile information to make public, such as a short biography or a picture. We may use your contact information to send you information about our services or to send marketing materials to you. You may use your account settings to unsubscribe from notifications from Talking Mental Health in the future. You may also unsubscribe by following the instructions contained within the notification or the instructions on our website.

 

We may use your contact information to help others find your Talking Mental Health account, which may include third-party services and client applications. Your account settings control whether others can find you by your email address or mobile phone number. 

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Our services are primarily designed to help you share information with other members of our community. If you choose to make your profile public, some of the information you provide us is information you are asking us to make public. This includes not only your username but also the stories you may contribute and the metadata provided with Talking Mental Health (such as when you wrote the story), the members you follow, the stories you interact with, and many other bits of information that result from your use of our services. In the future, we may use this information to customise the content we show you, including adverts. If you do not want your information to be made public, you should not make your profile public. 

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Our services broadly and instantly broadcast your public information to a wide range of users and potential services. For instance, your public user profile information and published stories are immediately delivered to third parties. When you share information or content like stories, photos and videos, always consider what exactly it is you want to be public.

 

• Links 

 

In future, Talking Mental Health may keep track of how users interact with its services. This includes looking at email notifications and third-party services by redirecting clicks or through other means. This will be done to better the service, to provide richer advertising and to be able to share aggregate click statistics such as how many times a particular link was clicked on. 

 

• Cookies

 

Like many websites, we use cookies and similar technologies to collect additional website usage data and to improve our services, but we do not require cookies for many parts of our services such as searching and looking at public member profiles. 

 

A cookie is a small data file that is transferred to your computer's hard disk. Talking Mental Health may use both session cookies and persistent cookies to better understand how you interact with us; to monitor aggregate usage by our members and web traffic routing on our services; and to customise and improve our services.

 

Most Internet browsers automatically accept cookies. You can instruct your browser, by changing its settings, to stop accepting cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit. However, some services may not function properly if you disable cookies. Learn more about how we use cookies and similar technologies here. 

 

• Log data

 

When you use our services, we may receive information ("log data") such as your IP address, browser type and cookie information. We receive log data when you use Talking Mental Health, for example, when you begin writing a story. We may also receive log data when you click on, view, or interact with a link on our services to a third-party application. We log this data in order to improve our service and user experience. We delete log data or remove any common account identifiers, such as your username, full IP address, or email address, after 18 months. 

 

• Third-parties and affiliates

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Talking Mental Health will use a variety of third-party services to help provide its services, such as hosting the site and to help us understand and improve the use of our services, such as Google Analytics. These third-party service providers may collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, such as cookies or your IP address.

 

In future, third-party ad partners may share information with us, like a browser cookie ID, website URL visited, mobile device ID, or cryptographic hash of a common account identifier (such as an email address), to help us measure and tailor ads. For example, this would allow us to display ads about things you may have already shown interest in. If this becomes the case, we would provide the means by which you could turn off tailored ads in your privacy settings so that your account is not matched to information shared by ad partners for tailoring ads. 

 

Information sharing and disclosure

 

• Your consent

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We may share or disclose your information at your direction, such as when you authorise a third-party web client or application to access your Talking Mental Health account (in future). 

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• Service providers

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We may share your private personal information with our future service providers subject to confidentiality obligations consistent with the privacy policy, and on the condition that the third parties use your private personal data only on our behalf and pursuant to our instructions.

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• Law and harm

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We may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request; to protect the safety of any person (especially minors); to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect Talking Mental Health rights or property. However, nothing in this privacy policy is intended to limit any legal defences or objections that you may have to a third party's, including a government's, request to disclose your information. 

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• Business transfers and affiliates

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In the event that Talking Mental Health files for bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganisation or sale of assets, your information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction. This privacy policy will apply to your information as transferred to the new entity. We may also disclose information about you to our corporate affiliates in order to help provide, understand and improve our services and our affiliates' services, including the delivery of ads (in future).

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• Non-private or non-personal information

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In future, we may share or disclose your non-private, aggregated or otherwise non-personal information, such as your public user profile information, stories, the people you follow, the people that follow you, the number of users who clicked on a particular link (even if only one did), or reports to advertisers about unique users who saw or clicked on their ads after we have removed any private personal information (such as your name or contact information). 

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• Modifying your personal information

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If you are a registered user of Talking Mental Health, we provide you with account settings to access or modify the personal information you provided to us and that which is associated with your account.

 

You can also set your Talking Mental Health account to private – which removes your profile from our members directory as well as your abilities to freely publish stories and interact with our community – or permanently delete it. Click here to find out how to make your account private. Click here to find out how to permanently delete your account. 

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Our policy towards children

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Our services are not directed at persons under 13 years of age. If you become aware that your child has provided us with personal information without your consent, please contact us at contact@talkingmentalhealth.com. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we become aware that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, we take steps to remove such information and terminate the child's account. 

 

Changes to this policy

 

We may revise this privacy policy from time to time. The most current version of the policy will govern our use of your information and will always be at talkingmentalhealth.com/privacy. If we make a change to this policy that, in our sole discretion, is material, we will notify you via an administrator update or email to the email address associated with your account. By continuing to access or use the services after those changes become effective, you agree to be bound be the revised privacy policy.