Data Rights on BeWelcome

This document was last updated on 22 March 2020. (French version)

Your Data Rights

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the French Digital Republic Act (DRA) give you certain rights over your personal data on BeWelcome. In summary, these include:

Right of access to data/copies of data

You have a right to know what personal data of yours BeWelcome holds and processes. In our Privacy Policy, we explain what data we require from you at sign-up. Apart from this, any personal data in your profile, in messages, or in posts, is only what is voluntarily provided by you, remains in your ownership, and is under your control to edit or delete. BeWelcome neither holds nor uses any data except for the purpose of facilitating hospitality or cultural exchange.

You have a right to obtain a copy of your personal data from BeWelcome. You can download this via the password-protected link in your BeWelcome profile.

Right to rectification of errors

It is your responsibility to keep your profile accurate and up to date, and any errors must be rectified directly by you.

One possible exception is if you believe that there are errors in the comments about you posted by others in your profile. Hosting comments/references are an essential part of the way hospitality exchange works and, by their nature, they are personal opinions. BeWelcome cannot be held responsible for the opinions of users but, if you believe that a comment is wrong, you can contact the BeWelcome Safety Team (through the contact form on the site) who will seek a resolution. Please note that, if there is just a difference of opinion and there are no issues such as a breach of the site Terms of Use, the Safety Team may not be able to resolve matters and the comment may stand.

Right to deletion/Right to be forgotten

You have the right to delete or have deleted any personal data, with the following exceptions:

• BeWelcome may retain some personal data, profile details etc. where they are relevant to an investigation about an abuse; and
• Some personal data may be retained where it is part of posts in the BeWelcome forum or messages to third parties.

Right to object to or to restrict processing

You may, at any time, block further processing of your data by setting your profile to «inactive». This suspends your hospitality activity and removes your profile from members lists and searches, though you might still receive messages from other members if you had outstanding correspondence with them.

Note that you can only suspend site activity for a maximum of 2 years. A period of inactivity longer than this may result in your membership being cancelled and your data deleted (see section 6 of the BeWelcome Terms of Use).

Right to data portability

GDPR promotes the idea that user data should be ‘portable’ between service suppliers. The individual nature of hospitality platforms means that there are natural restrictions on the ‘automatic’ transfer of data between platforms and, currently, no agreements or standards exist for this.

However, if you request a copy of your personal data from BeWelcome (see above) we will provide this copy in a ‘machine readable’ format (e.g. a .txt or .html file).

Right to withdraw consent

Your personal data is used for the purposes of hospitality and cultural exchange. This data is provided at your own discretion, and you may restrict or amend it at any time.

You can withdraw consent at any time by canceling your membership of BeWelcome (see section 1 of the BeWelcome Terms of Use). You can also either completely delete your profile or erase your profile data, using the ‘profile edit’ option.

Right to object to marketing

BeWelcome does not use personal data to make money, either for itself or on behalf of others. Our communications with you are normally only information about the site (e.g. site changes). We occasionally produce a newsletter which may contain wider information about BeWelcome and hospitality, but you can choose not to receive this by changing your account ‘preferences’.

Right to complain to the relevant data protection authority

For BeWelcome, the relevant data protection authority is the French CNIL (Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés) and details for contacting them are at www.cnil.fr/en/contact-cnil

Rights of Inheritance

The Digital Republic Act 2016 gives rights of inheritance of digital accounts, on the death of the user, to nominated heirs registered with the French CNIL (Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés) or with certain certified third parties.

Because of the particular circumstances of BW, accounts are individual and cannot be transferred or inherited. However, heirs registered under the DRA (see above) have a right to obtain a copy of the personal data, before the account is deleted.