Terms of Service


General

By utilizing ZINEY as a platform for content creation, sharing and delivery, you agree with and understand the following terms:
  1. Ziney is a social media platform for sharing content, either freely or for selling and buying original content. The terms for buying and selling content are listed separately.
  2. You understand that any of your activities on Ziney may be tracked and stored for later monitoring by Ziney. This may include detailed logs containing information about your browser. You understand that your activities may be traced back to your email address or social media account, depending on how you registered with Ziney.
  3. You agree with and understand the limitations and technicalities of Ziney's data storage durability. This includes, but is not limited to accidental destruction of your account or content data. In normal operation, this will never happen, but you agree not to hold Ziney accountable for accidentally erased data in case of user errors, programming errors, hardware failures, natural disasters or any other cause. You understand that Ziney will not in any way compensate you for content lost, destroyed or otherwise being rendered inaccessible through these or any other means.
  4. You agree with and understand that your account and content is hosted by and provided as a service by Ziney. You understand that any breach of these terms can be considered a reason to suspend or terminate your account. Ziney also reserves the right to police its content and accounts outside the terms outlined here. Your account, and its information, may be terminated for any reason and at any time without cause or notice.
  5. Ziney falls under the jurisdiction of the EU Data Protection Directive and GDPR, and as a user you are protected by it. Specifically, we will, in addition to the service itself, ensure that any third parties we interact with that may handle your data also comply to these same rules. This may include, but is not necessarily limited to Google Analytics.
  6. You agree to comply with community standards for content you create on the service. You will not post content that may in any way be termed illegal or offensive, including but not limited to content that is not your intellectual property or that you do not have a right to share, content that would generally be termed obscene, including but not limited to any type of pornography, sexual exploitation or extreme violence, hate speech, incitement to violence, fradulent or deceptive schemes, or spam. In particular, we do not accept any kind of nudity unless it can be shown to have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. You understand and accept that your content may be moderated and removed without warning, for these or any other reasons. Repeated violations may result in the permanent removal of your account.
  7. You understand that the content on Ziney is not necessarily endorsed or approved by the platform, but represents the content creators. In case of a breach of community standards, a law, or any other breach of propriety, you agree that you will not hold Ziney accountable in any way, including but not limited to court of law. If you feel offended by some material, instead let us know so about it so we can review the content and its creator and if necessary take appropriate action.
  8. You agree with and understand that these terms may be changed at any time. Minor changes and clarifications that do not change the spirit or intention of the terms will be silently updated in these terms. Major changes in terms policy will notified to you via email, telephone, Ziney private messaging, or any other channel where you can reasonably be expected to be reachable. Usage of Ziney past these terms changes constitutes, and will be interpreted as an acceptance of the updated terms. Ziney will generally not, but may at its discretion, ask you to specifically approve the terms again. Instead, you must deactivate and cease using your account if you do not agree with the updated terms.

Purchases

By utilizing ZINEY as a platform for buying content, you agree with and understand the following terms:
  1. Ziney is a market platform where vendors can directly sell content to you, the buyer. Ziney may extract fees from transactions, but these are paid by the seller, and not added to the price displayed to you, the buyer. Ziney will by itself never charge you for anything.
  2. You understand that the content you buy is legally owned by, and may be copyrighted by the content account holder. You are not allowed to redistribute the content outside Ziney, unless the account holder specifically allows you to do so. Doing so is a crime, punishable by law.
  3. You understand that it is your responsibility to make sure you are not buying illegal content. If you do so, and are charged for it, you agree not to hold Ziney accountable for any possible expenses. Ziney is just a marketplace, we can not check every vendor.
  4. In case of disputes, e.g. refunds, you will contact and resolve the issue directly with the seller, not with Ziney. You will not hold Ziney responsible for any financial loss incurred by your activities on Ziney. To clarify: it is possible that some account holders may not be operating under something that could be termed a fair business. Ziney will do its best to close down bad sellers, but will not always be able to prevent bad sells from happening. If you feel that an account is violating a law, or otherwise is not operating in good spirit or good intentions, please DO contact Ziney directly.
  5. You ensure that you will not participate in any kind of fraud in the payment process. This includes, but is not limited to credit card fraud or any other type of financial crime. Fraud may be persecuted in a court of law.
  6. You agree with and understand the limitations and technicalities of Ziney's data storage durability. This includes, but is not limited to accidental destruction of your account or content data. In normal operation, this will never happen, but you agree not to hold Ziney accountable for accidentally erased data in case of user errors, programming errors, hardware failures, natural disasters or any other cause. You understand that neither Ziney nor the content seller will re-compensate you for content lost, destroyed or otherwise being rendered inaccessible through these or any other means.
  7. You agree with and understand that these terms may be changed at any time. Minor changes and clarifications that do not change the spirit or intention of the terms will be silently updated in these terms. Major changes in terms policy will notified to you via email, telephone, Ziney private messaging, or any other channel where you can reasonably be expected to be reachable. Usage of Ziney past these terms changes constitutes, and will interpreted as an acceptance of the updated terms. Ziney will generally not, but may at its discretion, ask you to specifically approve the terms again. Instead, you must cease using or deactivate your account if you do not agree with the updated terms.

Sales

By utilizing ZINEY as a platform for content sales, you agree with, and will, to best of your abilities, comply with the contents of the following terms:
  1. You, the seller, understand that all of your financial transactions are stored and may be monitored by Ziney. This data includes information about your content, your account, and the end customer account, but does NOT include technicalities of the payment, e.g. credit card numbers.
  2. You, the seller, are responsible for ensuring that the material you sell is legal for you to distribute and sell. This includes, but is not limited to, copyright laws, decency laws and secrecy laws. You ensure that any possible legal disputes concerning your material will not involve Ziney in any way. Ziney is just a marketplace and will not and can not check every vendor for legality.
  3. You, the seller, are responsible for resolving any possible disputes with the content buyer. This includes, but is not limited to, refunds, rebates, replacement content or partial refunds. You agree not to include Ziney in any of these business processes. For any transactions through Ziney, for which Ziney has extracted a commission, or any other service fee, the fee will not be refunded to you, the seller, or the buyer. Ziney will keep any service fees, regardless of disputes or additional expenses between you, the seller, and the buyer.
  4. You, the seller, agree not to hold Ziney accountable in any way, legal or non-legal, for any possible access of your content through non-legal or non-intended means. This includes, but is not limited to, access of for pay content through malicious hacking or exploit of computer vulnerabilities. This also includes non-malicious coding errors which might expose your content to non-paying users. Ziney will do its utmost to prevent these cases, but you agree not to hold Ziney responsible for compensating you for any losses due to these kinds of issues.
  5. You, the seller, agree with and understand the limitations and technicalities of Ziney's data storage policies. This includes, but is not limited to: your data may be stored in several places and your data may be stored beyond the time it is available to the public. All content is available and visible to Ziney personnel. Deleted content may still be present in some storage, and will be removed permanently at Ziney's discretion. The primary reason for this clause is to ensure recovery from various user errors, e.g. accidentally deleted content or user accounts, but may be used for other reasons.
  6. You, the seller, agree with and understand the limitations and technicalities of Ziney's data storage durability. This includes, but is not limited to accidental destruction of your account or content data. In normal operation, this will never happen, but you agree not to hold Ziney accountable for accidentally erased data in case of user errors, programming errors, hardware failures, natural disasters or any other cause.
  7. You, the seller, will resolve any possible issues involving Stripe directly with Stripe, without involving Ziney. This includes, but is not limited to issues with bad credit cards, forgeries, or bad user credit accounts. This also involves possible issues with Stripe payouts to your bank account. You will not hold Ziney liable for any issues involving the technical transfer of money between your Stripe account, your bank account, or the end customers bank account. Furthermore, you agree to resolve any of these issues either with Stripe or the end user directly, without involving Ziney.
  8. You, the seller, agree with and understand that your account and content is hosted by and provided as a service by Ziney. You understand that any breach of these terms can be considered a reason to suspend or terminate your account. Ziney also reserves the right to police its contents and accounts outside the terms outlined here. Your account, and its information, may be terminated for any reason and at any time without cause or notice.
  9. You, the seller, agree with and understand that these terms may be changed at any time. Minor changes and clarifications that do not change the spirit or intention of the terms will be silently updated in these terms. Major changes in terms policy will notified to you via email, telephone, Ziney private messaging, or any other channel where you can reasonably be expected to be reachable. Usage of Ziney past these terms changes constitutes, and will interpreted as an acceptance of the updated terms. Ziney will generally not, but may at its discretion, ask you to specifically approve the terms again. Instead, you must deactivate your sales account if you do not agree with the updated terms.

Privacy policy

Last updated 21.4.2021.

Identity of company and contact details

Identity of company:

Ziney Ltd.
Käsityöläiskatu 7b8
20100 Turku, Finland
info@ziney.co
+358 50 358 8607
Business ID: 3187201-2

Data protection officer:

Daniel Sjöblom (daniel@ziney.co)

List of data we gather

Logs:

  • IP-address
  • Browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.)
  • Operating system (Windows etc.)
  • Pages visited by the user

Registered users:

  • Email address
  • First and last name (optional)
  • Country (optional)
  • Link to an external website (optional)
  • Freeform description (optional)
  • Profile picture (optional)

Information created by users:

Any data voluntarily created by users, such as:

  • Content (articles, videos, images, etc.)
  • Reactions to content (likes, votes, comments, etc.)
  • Interactions with other users (chat messages, follows/unfollows, blocks, etc.)

Information about purchases:

  • What a user has bought
  • The location of the user (street level address + IP information)
  • What the items cost
  • What payment method was used
  • Payment method details (e.g. the credit card number)

Information about sales:

  • What a user has sold
  • The customers of the user (all user data, incl. street-level location)
  • How much the user has sold
  • Used payment methods
  • For subscriptions, the payment method details (e.g. the credit card number)

Surveys and other feedback forms:

  • Answers to surveys, quizzes or other feedback forms

Contact requests:

  • Contact requests initiated by users (contact form, emails, phone calls, etc.)

Who processes data

Besides log-level and purchase/sales data, information is generally only processed by Ziney employees and services required to implement the functionality of the platform, and not shared with third parties.

Exceptions:

  • in legal cases, information may be shared with governmental agents like courts of law

If log level data is shared with a third party, it is first anonymized, or otherwise made sure that it is handled per the GDPR directives by that third party as well.

Examples:

  • Google Analytics (optional, if the user opts-in)
  • Hotjar (optional, if the user opts-in)
  • Newrelic (used for performance profiling)
  • RorVsWild (used for performance profiling)

Purchase and sales data are shared with the parties involved in the business transaction, e.g. a seller can see the location of the buying customer, how much he has paid, if he has pending payments, and so on. This does not include email addresses or phone numbers, nor does it include details about payment methods like credit card numbers.

Information may be made available to subcontractors to implement specific tasks on behalf of Ziney, but in these cases, we also ensure the customer is protected by GDPR by imposing the same requirements on them. The information will also be a restricted subset specified by Ziney, we will never share a "full profile" with subcontractors. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Customer support
  • Market analysis
  • Accounting
  • Card payments

In cases where there is a need for us to interact with a party that does not fully comply with the GDPR, we will first securely encrypt the data before interacting with that party, or we will anonymize the data, ie. data may be stored on a non-GDPR platform, but that platform will not be able to access the information in a way that would identify anything about users of Ziney.

Why is data processed

Data is generally processed to ensure the operation of the service, ie. to provide users with the features that the service implements. This includes:

  • Infrastructure maintenance (ie. logs are stored to make it possible to resolve problems and programming errors in the service)
  • Normal operation (ie. chat messages must be stored and processed to show messages to users)
  • Analytics (to make it easier to identify problems and bottlenecks in the service design)
  • Legal compliance (e.g. information stored for tax purposes, like receipts on purchases or sales)
  • Business operations (e.g. information used in accounting or business development)

In addition to this, we can use the customer's information for marketing or market analysis purposes, with the following restrictions and safeguards for the user:

  • User may opt-out of marketing at any time
  • The marketing will be strictly related to Ziney, ie. we will not suddenly start offering toothbrushes or shoes to our customers
  • The marketing data is not shared with or sold to any third parties, except for possible subcontractors that work for us under our direction and terms

Where is data gathered from

Except for log-level data, all data is gathered from voluntary actions performed by the user, e.g. registration, content creation, purchases on the platform, and so on.

We do not automatically import data about users from any external sources, such as mailing lists or databases from other businesses or governments. We can at our discretion consult open governmental or private databases about users in case of e.g. payment disputes, to prevent known frauds, and other out of the ordinary matters.

How long is data stored

Data is as a rule stored until the user deregisters or is otherwise removed from the service. This is to provide our users with a continuous service, e.g. we will generally not delete an account after X months of inactivity, although we may do so at our discretion.

An exception is log-level data which is generally discarded once it is no longer useful or when storage space needs to be freed.

Automated decision making

Data can be used in AI-based or other automated decision making systems, but generally not where it may affect users legally or otherwise significantly. Its main purpose is to ensure the functionality of the service, e.g. by using AI to block content otherwise expressly forbidden in the terms of service.

Data transfer outside EU / ETA

Our services and data centers may be located inside or outside the EU, and there may be free transfer of data between different data centers in different regions. Our services and data centers provide at least as high a level of protection to users as the GDPR does in the EU, or in cases that they do not, we encrypt or anonymize all information sent to those particular services. Users have the right to terminate their account if they do not agree with their information being used this way.

The service is open to anyone from anywhere, hence the public information, profile, and any content a user has created, but none of the private data, will be visible around the world.

If a user purchases content from vendors outside the EU, they will have access to the details concerning that purchase.

Why don't we store everything inside the EU? We prefer European partners, but in some cases, this is not possible, e.g. a service we use may not yet have European data centers. In the case of interactions with users outside the EU, the data is already publicly visible outside the EU, and where it is stored is of course a secondary matter. In other cases, we do this to ensure the service remains performant, for example, so that we can serve the same content to users outside the EU from locations closer to them. In yet other cases, we may do so for economic reasons, to ensure competitive pricing by using a cheaper service from outside the EU.

Users are protected by the legal safeguards of the GDPR (articles 46 & 47).

Security measures

All https (website) connections are secured and encrypted with SSL. All server connections are encrypted and secured. Emails are not encrypted, but the accounts are secured via password or other authentication mechanisms, and access to the email service itself is encrypted. In particular, the contact form uses email and the messages are not encrypted.

We take security seriously and take all reasonable precautions to safeguard our users and ourselves.

Cookie policy

We strive towards using a minimal set of cookies. Some of them are strictly necessary for functionality, and any optional ones will by default not be used unless the customer opts into using them. In particular, we will always ask the user to opt into so-called third party cookies that can be used to track the user across a wide range of services. Opting out of any optional cookies will not affect the functionality of the services. Cookie preferences can be changed at any time and for any reason. Our cookie policy is GDPR compliant.

Rights of users

As per the GDPR, a user has the right to:

  • Perform an information request to ascertain if the service has information about him
  • Perform an information request to ascertain what information the service has about him

Information requests are free to perform up to once per year, after which we may request a fee for the information retrieval. The fee is to prevent overloading our resources and intended to cover the cost of the information retrieval.

A user may ask for their information to be updated in any registers we have about them. Typically this is done via the "Edit profile" functionality, but if this is not sufficient he may contact us directly.

A user has a right to opt-out of any otherwise legal marketing purposes we use their information for, in particular, marketing offers sent by email.

A user has the right to cancel their account and have all related information destroyed. This can be done via the "Edit profile" page. This does not include any communications outside the platform, e.g. emails, and does not include: a) information sent via the contact form b) answers to anonymous surveys where a user has entered their email address or other contact information.

Requests sent via the contact form are emailed to our customer support and are generally erased after processing them. A customer may request us to specifically erase any email correspondence with them, except where this would contradict some other law. Likewise, answers to anonymous surveys are stored in a separate system. A customer may specifically ask us to erase any survey data related to their email or other contact information, except where this would contradict some other law..

Users have a right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

Policy changes

Policy changes are notified by changing the date at the top of this document.

Contact

If you have any questions regarding this privacy policy, you may contact us at info@ziney.co or by using the contact form on the website, https://ziney.co

To contact a supervisory authority, consult a local state representative or legal advisor to survey your options.