Updates to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
9 May 2018
On May 25th the GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation 2016/679), an EU regulation that's created to enhance your privacy rights, comes into force. We've taken this opportunity to go through and update both our Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy to provide increase transparency with how we provide our services and to make sure we are compliant with the GDPR.
Our new terms will come into effect on May 25, we will ask for your acceptance of the updated terms from then on. Today we're publishing the new terms to give you a little time to familiarize yourself with the upcoming changes.
Terms of Service - What's changing?
Changes to the Terms of Service help make it easier to read, clarify how bitcoin trades are made, advertisements are posted, and disputes are resolved.
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One account per person – You are only allowed to register one personal account.
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Company accounts – A company may operate several accounts, each account may only be used by one employee and may not be shared.
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16 years or older – From the 26th of May only those 16 years or older can use LocalBitcoins.
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ID verification – We don't require ID verification for all users, but in some situations you may be asked to verify your ID with us. We will ask you to ID verify in the following situations:
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After trading over certain volume limits and when advertising - It is our top-most priority to ensure that LocalBitcoins is a safe and securebitcoinmarketplace and that no one is able to use our service for money laundering or other unlawful activities. Most fraud on LocalBitcoins stems from users attempting money laundering. We believe that taking a strict stance in this regard is in the interest of our users and important for our brand as a trustworthy marketplace.
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Unauthorized access - If someone hacks your account we may require you to ID verify as part of the account recovery process.
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Fraud investigations - If your account is reported for fraud along comprehensive evidence we may ask you to complete ID verification as part of the investigation.
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Account recovery - If you've lost all access to your account we will ask you to complete ID verification as part of the account recovery process. If your account is NOT ID verified we cannot guarantee that we can return access if you've forgotten your password and you no longer have access to your email, even if your life savings are in your wallet.
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Bitcoin trading – We added a new section that details your obligations when taking part in bitcoin trades.
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Advertisements – We added a section for advertisers detailing the rules around running advertising.
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Disputing bitcoin trades – The new section on bitcoin trade disputes explains your obligations during bitcoin trade disputes.
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Unresponsive to support requets – During a dispute you can be asked by our support team to provide evidence. If you do not reply in the disputed trade within 12 hours and provide the requested evidence, the dispute may be resolved against you.
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Account suspension & wallet limitation – To fight fraud and to protect your account it is sometimes necessary to suspend or limit it.
The three most common situations when we suspend accounts:
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We identified that your account is accessed by third party. We suspend the account to limit the damage the hacker can do.
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Another user has reported you as fraudulent with significant proof. We suspend accounts that are reported for fraud to prevent further fraud.
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You have previously had an account banned on LocalBitcoins.
Users who are suspended are asked to contact us, unless we've already contacted the user, in order for us to investigate the suspension. We remove account suspensions as soon as the reasons for the suspension no longer exist. Our ToS contains a detailed list of the situations when we limit or suspend accounts.
Privacy Policy – What's new?
Our Privacy Policy has been almost completely rewritten. We describe in detail the categories of personal data that we collect and store including our reasons for collecting and processing the data. We explain how and with whom we share your personal data. We explain our policy regarding data retention and account deletion and we explain your rights to your data. We explain how we use cookies and let you know how you can get in touch with our data protection officer.
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Your Personal Data and How We Use It – We divide the personal data that we store into categories and for each category we detail the types of personal data that we process, the source of that personal data, the purposes for which we process the data and the legal bases of the processing.
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Providing Your Personal Data to Others – We use a number of third parties to help provide our services. This part of explains these third parties and what personal data we may share with them.
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International transfer of your personal data – We store your information primarily within the European Economic Area. However, some features and requirements of the site involve transferring your information to third-party service providers outside the European Economic Area.
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Retaining and Deleting Personal Data – You can delete your account at any time, which ends your agreement with us. However, we retain the majority of your data for 5 years after you delete your account.
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Your rights – Under the GDPR and depending on the legal bases for processing the data you may have e.g. the right to access your personal data, the right to correct any data that is incorrect, the right to have data removed that we no longer have a reason to process, the right to object to processing, the right to data portability, the right to complain to a supervisory authority, and the right to withdraw consent.
FAQ
Do you share my personal data with anyone?
In order to provide you with the best possible service we use services from third party companies. As part of these services it is necessary to share part of your personal data with them.
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Jumio Netverify - When you ID verify with us we use Jumio to verify the authenticity of your ID.
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Mixpanel - We gather event based tracking data e.g. when you start and complete a trade. We also use Mixpanel to send email notifications.
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Sentry.io - We use Sentry.io to help our developers find and fix errors with the service.
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Google analytics - We use Google Analytics give us web analytics data so that we can better understand how our services are being used.
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Sendgrid, Twilio, TM4B, Nexmo - We use a number of companies to help deliver email and SMS notifications.
How can I access my personal data?
You can access the vast majority of personal data we store on your account from the following pages:
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Dashboard - Your dashboard lets you access your trades and advertisements as well as all related data.
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The support center - You can find all of the support tickets that you've opened through the support center.
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Wallet history - Your complete transaction history can be found from the wallet transactions page.
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Account IP logs - Displays your login history.
If you could not find the data you were looking on the above pages please contact customer support to request a copy of the data that you are interested in.
How can I correct errors in my personal data?
Most of the personal data that you have given to us can be corrected by yourself from the profile edit page. For data such as your full name or other data that you notice is wrong you can contact customer support and let us know which data you want to correct.
How can I delete my personal data?
From May 25th you will be able to delete your account, if you have not used your account for bitcoin transactions or trades we can delete your account immediately. If you have made transactions or started trades we store your data according to our privacy policy for a maximum of five years.
How long do you store my personal data?
Trade chat information is removed 180 days after the trade is completed. Most of your data is stored for 5 years after you've requested account deletion. If you've never used your account for trades or transactions, your data is deleted 14 days after you delete your account. Please see section 6 in the Privacy Policy for detailed information on data deletion and retention.
What should I do if I do not agree to the changes?
If you already know that you will not agree to the updated terms then we recommend that you withdraw your bitcoin from your wallet and, after May 25th, delete your account.
What is this GDPR?
The GDPR is an EU regulation for data privacy for all EU citizens. You can read the full regulation here.
Contact us
If you have any questions regarding these changes please don't hesitate to contact support.