For the first time ever, eHarmony changes its terms of service and tells its members.
(For everyone’s information, eHarmony changes its terms and conditions of service from time to time, without telling its members and customers beforehand. Also, eHarmony never tells anyone what the changes were. In October 2008, I got sick and tired of this and decided to use a “web page monitoring service” to watch for changes to their TOS page (plus a few others), and then of course report them here. This will be a regular column under this blog’s “Site changes” category. I hope you find it useful.)
For the first time ever, eHarmony informs its customers that they changed their terms and conditions of business. In the past two days, several members (not all of them) received an advisory email from eHarmony with a summary of the changes last April 25. Honestly I am stupefied!
Click here for the exact changes to the policy (pdf, 366kb).
While eHarmony did send its members a SUMMARY of the changes, they did not disclose what the exact changes were, what lines or sections were added and what sections were removed. The email also presumed their members would know better. Of course they don’t.
Here is the advisory email:
Dear eHarmony Blog,
You may have noticed that we recently changed our Terms and Conditions of Service and Privacy Policy. We know that reading Terms and Policies isn’t at the top of your to-do list, but we do want to provide you with a summary of the important revisions to the terms of our service.
Deletion of Personal Information. We have added language to our Privacy Policy to clarify that you absolutely have the right to request removal of your personal information from our database after you close your account.
Social Media and Mobile. Technology and the Internet are becoming even more integrated into our lives. That means we at eHarmony must continue to develop our services in a manner that enables our members to take full advantage of some of the benefits connecting with your social networks offers. For example, our current Facebook Connect feature allows importing your own Facebook photos to your eHarmony profile photos and seeing common connections with your match, should both of you choose to use the Facebook Connect feature. Our goal in all such projects is to give our members more relevant options and features. Also, we continue to make our service available on mobile devices and strive to make that experience as dynamic as possible. Our data collection and data sharing policies related to the above appear in the Terms and Conditions of Service and Privacy Policy.
‘Old Matches’. We have added a disclosure that allows us to remove very old, unopened matches from the My Matches page. This change will allow for a faster loading of the ‘My Matches’ page and will likely only affect a small number of our current users. Don’t worry. This will not affect matches with whom you are communicating.
Arbitration. We have added an arbitration provision to the Terms and Conditions of Service and removed the California law and venue requirements. The arbitration provision contains detailed information about your rights and the arbitration procedure. Under its terms, you and eHarmony agree to have disputes settled by a neutral arbitrator from a non-profit organization not affiliated with eHarmony. This arbitration provision goes into effect immediately except for current subscribers on eHarmony, for whom this will become effective upon renewing or extending your subscription, or re-subscribing to eHarmony at a later date.
Other. We have made other minor changes to the Terms and Conditions of Service and Privacy Policy. Please review them in their entirety for the full disclosures. You can always find the most recent version of these policies on the bottom of our home page and other areas of the website.
We welcome any comment or questions you may have about these changes.
Sincerely,
eHarmony Customer Care
Categories: Site changes
Can you guess who had been denouncing eHarmony Inc.’s sites for fraud in several Consumers’ Associations worldwide?
The automatic rebilling clause will be next.
by FernandoArdenghi on Apr 27, 2012 at 10:19 pm