Privacy policy
Updated 1st January 2022
Updated 1st January 2022
Welcome to NextBlock!
We invite you to read about our privacy and security practices and contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
This policy is a part of the NextBlock member agreement, but it controls over any conflicts with that agreement. This policy only addresses our practices associated with the NextBlock.sg website and the associated iPhone and Android apps. Other websites, apps and services we operate may be subject to other policies and practices.
Server Logs. We automatically collect information about your visits to our app, usage of the service, and your interaction with the messages we send, including metrics such as your operating system, your IP address, and usage and browsing habits. We use this information to diagnose and resolve server problems, analyze trends, help target offers and other ads, track user movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information.
Cookies. Like most websites, our App uses "cookies," small data files stored on your computer which include a unique identifier. These include cookies from us and from our business partners.
Invitations. Existing NextBlock members may invite you to join the service via postal mail, email, SMS/text message or other ways. To help NextBlock members extend those invitations, we gather information about neighbours in a neighbuorhood, including non-members.
If you aren’t a member, you can opt-out of future email invitations, or ask us to delete any non-public information about you that we use to facilitate member invitations, by contacting us. If we haven't built your neighbourhood service yet, you can ask us to notify you when we create a neighbourhood where you live. We retain your request information indefinitely and use it to provide the requested notification and assist with your verification. If you change your mind about wanting to be notified, contact us.
Verification. You can verify your neighbour status by:
Having a neighbour (who already has an account in the neighbourhood) invite you to the neighbourhood and then confirming your address, or
Input an invitation code provided either by NextBlock
Providing us your name and street address (and email address, if we don't already have it) and then sending in this information via a picture format in the App’s user verification feature.
We may offer other verification methods as well over time. If we ask you to confirm your email address and you don’t, we may choose to restrict or terminate your account.
If you decide not to verify the account and would like us to delete your non-public verification information, contact us.
Profile Information. We allow you to create a personal profile and submit information such as your phone number, photo, biography and personal interests. We may give you ways to hide some of this profile information, but your name and district may be visible to your neighbours so long as you maintain your account. We also have a feature – privacy mode that, when activated, hides a portion of your profile information and your posts on the app from other neighbours. If you are the subject of an unauthorized profile, please contact us.
Communications with Other Members. We give you a variety of ways to communicate with your neighbours and share Content (as defined in the member agreement). Some of these communications are visible to the entire neighbourhood and (if you choose) interest groups, although we may give your neighbours ways to block your communications. Other communications (such as messages between you and another individual member) may be visible only to a subset of your neighbours. Certain member-related administrative emails cannot be turned off; the only way to end those is to deactivate your account.
Respecting Your Neighbours' Privacy. One of NextBlock’s central tenets is that neighbours should be able to communicate amongst themselves. For this reason, we restrict who can access your neighbourhood and take efforts to exclude non-neighbours from the conversation. For example, we don't let public Web search engines (such as Google) index member-submitted Content.
Given this norm, taking information shared by one neighbour to another and sharing it outside the neighbourhood(s) violates your neighbours' expectations and is a serious breach of trust. Therefore, you may not share your neighbours' information or any communications sent through NextBlock with anyone outside the neighbourhood(s) to which the post was distributed without the author's permission. Also, you may not gather information from NextBlock, either manually or on an automated basis (such as through scripts, robots, crawlers or spiders). Without limiting the foregoing, it is not OK to provide your neighbours' information from NextBlock to third party marketers. Violating this provision may lead to a loss of account privileges, potentially including a permanent ban from NextBlock.
Third Party Offers. We know that you do not want marketing from third parties just because you join a neighbourhood App, so we do not turn over your personally identifiable information to third party marketers without your express consent. In the future, we may create a feature that presents offers for goods and services we think you'd like. If you decide to participate with an offer, you may be presented with an opportunity to share information with the merchant. If you accept the offer, then we'll send the information you requested to share with the merchant. We won't transmit that information to the merchant until you explicitly ask us to do so. At that point, the data we deliver to the merchant will be governed by the merchant's privacy policy, not ours.
Account Deactivation and Reactivation. You can deactivate your account by writing in to us. Deactivation will end your email notifications, and you will no longer appear in your neighbourhood directory or map. Your previously posted Content will remain in your neighbourhood, attributed to you, unless you delete individual Content items before you deactivate; and remaining Content items will link to a limited user profile that includes your name. You can undo an account deactivation by reactivating your account (though we may set a time limit for reactivation). We may notify the neighbourhood Leads of your departure from the neighbourhood and give you an opportunity to explain it to the Leads.
Government Relations and Lawsuits. We may disclose data about you to the government if we are required to do so or as we think is prudent for safety or security reasons; and you authorize us to make these disclosures. We may also disclose data about you in connection with actual or potential legal proceedings (a) in response to judicial or other government subpoenas, warrants or orders, (b) if we are required to do so in other ways, (c) if such disclosures might mitigate our liability, or (d) to enforce our rights.
Limits on Our Abilities. While we work hard to respect your privacy, like any other complex online service, we might inadvertently use or disclose your data in ways inconsistent with this policy. For example, a temporary software glitch could lead to public display of your personal data despite your contrary preferences. We might also make ad hoc uses of your data in ways not mentioned here. In these anomalous situations, we will try to rectify the anomaly as soon as we can.
Data Retention. Subject to any legal obligations to delete data, we may choose to retain information in our server logs, our databases and our records indefinitely.
Security. NextBlock uses https on its web pages to reduce the risk of unauthorized interception of your communications during your visits to the website. However, we cannot guarantee that your personal data won’t be intercepted or improperly accessed.
Amendment. This privacy policy is part of the NextBlock member agreement and can be modified in accordance with the amendment procedures described in that document