Privacy Policy

1. Introduction, Controller and Processor

This Privacy Policy details how Crowdskills Limited a company registered in England and Wales with company number  09050188 and registered office at Impact Hub, 34b York Way, Kings Cross, London N1 9AB, with trading names TalentPools and TalentPools, collect, use and process personal data provided to us.  If you have any questions on this Privacy Policy or otherwise relating to how we process your personal data you can contact us at info@talentpools.io.

We collect or receive personal data as both a controller and as a processor under applicable laws.

If you provide personal data to us directly, such as through our website (our Website), or we collect yourf personal data as a result of the operation of our business, we are a controller of that personal data.

However, as part of our business, we host personal data for our clients.  For the purposes of this Privacy Policy, we use the term Client to mean the organisation who uses our systems to host their site and customer data base.

We may therefore hold personal data about you within our system if you are on our Client’s database and we have access to that database to provide services to our Client.  You should also therefore review our Client’s privacy policy to see how they process your personal data if you have any concerns about the processing of your personal data by us or our Client.  Please contact us if you are unsure of the identity of our Client who has collected your personal data.

This Privacy Policy affects your legal rights and obligations so please read it carefully. If you do not agree to be bound by this Privacy Policy, please do not provide your personal data to us, or if we have access to your data as a result of the provision of our services to a Client, please let us know if you wish to be removed from our systems.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time at our discretion and in particular to reflect any changes in applicable laws. If we do so, and the changes substantially affect your rights or obligations, we shall notify you if we are the controller of your personal data.  Otherwise, you are responsible for regularly reviewing this Privacy Policy so that you are aware of any changes to it.

2. What personal data do we collect?

Information you provide to us

From time to time you may provide personal data to us. This may be because you wish to:

  • use our Website;
  • create an account on our Website;
  • engage on and use our Website either as a Seller or a Buyer;
  • provide services to us;
  • purchase services from us;
  • apply to us for work;
  • otherwise contact us including with feedback, review, queries, comments or complaints.

You may provide personal data to us directly, or to us through our social media platforms.

For example, you may provide the following personal data to us:

By personal data we mean identifiable information about you, such as:

  • Name, and contact information, such as email address, phone number, mobile telephone number, physical address, and (depending on the service used) sometimes financial information, such as bank account numbers;
  • transactional information based on your activities on our Website (such as bidding, buying, selling, item and content you generate or that relates to your account), billing and other information you provide to purchase an item;
  • personal information you provide to us through correspondence, chats, dispute resolution, or shared by you from other social applications, services or websites;
  • additional personal information we ask you to submit to authenticate yourself if we believe you are violating site policies (for example, we may ask you to send us an ID to answer additional questions online to help verify your identity);
  • information from your interaction with our sites, services, content and advertising, including, but not limited to, device ID, device type, location, geo-location information, computer and connection information, statistics on page views, traffic to and from the sites, ad data, IP address and standard web log information.

We do not collect  special categories of personal data about you.

Certain personal data is mandatory to be provided to us in order that we can fulfil your request, for example to create an account with us, and we shall make this clear to you at the point of collection of the personal data.

All personal data that you provide to us must be true, complete and accurate.  If you provide us with inaccurate or false data, and we suspect or identity fraud, we will record this and we may also report this to the appropriate authorities.

At our request, you shall promptly provide evidence of your identity.

When you contact us by email or post, we may keep a record of the correspondence and we may also record any telephone call we have with you.

Information provided to us by our Clients

As noted above, we may receive personal data about you if you are on our Client’s database and we have access to that database to provide services to our client.  If you are on our Client’s database, we process and collect the following information about you, provided that you have given such information to our Client:

  • Basic information such as name, age, postal address, email address and phone number
  • Details about your employer (name, address, phone number, ID and VAT ID) should such information be considered to be personal data
  • Authentication information such as username and password, and if any third party service (e.g. Facebook) is used to sign in, the user ID of that service
  • Information relating to the customer relationship such as advertised profiles and services, job postings, related communications, agreed services, their start and end times and information on their use
  • Billing information such as credit card number and expiration date, also processed by Processor’s payments processor (currently Stripe, subject to change).

Information we automatically collect about you

When you use our Website, we automatically collect and store information about your device and your activities. This information could include:

  • technical information about your device such as type of device, web browser or operating system;
  • your preferences and settings such as time zone and language; and
  • how long you used the Website and which services and features you used.

Some of this information is collected using cookies and similar tracking technologies. If you want to find out more about the types of cookies we use, why, and how you can control them, please see our Cookies Policy.

When you use a Website we host for our Clients, the following technical data is also automatically collected and processed:

  • IP address
  • Geographical location data based on the IP address
  • Service access times
  • Statistics on page views
  • Any other automatically collected technical data

Information we receive from others

Given the nature of the services we provide on our Website, we may receive information about you from other users.  If we have your information as a processor, then we have received that information from  our Client.

If you are based in the US, when you visit or log in to our website, cookies and similar technologies may be used by our online data partners or vendors to associate these activities with other personal information they or others have about you, including by association with your email or home address. We (or service providers on our behalf) may then send communications and marketing to these email or home addresses. You may opt out of receiving this advertising by visiting https://app.retention.com/optout

We may also receive personal data about you from our subcontractors and agents such as companies we engage to provide IT services or payment services to us.

If we reasonably believe that any of the personal data you have provided to us is inaccurate, we may receive further personal data from third parties, confirming or otherwise, your identity.

3. Lawful use of your personal data

We will use your personal data only where we have a lawful basis to do so.  The lawful purposes that we rely on under this Privacy Policy are:

  • consent (where you choose to provide it);
  • performance of our contract with you;
  • compliance with legal requirements; and
  • legitimate interests. When we refer to legitimate interests we mean our legitimate business interests in the normal running of our business which do not materially impact your rights, freedom or interests.

If you wish to access and use our website, we shall use your personal data to allow you to do so all in accordance with our Terms of Use.   In particular, if you are a Seller (or a freelancer) on our Website, you agree that the following information is publicly available: Name, Skills, Rating, Introduction, Approximate location.

We may from time to time need to use your personal data to comply with any legal requirements, for example:

  • as part of anti-money laundering processes;
  • when required by law such as to comply with requests by competent authorities or in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request;
  • when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, investigate fraud or to protect a third party’s property, safety or rights.

We may also use your personal data for our legitimate interests including:

  • to improve our Website and services;
  • in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of assets, consolidation or restructuring, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by or into another company or in the unlikely event that we go out of business or enters bankruptcy, we would transfer your personal data to a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer may continue to use your personal data as set forth in this Privacy Policy;
  • to deal with any questions or comments you raise;
  • for audit purposes; and
  • to contact you about changes to this Privacy Policy.

If we receive your personal data as a processor for our client, we shall only use that personal data to comply with our contract to provide services to our client.

We may also collect other anonymized statistics and technical data about the way you use either our Website, services and/or the services we provide for our Client.  We shall use that information to review and improve our Website, services and business generally and we may display information publicly to others in an aggregate format that does not reveal statistics of any single marketplace.

4. Who do we share your data with?

Given the nature of the services we provide on our Website, we may provide information about you to other users if you have interacted with them.  If we do so, or you otherwise provide your personal data to any third party user on our Website, you agree that the third party’s own privacy policy may apply.

For our legitimate interests, whether we are a controller or processor for our Client of your personal data, for our legitimate interests we may share your personal data with our sub-contractors and agents that we may appoint to perform functions on our behalf and in accordance with our instructions, including IT service providers, payment providers, accountants, auditors and lawyers.

We shall provide our sub-contractors and agents only with such of your personal data as they need to provide the service for us and if we stop using their services, we shall request that they delete your personal data or make it anonymous within their systems.

5. Where we hold and process your personal data

Some or all of your personal data may be stored or transferred outside of the United Kingdom or  European Economic Area (the EEA) if for example, if our email server is located in a country outside the United Kingdom or the EEA or if any of our sub-contractors are based outside of the United Kingdom or the EEA.

Where your personal data is transferred outside the United Kingdom or the EEA, it will only be transferred to countries that have been identified as providing adequate protection for personal data or to a third party where we have approved transfer mechanisms in place to protect your personal data – i.e., by entering into the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, or by ensuring the entity is Privacy Shield certified (for transfers to US-based third parties).

6. Security

We shall process your personal data in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data, including protection against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage.  In particular, access is restricted to employees who need to know your personal data, and we use appropriate password protection, firewalls and   encryption electronic measures together with information access controls within our electronic data management systems.

However, unfortunately, because of the nature of electronic storage,  we cannot promise that your personal data or any other data you provide to us will always remain secure.   If there is a security breach, we will do all that we can as soon as we can to stop the breach and minimise the loss of any data.

7. Marketing

We may send you marketing email messages from us about our Website and business and to solicit feedback either because you have consented to receive the emails, or for our legitimate      interests.

You can choose to no longer receive marketing emails from us by contacting us or clicking unsubscribe from a marketing email.  Please note that it may take us a few days to update our records to reflect your request.

If you ask us to remove you from our marketing list, we shall keep a record of your name and email address to ensure that we do not send to you marketing information. We will still contact you as necessary about your account.

8. Your rights

You have a number of rights under applicable data protection legislation. Some of these rights are complex, and not all of the details have been included below. Further information can be found here

  • Right of access: You have the right to obtain from us a copy of the personal data that we hold for you.
  • Right to rectification: You can require us to correct errors in the personal data that we process for you if it is inaccurate, incomplete or out of date.
  • Right to portability: You can request that we transfer your personal data to another organisation
  • Right to restriction of processing: In certain circumstances, you have the right to require that we restrict the processing of your personal data.
  • Right to be forgotten: You also have the right at any time to require that we delete the personal data that we hold for you, where it is no longer necessary for us to hold it. However, whilst we respect your right to be forgotten, we may still retain your personal data in accordance with applicable laws.
  • Right to stop receiving marketing information: You can ask us to stop sending you information about our business, but please note we shall continue to contact you in relation to any matters relating to your Crowdskills account, if you have one.

You may be able to exercise some of these rights within your account on the Website.  If we process your data for a Client will shall notify that Client if you exercise any of your rights under this section.

We reserve the right to charge an administrative fee if your request in relation to your rights is manifestly unfounded or excessive.

If you have any complaints in relation to this Privacy Policy or otherwise in relation to our processing of your personal data, please tell us. We shall review and investigate your complaint and try to get back to you within a reasonable time.  You can also contact the Information Commissioner, see www.ico.org.uk or if you are based outside of the United Kingdom, please contact your local regulatory authority.

9. Retention of personal data

If our Client requests us to do so, we shall delete your personal data or make it anonymous within our systems.

Subject to the provisions of this Privacy Policy, we will retain personal data in accordance with applicable laws.

In particular, we shall retain your personal data for as long as you have an account on our Website. However, we may also be required to retain personal data for a particular period of time to comply with legal, auditory or statutory requirements, including requirements of HMRC in respect of financial documents.

Where we have no legal basis for continuing to process your personal data, we shall either delete or anonymise it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

10. General

If any provision of this Privacy Policy is held by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid or unenforceable, then such provision shall be construed, as nearly as possible, to reflect the intentions of the parties and all other provisions shall remain in full force and effect.

This Privacy Policy shall be governed by and construed in accordance with English law and you agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the English Courts.

Last updated: February 2020.