We see our Privacy Policy as one of the ways we can tell you about the benefits of our Service, and showcase some things we do to protect you and give you helpful information.
One of the important things we have done is have our Privacy Policy reviewed by TRUSTe an independent company which specialises in reviewing the privacy policies of leading companies including Disney, Apple and MSN. TRUSTe put every company it gives a seal to through a rigorous assessment programme, and ensure that standards are kept up by future re-approval. You can be confident that TRUSTe approval shows our Privacy Policy is amongst the best.
While TRUSTe approval may be reassuring there's not much point in having a privacy policy if we don't point out some of the terms that you will find useful and will give you further assurance of just how careful we have to be with your data, and that we take this obligation seriously.
You might wonder why we have to have even the small amount of personal information on you which we do. There's no great mystery to this. We need some information so that we can check who you are if you ask us for a new password. If we didn't we couldn't be confident that we were actually dealing with you when a request for a password is made. Obviously you'd be right to be angry if we just handed out a password to your account without checking.
Similarly we'll email you at the address you've given us to check that you want your account closed if you tell us to do that. As well as giving you an opportunity to consider whether this is what you really want to do, it also stops somebody posing as you and maliciously causing you the inconvenience that having to rebuild your data would cause you if they closed your account.
As our Service develops and you get more from it we're sure you'll want to stay with us, but if for any reason you ever wanted to leave us our promise to you is that your data belongs to you and only you. If you delete your account we delete your data and we don't have access to it.
We know that users come to us to use a great tool that helps them organise their financial lives. For most people we think it's helpful if we can make the occasional suggestion that lets them get even more from the service. A few people like to work things out for themselves. That's OK with us, if you tell us that you don't want to hear from us we won't get in touch. You can always opt in again later.
by Peter Downie, Head of Risk and Compliance