terms
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 The following Terms of Use (“Terms”) govern the agreement between Qualidates AG (“qualidates”, “us”, “we” or “our”) and the visitors, users and customers of its dating website services (“User(s)”, “you” or “your”). qualidates’s registered office is at Turmstrasse 18, 6312 Steinhausen, Switzerland. Our VAT number is CHE-179.979.549 MWST.
1.2 Users must read these Terms carefully. These Terms set out the basis on which Users are allowed to access and use websites operated by qualidates (the “Service”) and the services available through the Service.
1.3 The Service is run and provided by qualidates.
1.4 The privacy of Users’ personal data is important to us. Please see our Privacy Notice, which forms part of these Terms for details of how we will process, use and share your personal data. qualidates also uses cookies and similar technologies. Please see our Cookie Policy, for more details of how we and others use cookies and similar technologies.
1.5 The Service is a dating platform which offers Users the possibility of creating an online dating profile and indicating that they are interested in options such as partnerships, friendships, one-night-stands or extramarital affairs. The Service offers the opportunity to contact real, like-minded men or women, couples or additional partners.
2 USE OF THIS SERVICE AND OUR ADDITIONAL SITES
2.1 Access to and use of the Service is subject to these Terms. By continuing to access and use the Service, you agree to be legally bound by these Terms.
2.2 qualidates operates on a centralised platform which provides various dating services and sites via various domains belonging to us. qualidates operates these various dating sites and services under other names and / or domains (“Additional Sites”). In order to provide you with access to the largest possible number of profiles, we allow you to access profiles on the Service and on the Additional Sites. Likewise, users of those Additional Sites can also access your profile published on this Service. Please note that registering on this Service will mean that your profile will be made available on all of qualidates’s Additional Sites.
2.3 qualidates’s Services are offered and you agree to only use the Service (including any Additional Sites) exclusively for private, non-commercial purposes.
2.4 qualidates provides both free and fee-based Services. Free registration enables the User to create a profile, view the profiles of other Users and send predefined messages to other Users (“Free Membership”). Users who register for the additional paid Service may, in addition to the free services, contact other Users and send personalised messages to them (“Premium Membership”). Premium Membership can be subscribed to for different periods of time (e.g. one month, three months or six months). Before providing access to the benefits of Premium Membership, the User shall be informed about the scope of the Services as well as the price and terms of payment.
2.5 We may update these Terms from time to time for legal or regulatory reasons, or to reflect changes in our services or practices. We endeavour to notify Users by email of any material change that affects such Users. However, you should regularly check this page to see if any changes have been made.
2.6 For Premium Membership Users, any changes will become effective from the date of the User’s next payment following the change unless we notify such Users otherwise. For Free Membership Users, any changes will become effective as soon as we notify such Users of them or otherwise make them available on the Service.
2.7 If you continue to use the Service following any variation of these Terms, then you will be deemed to have accepted such variation. If you do not agree to such variation, you should stop using the Service.
3 MEMBERSHIP & REGISTRATION
3.1 qualidates does not allow persons under the age of 18 to use the Service. If we have doubts about your legal age or any other personal details, we will ask you to provide proof of age or appropriate identification. If you fail to provide such requested information within two weeks, we are entitled to withdraw the Service from you and terminate any Free or Premium Membership without notice.
3.2 To apply to receive qualidates’s Services you must provide us with some of your personal data (including name, gender, date of birth, email address), which we will use in accordance with our Privacy Notice. Upon registering, the User will then be asked to accept these Terms and acknowledge our Privacy Notice.
3.3 In addition to the Free Membership, we offer Users the opportunity to subscribe to a Premium Membership. By clicking the ‘Buy now’ button, the User submits an offer to conclude a contract for qualidates’s Premium Membership. We will confirm the acceptance of the offer to the User by either activating the Services available for Premium Membership or sending the User an email. We will supply the Premium Membership to you until your Premium Membership subscription expires (if applicable) or you terminate your Premium Membership in accordance with Section 5 (Right to Cancel) or Section 6 (Termination) or we terminate your Premium Membership for your breach of any of your obligations.
4 FEES
4.1 Before the User subscribes to Premium Membership, we will inform the User of the applicable fees, the method of payment as well as the duration of ongoing payment obligations. If you have subscribed to a one, three or six month Premium Membership and do not terminate your Premium Membership in accordance with Section 5 (Right to Cancel) or Section 6 (Termination), it will automatically renew and your payment method will continue to be charged for each renewal period.
4.2 The fee for Premium Membership is to be paid in advance to us and will be collected in full using the payment procedure selected in the ordering process.
4.3 If it is not possible to collect the full payment amount, we reserve the right to collect this amount in separate instalments at our own discretion.
4.4 If you fail to pay your Premium Membership fees, we may appoint a debt collection agency to recover the sums owed by you. In which case, you agree to pay all reasonable costs, including collection fees, incurred by us in recovering the amounts you owe. We will send you several emails notifying you that there are fees owed before appointing a debt collection agency. Please ensure that if you wish to terminate your Premium Membership that you inform us by following the procedure in either Section 5 or 6 below, otherwise we will assume that you want to continue you with your Premium Membership.
5 RIGHT TO CANCEL
5.1 When you subscribe to Premium Membership you agree to receive the Services available for Premium Membership immediately.
5.2 As a consumer, you have the right to cancel your Premium Membership within fourteen (14) days from the date on which you subscribed to Premium Membership without giving any reason (the “Cancellation Period”).
5.3 To exercise your right to cancel, you must within the fourteen (14) day Cancellation Period send to us a notification clearly stating your decision to cancel your Premium Membership, for example, in a letter sent by post, fax or email.
Effects of cancellation
5.4 If you terminate your Premium Membership during the Cancellation Period and you have:
(a) not accessed the Premium Membership, we will refund the entire Premium Membership subscription fee received from you; or
(b) already accessed the Premium Membership, for example by sending personalised messages to other Users, but subsequently cancel, we will refund the subscription fee received from you minus a pro rata amount that corresponds to the number of days you have accessed the Premium Membership over the total subscription length.
5.5 In any event, we will provide you with the applicable refund amount without undue delay and within fourteen (14) days of the date on which we received your notice to cancel your Premium Membership. Unless expressly otherwise agreed, we will use the same means of payment for your refund that you used for subscribing to Premium Membership. You will not incur any fees as a result of the reimbursement.
6 TERMINATION OF MEMBERSHIP
6.1 Free Membership: You are entitled to terminate your Free Membership at any time by selecting the ‘Delete profile’ button within the Service. After the Free Membership has been terminated, your profile and the corresponding data records will be deleted, except to the extent that our legal requirement requires the storage of such data.
6.2 Premium Membership: You can cancel within the fourteen (14) day Cancellation Period, see Section 5 above. You are also entitled to terminate your Premium Membership at any time by providing 14 days’ notice prior to the end of the subscription term. If the 14 days’ notice period ends after the subscription term your Premium Membership will automatically renew but will terminate at the end of the renewed subscription term. Termination of a Premium Membership must be made in writing to support@qdhelp.ch. The notice of termination should include your full name, Premium Membership details, email address and username used for registration in order to ensure successful processing of the termination.
6.3 Where offered on the Service, if you signed up for a subscription of less than 30 days (e.g. on a short term trial basis), you are entitled to terminate the Premium Membership effective immediately at any time.
6.4 Termination of the Free Membership as well as of the Premium Membership is confirmed by sending an email to the User’s current registered email address.
6.5 qualidates is entitled to immediately terminate a User’s Free or Premium Membership if:
(a) the User violates user obligations in accordance with Section 8 (User Obligations);
(b) contrary to Section 3.1 above, the User does not provide proof of age or appropriate identification at the request of qualidates.
7 GENERAL COMMUNICATION GUIDELINES
7.1 By registering, you expressly agree to receive notification emails from qualidates regarding the Service. You can disable the ability to receive certain types of notification emails at any time by amending your email preferences in your profile.
7.2 qualidates will set up an electronic mailbox for you under your profile, which may be used by you to contact other Users and qualidates may also send Service notifications to this mailbox. You can only send personalised messages to other Users after subscribing to a Premium Membership.
7.3 You must adhere to the rules of the Service and must not use your electronic mailbox and message sending options to carry out any of the prohibited activities specified in Section 8 (User Obligations) or elsewhere in these Terms.
7.4 You authorise and instruct qualidates to contact other Users in your name, unless you expressly opt out of this feature during the registration procedure. At our own discretion, we shall act on your behalf to send introduction messages to potentially interesting partners in your name, automatically trigger profile visits and send requests for immediate dates. If qualidates sends any such messages in your name, these messages shall be labelled separately in the inbox.
8 USER OBLIGATIONS
8.1 You are solely responsible for the accuracy of your registration information and any other personal details you provide as well as any information you freely provide about yourself. You guarantee that all the information provided in your User profile is true and describes yourself. The intentional provision of false information entitles qualidates to block your profile without our claim for payment being affected. This also entitles us to terminate your Free or Premium Membership without notice.
8.2 You agree that you will not use qualidates’s Services for business or commercial purposes, in particular for advertising purposes. You are not allowed to search the content and profiles of other Users manually or use programs to do so in order to use the data obtained for purposes outside of the Services provided by us.
8.3 You are obliged to keep emails and other messages as well as data from other Users confidential and to not disclose them without the third party’s consent.
8.4 You agree to keep your login details confidential. In the event that login details are disclosed to third parties, you shall be responsible for all the consequences of this event. If you suspect that your login details have been disclosed to third parties, you must immediately inform us of this and take appropriate measures to avoid further misuse, such as changing your password.
8.5 You expressly agree to:
(a) provide accurate information to us and keep it updated;
(b) use your legitimate details to sign up, including using your real name and image(s) of your likeness in your profile;
(c) not act in an unlawful, libellous, abusive, obscene, discriminatory or otherwise objectionable manner;
(d) not harass, abuse or harm another person;
(e) use the Services in a respectful manner and act honestly in your communications with other Users;
(f) not create a member profile for anyone other than yourself;
(g) not use or attempt to use another User’s account or restrict that User from using or enjoying the Service;
(h) not send spam or other unwelcome communications to others;
(i) not interfere with, or disrupt, the Service and / or any Additional Sites or any servers or networks connected to the Service and Additional Sites, including by transmitting any worms, viruses, malware, spyware or any other code of a destructive, malicious or disruptive nature. You may not inject content or code or otherwise alter or interfere with the way any page of the Service or Additional Site which is rendered or displayed in your browser or device;
(j) not share or disclose information that a User does not have the right to share or disclose (such as confidential information of others);
(k) not use the Service in any way that might be illegal or breach these Terms; or
(l) not collect or store other Users’ personal data.
8.6 When posting content, you expressly agree that:
(a) it will comply with all applicable laws, including, without limitation, privacy laws, obscene publications, intellectual property laws, anti-spam laws, and regulatory requirements;
(b) it does not and you will not add or link to any content that is defamatory, offensive, obscene, pornographic, indecent, malicious, threatening, abusive or promotes discrimination, racism, bigotry, hatred, bestiality or physical harm of any kind against any group of people or person or animal;
(c) you will not post, link to or otherwise publish any content about illegal activities such as making or buying drugs or illegal weapons;
(d) you will not post, link to or otherwise publish content that exploits people in a sexual, violent or otherwise unlawful manner;
(e) you will not post, link to or otherwise publish content which contains videos, stills, photographs, audio photographs, or images of another person without their permission;
(f) you will not interfere or violate a third party’s private life, nor interfere with their private communications;
(g) you will not post, link to or otherwise publish any content containing any form of advertising or promotion for goods and services or any form of unsolicited communication;
(h) you will not post, link to or otherwise publish any content that contains software viruses, files or code designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of our sites or any computer software or equipment; and
(i) it is your own original content and does not (and our publication and use of it will not) infringe or interfere with the intellectual property or other rights of any third party.
8.7 Failure to comply with any of the above rules of conduct or violation of any of the expressly arranged obligations outlined in these Terms shall entitle us to terminate the membership immediately without notice for good reason, as well as to immediately block you from accessing our Service and / or any of our Additional Sites. Instead of blocking or terminating a User, we can also at our sole discretion delete parts of the User profile.
8.8 We are not obligated to moderate the content on the Service and any Additional Sites, but we may check the contents (e.g. by reviewing messages sent or received by Users or any images uploaded by Users) and remove the corresponding content if we believe it violates any of these Terms.
9 LICENCE OF RIGHTS
You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, transferable right during the membership term, to use the content created or provided by you on the Service and Additional Sites, including but not limited to pictures, texts and videos.
10 LIABILITY
10.1 We do not accept any liability for:
(a) the content of User profiles. We have no control over the accuracy and security of information exchanged between Users or posted by Users in their profiles;
(b) the compatibility with other Users of the Service or Additional Sites or for the success of any contact made between Users;
(c) unauthorised third parties gaining access to personal data of Users (e.g. as a result of hackers gaining unauthorised access to the database);
(d) third parties misusing Users' details and information that the Users share or make available to third parties; or
(e) any financial loss or damage that could arise out of the Users’ use of the Service save to the extent that such loss or damage cannot be excluded by law.
10.2 Nothing in these Terms shall have the effect of excluding or limiting qualidates’s liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by our negligence.
11 INDEMNITY
11.1 You shall indemnify qualidates against any liability, obligations, damages, costs (including reasonable expenses) and compensation claims resulting from your:
(a) defamatory statements, harassment of or any unlawful conduct towards other Users;
(b) breach of our intellectual property rights or any other third party intellectual property rights; or
(c) other breach of any of these Terms.
12 TECHNICAL DEFECTS
12.1 qualidates does not guarantee the permanent availability of its websites or their technical functionality.
12.2 In particular, qualidates assumes no responsibility for disruptions to the quality of access to the Service due to force majeure or other circumstances beyond the control of qualidates.
13 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN OUR SERVICE AND THE CONTENT
13.1 The design of the Service and / or any Additional Sites and all software and other content contained within the Service and / or any Additional Sites are protected by copyright, trade marks, patents and other intellectual property rights and laws. Neither the design of the Service / Additional Sites nor the content may be copied, reproduced, transmitted, stored, sold or distributed without the prior written consent of qualidates.
13.2 You may not at any time modify, store, copy (including for example scraping, using crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, and any other technology or manual work), extract, reutilise, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works from, transfer, or sell, distribute or create any information, dating profiles, products or services obtained from other Users, linked to or using this Service or any Additional Sites and any data therein or that may provide Users with the ability to do the same, unless approved by qualidates through a signed licence agreement.
14 LINKS TO THIRD PARTY WEBSITES
The Service may include links to third party websites that are controlled and maintained by others. Any link to other websites is not an endorsement of such websites and you acknowledge and agree that qualidates is not responsible for the content or availability of any such websites. We recommend you review those websites’ terms and conditions and privacy policies to ensure you are happy to use them.
15 CONTACT US
If you have an enquiry or complaint about qualidates, you should contact our customer services team and we will try to answer your enquiry or resolve any complaint as soon as possible.
16 SEVERANCE
If any of these Terms should be found to be invalid, illegal or unenforceable for any reason by any court of competent jurisdiction then such term shall be removed and the remaining terms shall survive and remain in full force and effect and continue to be binding on and enforceable by both of us.
17 THIRD PARTY RIGHTS
A person who is not a party to these Terms has no rights under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 to enforce any of these Terms but this section does not affect a right or remedy of a third party which exists or is available apart from that Act.
18 GOVERNING LAW
These Terms and the use of the Service generally and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter or formation (including non-contractual disputes or claims) will be governed by swiss law. Any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with such contracts or their formation (including non-contractual disputes or claims) shall be subject to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Switzerland.
19 ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION
19.1 If you have a complaint relating to these Terms, we will attempt to resolve the complaint internally. If our internal complaints process is exhausted and the complaint is not settled, you may make a request to us for the dispute to be settled by mediation.
19.2 The European Commission provides a platform for online dispute settlement. This gives you the opportunity to settle disputes in connection with your online order without first engaging a court. The platform can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr/.
Last Updated [ December 2017]