Privacy policy

Effective Date: July 8, 2016

At our website, www.tradefest.io (the “Website”), we provide a social information sharing network for business professionals. In this Privacy Policy (“Policy”), we describe how we collect, use, and disclose information that we obtain from you when you visit our Website and use our products and services (“Services”).

By visiting the Website, or using any of our Services, you agree that your personal information will be handled as described in this Policy. Your use of our Website or Services, and any dispute over privacy, is subject to this Policy and our Terms and Conditions, including its applicable limitations on damages and the resolution of disputes. Tradefest's Terms and Conditions are incorporated by reference into this Policy.

The Information We Collect About You

We may collect information about you directly from you and from third parties, as well as automatically through your use of our Website or Services. The type of information that we collect about you varies based on your interaction with our Website and our Services.

Information We Collect Directly From You. We will collect information directly from you when you interact with certain portions of our Website, contact us, and use our Services.
Registration/Account Creation. Specifically, we require registration and/or account creation to access certain features of our Website (e.g., to post a review or make a comment). You may register with our Website by providing your email address. If, however, you seek to post a review or make a comment, then you must create an account by using your log in credentials for certain social networking Websites (currently LinkedIn™). Tradefest will store your LinkedIn™ profile information as part of your Tradefest profile, and may share your profile information with third parties as described below under "How We Share Your Information". We may later offer additional means of registration or collect additional information as part of the account registration process.

As part of your user profile, you may (but are not required) to submit additional information, including, for example, your picture, a “headline” describing you, name, country, city, state, industry, job type, department, expertise, or other demographic data.

Other Features. We will request additional information from you to access certain features. If you want to download a document, access a free trial or if you request to be contacted by a vendor, we will ask you for additional information, including but not limited to your phone number, your company, your title and other information pertinent to the action that you are taking on the Website.
Information that We Collect About You from Social Networking Websites. When you log into our Website using your social networking credentials, we will request access to your profile and your email address. If you seek to use other features of our Services, such as to invite your colleagues to join our Website, we will request additional permissions from you. We will request your permission before accessing the information in your social networking Website. If you decline to grant us permission, we may be unable to perform the service that you request.

We store some information that we receive from social networking Websites with other information that we collect from you with your approval. The social networking Website controls the information that it collects from you. For information about how the social networking Website may use and disclose your information, including any information you make public, please consult its privacy policy. We have no control over how any third party Website uses or discloses the personal information it collects about you.

Information We Collect Automatically We may automatically collect the following information about your use of our Website or Services through cookies, web beacons, and other technologies: your browser type and operating system; web pages you view; links you click; your IP address; the length of time you visit our Website and or use our Services; and the referring webpage that led you to our Website. Please see the discussion below entitled “Our Use of Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms” for additional Information.

Your Reviews

When you post a review, you have the option to mark it “Anonymous.” If you do so, then other users will see your role, department, industry, and the size of your company. You may update your choice at any time, but please note that third parties and other users of the Website already may have had access to your review and that there might be cached copies and static content of the Website. As such, complete copies of your review may exist even if we make your review Anonymous on our Website. Please note that you will need to exercise your choice for each review that you post.

How We Use Your Information

We use your information, including your personal information (collectively “information”) for the following purposes:

To provide our Services to you, to communicate with you about your use of our Services, to respond to your inquiries, to fulfill your orders, and for other customer service purposes, which may include communicating with you via email.
To tailor the content and information that we may send or display to you, personalized help and instructions, and to otherwise personalize your experiences while using the Website or our Services.
For customer loyalty programs.
For marketing and promotional purposes. For example, we may use your information, such as your email address, to send you news and newsletters, special offers, and promotions, or to otherwise contact you about products or information from us or from our partners that we think may interest you. We also may use the information that we learn about you to assist us in advertising our Services in various forums, including on third party websites, on social media Websites, among other means.
To present information to you about your LinkedIn™ connections or suggest reaching out to your connections or other people you may know.
To post to your social networking accounts with your permission.

To better understand how users access and use our Website and Services, both on an aggregated and individualized basis, to improve our Website and Services and respond to user desires and preferences, and for other research and analytical purposes.

How We Share Your Information

We may share your information as follows:

Tradefest Users.Registered users may control certain privacy settings on our Website. As a default, your full profile (your “Profile Information”) will be available to all registered users.
Your Social Networking Contacts.If you grant the requested permissions, we will have access to your contacts at the various social networking Websites, and, with your express direction, we may invite your contacts to join our Website and our Services.
Service Providers.We may disclose the information we collect from you to third party vendors, service providers, contractors or agents who perform functions on our behalf. These entities assist us with maintaining our Website and our Services, our marketing efforts, and for other purposes.
Events organizers.We may share your reviews with the enterprise events organizers or provider of the product that you reviewed or with other third parties. We can share the content of your review and your Profile Information. These entities may use your information to market their products and services to you, as well as to post your review on their website or to otherwise use the content in your review.

We also may share your information with the following persons and for the following purposes:

Business Transfers.If we are acquired by or merged with another company, if substantially all of our assets are transferred to another company, or as part of a bankruptcy proceeding, we may transfer the information we have collected from you to the other company.

In Response to Legal Process.We also may disclose the information we collect from you in order to comply with the law, a judicial proceeding, court order, or other legal process, such as in response to a court order or a subpoena.
To Protect Us and Others.We also may disclose the information we collect from you where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person, violations of our Terms of Service or this Policy, or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
Aggregate and De-Identified Information.We may share aggregate or de-identified information about you with third parties for marketing, advertising, research or similar purposes.

Our Use of Cookies and Other Tracking Mechanisms

We and our third party service providers use cookies and other tracking mechanisms to track information about your use of our Website or Services. We combine this information with other personal information we collect about you to develop a more complete profile about you, to improve your experience on our Website, to assist us with advertising and marketing, and as described in this Policy.

Session Cookies. Session cookies exist only during an online session. They disappear from your computer when you close your browser or turn off your computer. We use session cookies to allow our systems to uniquely identify you during a session or while you are logged into the Website. This allows us to facilitate your identity and improve your experience as you move through our Website.
Persistent cookies.Persistent cookies remain on your computer after you have closed your browser or turned off your computer. We use persistent cookies to enable you for certain log in purposes as well as to track aggregate and statistical information about user activity.

Disabling Cookies. Our Website will not function properly without cookies enabled. At a minimum, session cookies must be allowed in order to preserve your identity as you navigate the Website. If you wish, you can logoff from the Website once you are done and then delete any persistent cookies that remain.

Web Beacons, Pixel Tags and Other Technologies. We use web beacons, such as clear GIFs, web bugs or pixel tags, which are tiny graphics with a unique identifier similar in function to cookies. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on your computer's hard drive, clear GIFs are embedded invisibly on web pages. We may use clear GIFs in connection with our Website to, among other things, track the activities of website visitors, help us manage content, and compile statistics about website usage. We and our third party service providers also use clear GIFs in HTML e-mails to our customers, to help us track e-mail response rates, measure the success of our marketing campaigns, identify when our e-mails are viewed and track whether our e-mails are forwarded.

Third Party Analytics

We use automated devices and applications to evaluate usage of our Website. We also may use other analytic means to evaluate our Services. We use these tools to help us improve our Services, performance and user experiences. We may combine this information with other information we collect from our users.

Do Not Track

Currently, our systems do not recognize browser “do-not-track” requests. You may, however, disable certain tracking as discussed in this section (e.g., by disabling cookies); you also may opt-out of targeted advertising by contacting us directly by email.

Third-Party Ad Networks

We use third parties such as network advertisers to serve advertisements on our Website and on third-party websites or other media (e.g., social networking platforms). This enables us and these third parties to target advertisements to you for products and services in which you might be interested. Third-party ad network providers, advertisers, sponsors and/or traffic measurement services may use cookies, JavaScript, web beacons (including clear GIFs) and other tracking technologies to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content to you. These third-party cookies and other technologies are governed by each third party’s specific privacy policy, not this one. We may provide these third-party advertisers with information, including Personal Information, about you.

Third-Party Links

Our Website and Services may contain links to third-party websites. For example, occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third party products or services on our Website. These third parties have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of those linked Websites, including their information practices.

User Generated Content

Our Website is a forum for users to share their experience with various products and services. To this end, we invite registered users to post reviews on our Website. Please note, however, that if you post reviews to our Website, then all of the information that you post will be attributed to your Profile Information. If you share your Profile Information, your full identity will be visible unless you change your privacy settings. Please also note your Demographic Profile will be available to all members of our Website. If you post your own content on our Website or Services, your posting may become public and we are cannot prevent such information from being used in a manner that may violate this Policy, the law, or your personal privacy. You are responsible for the accuracy of any information contained in your postings.

Security of Your Personal Information

We have implemented commercially reasonable precautions to protect the information we collect from loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Please be aware that despite our best efforts, no data security measures can guarantee 100% security.

You should take steps to protect against unauthorized access to your password, phone, and computer by, among other things, signing off after using a shared computer, choosing a robust password that nobody else knows or can easily guess, and keeping your log-in and password private. We are not responsible for any lost, stolen, or compromised passwords or for any activity on your account via unauthorized password activity.

Access to Your Personal Information

You may log into your account at any time to update your profile information. Please note that copies of information that you have updated, modified or deleted may remain viewable in cached and archived pages of the Website for a period of time and may have been shared with third parties prior to your update, modification, or deletion of the information. We are unable to update, modify, or delete information that was previously shared with a third party.

What Choices Do You Have Regarding Use of Your Personal Information?

We may send periodic promotional emails to you. You may opt-out of such communications by following the opt-out instructions contained in the e-mail. Please note that it may take up to 10 business days for us to process opt-out requests. If you opt-out of receiving emails about recommendations or other information we think may interest you, we may still send you e-mails about your account or any Services you have requested or received from us.

Terms and Conditions

Please also visit our Terms and Conditions section establishing the use, disclaimers, and limitations of liability governing the use of our Website.

Contact Us

If you have questions about the privacy aspects of our Services or would like to make a complaint, please contact us at hello@tradefest.io

Changes to this Policy

This Policy is current as of the Effective Date set forth above. We may change this Policy from time to time, so please be sure to check back periodically. We will post any changes to this Policy on our Website. If we make any changes to this Policy that materially affect our practices with regard to the personal information we have previously collected from you, we will endeavor to provide you with notice in advance of such change by highlighting the change on our Website, or sending an email to registered users at the last address of record.

Rules of conduct

The intent and design of expocheck is to provide support to visitors and exhibitors in deciding which trade fair or exhibition to attend. They're supposed to find those shows best meeting their needs and requirements.

In order to make expocheck a genuinely efficient tool, there are a few rules to observe for posting ratings, reviews and comments. Compliance with these rules is essential and will be closely monitored. If any reviews or comments with contents violating our terms of use are reported or found, these will be put in quarantine and will be deleted from our website – without any exceptions. In severe cases, we reserve the right to suspend registered members.

Only fair reviews are of any use

Your reviews must actually relate to the reviewed trade fair and exhibition events; they must be truthful, objective and founded. You may only review events you actually attended as visitor or exhibitor. You may of course also submit critical reviews and comments, you must, however, stick to the facts. Trade fair or exhibition organizers and/or their staff may not submit any reviews about their own shows or cause such reviews to be submitted or write incorrect reviews or cause such reviews to be submitted in order to intentionally discredit a competitor. Reviews based upon hearsay or third-party opinions are inadmissible. Derogatory symbols may not be used.

The following contents are inadmissible:

Below is a non-conclusive list of user contributions which are unlawful and which will not be publicized at the website. (Excerpt from Terms of Use).

We reserve the right to amend this list at any time and at its own discretion to investigate or take legal action against any party acting in violation of these regulations, in particular to remove the unlawful item from the website and/or to put it under quarantine and, where applicable, to exclude the violator from further using the website. This relates to user contributions which

are obviously offensive to an online community, e.g. contents in any way considered racist, intolerant, defamatory or derogatory of a physical detriment, irrespective of whether against a group or an individual;
are used to pretend being another person or staff member of another company without this being true;
are used to review a trade fair, exhibition or another event without actually having been there;
are used to intentionally cause harm to another person or a competitor or instigate others to do such;
encompass forwarding so-called junk mail, chain letters or other unsolicited mass advertisement or so-called spam;
are defamatory or offending;
contain information which you know to be false or deceptive or which refer to illegal activities or conduct or which are obscene, threatening or abusive;
have links to external websites;
encompass illegal or unauthorized copies of a work to which another person has copyrights e.g. pirated computer programs or links to these, information on how to override preinstalled copy protection or illegal music copies or links to illegal music files:
contain websites with restricted access or password access or which contain concealed websites or images, i.e. which cannot be linked from another generally accessible website;
contain instructions for illegal activities, e.g. the manufacture or purchase of illegal weapons and/or the violation of third-party personal rights and/or sending or generating computer viruses;
represent a form of conduct or promote a form of conduct which is a punishable offense, is subject to civil-law liability or in any other way is unlawful or violates the rights of a third party in Germany or, if applicable, in any other country all over the world; or
promote business activities or sales without our prior written approval having been obtained, e.g. competitions, lotteries, barter deals, advertisement and transactions based on snowball systems.

By forwarding or disseminating user contributions at this website, you authorize the public to freely use, copy and disseminate these user contributions in all media and in any form without your prior consent being required. You may not forward or disseminate information or material to which a third party has copyrights without explicit prior written consent by such third party. You will indemnify us against any third-party claims asserted due to any violation by you of these regulations.