Terms of Service

Terms of Service

These terms govern use of the Internet forum at https://www.worldwatercommunity.com.
To use the forum, you must agree to these terms.

The company may offer other products and services, under different terms. These terms apply only to use of the forum.

• Important Terms
• Your Permission to Use the Forum
• Conditions for Use of the Forum
• Acceptable Use
• Content Standards
• Enforcement
• Your Account
• Your Content
• Your Responsibility
• Disclaimers
• Limits on Liability
• Feedback
• Termination
• Disputes
• General Terms
• Contact
• Changes

Important Terms

These terms include a number of important provisions that affect your rights and responsibilities, such as the disclaimers in Disclaimers, limits on the company’s liability to you in Limits on Liability, your agreement to cover the company for damages caused by your misuse of the forum in Responsibility for Your Use, and an agreement to arbitrate disputes in Disputes.

Your Permission to Use the Forum

Subject to these terms, the company gives you permission to use the forum. Everyone needs to agree to these terms to use the forum.

Conditions for Use of the Forum

Your permission to use the forum is subject to the following conditions:

1. You must be at least thirteen years old.
2. You may no longer use the forum if the company contacts you directly to say that you may not.
3. You must use the forum in accordance with Acceptable Use and Content Standards.

Acceptable Use

1. You may not break the law using the forum.
2. You may not use or try to use another’s account on the forum without their specific permission.
3. You may not buy, sell, or otherwise trade in user names or other unique identifiers on the forum.
4. You may not send advertisements, chain letters, or other solicitations through the forum.
5. You may not use the forum to gather addresses or other personal data for commercial mailing lists or databases.
6. You may not automate access to the forum, or monitor the forum, such as with a web crawler, browser plug-in or add-on, or other computer program that is not a web browser. You may crawl the forum to index it for a publicly available search engine, if you run one.
7. You may not use the forum to send e-mail to distribution lists, newsgroups, or group mail aliases.
8. You may not falsely imply that you’re affiliated with or endorsed by the company.
9. You may not hyperlink to images or other non-hypertext content on the forum on other webpages.
10. You may not remove any marks showing proprietary ownership from materials you download from the forum.
11. You may not show any part of the forum on other websites with iframe.
12. You may not disable, avoid, or circumvent any security or access restrictions of the forum.
13. You may not strain infrastructure of the forum with an unreasonable volume of requests, or requests designed to impose an unreasonable load on information systems underlying the forum.
14. You may not impersonate others through the forum.
15. You may not encourage or help anyone in violation of these terms.

Content Standards

1. You may not submit content to the forum that is illegal, offensive, or otherwise harmful to others. This includes content that is harassing, inappropriate, or abusive.
2. You may not submit content to the forum that violates the law, infringes anyone’s intellectual property rights, violates anyone’s privacy, or breaches agreements you have with others.
3. You may not submit content to the forum containing malicious computer code, such as computer viruses or spyware.
4. You may not submit content to the forum as a mere placeholder, to hold a particular address, user name, or other unique identifier.
5. You may not use the forum to disclose information that you don’t have the right to disclose, like others’ confidential or personal information.

Enforcement

The company may investigate and prosecute violations of these terms to the fullest legal extent. The company may notify and cooperate with law enforcement authorities in prosecuting violations of the law and these terms.

The company reserves the right to change, redact, and delete content on the forum for any reason. If you believe someone has submitted content to the forum in violation of these terms, contact us immediately.

Your Account

You must create and log into an account to use some features of the forum.

To create an account, you must provide some information about yourself. If you create an account, you agree to provide, at a minimum, a valid e-mail address, and to keep that address up-to-date. You may close your account at any time by e-mailing tos @ worldwatercommunity.com.

You agree to be responsible for all action taken using your account, whether authorized by you or not, until you either close your account or notify the company that your account has been compromised. You agree to notify the company immediately if you suspect your account has been compromised. You agree to select a secure password for your account, and keep it secret.

The company may restrict, suspend, or close your account on the forum according to its policy for handling copyright-related take down requests, or if the company reasonably believes that you’ve broken any rule in these terms.

Your Content

Nothing in these terms gives the company any ownership rights in intellectual property that you share with the forum, such as your account information, posts, or other content you submit to the forum. Nothing in these terms gives you any ownership rights in the company’s intellectual property, either.

Between you and the company, you remain solely responsible for content you submit to the forum. You agree not to wrongly imply that content you submit to the forum is sponsored or approved by the company. These terms do not obligate the company to store, maintain, or provide copies of content you submit, and to change it, according to these terms.

Content you submit to the forum belongs to you, and you decide what permission to give others for it. But at a minimum, you license the company to provide content that you submit to the forum to other users of the forum. That special license allows the company to copy, publish, and analyze content you submit to the forum.

When content you submit is removed from the forum, whether by you or by the company, the company’s special license ends when the last copy disappears from the company’s backups, caches, and other systems. Other licenses you apply to content you submit, such as Creative Commons licenses, may continue after your content is removed. Those licenses may give others, or the company itself, the right to share your content through the forum again.

Others who receive content you submit to the forum may violate the terms on which you license your content. You agree that the company will not be liable to you for those violations or their consequences.

Your Responsibility

You agree to indemnify the company from legal claims by others related to your breach of these terms, or breach of these terms by others using your account on the forum. Both you and the company agree to notify the other side of any legal claims for which you might have to indemnify the company as soon as possible.

If the company fails to notify you of a legal claim promptly, you won’t have to indemnify the company for damages that you could have defended against or mitigated with prompt notice.

You agree to allow the company to control investigation, defense, and settlement of legal claims for which you would have to indemnify the company, and to cooperate with those efforts. The company agrees not to agree to any settlement that admits fault for you or imposes obligations on you without your prior agreement.

Disclaimers

You accept all risk of using the forum and content on the forum. As far as the law allows, the company and its suppliers provide the forum as is, without any warranty whatsoever.

The forum may hyperlink to and integrate forums and services run by others. The company does not make any warranty about services run by others, or content they may provide. Use of services run by others may be governed by other terms between you and the one running service.

Limits on Liability

Neither the company nor its suppliers will be liable to you for breach-of-contract damages their personnel could not have reasonably foreseen when you agreed to these terms.

As far as the law allows, the total liability to you for claims of any kind that are related to the forum or content on the forum will be limited to €50.

Feedback

The company welcomes your feedback and suggestions for the forum. See the Contact section below for ways to get in touch with us.

You agree that the company will be free to act on feedback and suggestions you provide, and that the company won’t have to notify you that your feedback was used, get your permission to use it, or pay you. You agree not to submit feedback or suggestions that you believe might be confidential or proprietary, to you or others.

Termination

Either you or the company may end the agreement written out in these terms at any time. When our agreement ends, your permission to use the forum also ends. The following provisions survive the end of our agreement: Your Content, Feedback, Your Responsibility, Disclaimers, Limits on Liability, and General Terms.

Disputes

Dutch Law will govern any dispute related to these terms or your use of the forum. You and the company agree to seek injunctions related to these terms only in The Netherlands,  federal court in Amsterdam. Neither you nor the company will object to jurisdiction, forum, or venue in those courts.

You will settle any dispute as an individual, and not as part of a class action or other representative proceeding, whether as the plaintiff or a class member. No arbitrator will consolidate any dispute with any other arbitration without the company’s permission.

Any arbitration award will include costs of the arbitration, reasonable attorneys’ fees, and reasonable costs for witnesses. You and the company may enter arbitration awards in any court with jurisdiction.

General Terms

If a provision of these terms is unenforceable as written, but could be changed to make it enforceable, that provision should be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable. Otherwise, that provision should be removed.

You may not assign your agreement with the company. The company may assign your agreement to any affiliate of the company, any other company that obtains control of the company, or any other company that buys assets of the company related to the forum. Any attempted assignment against these terms has no legal effect.

Neither the exercise of any right under this Agreement, nor waiver of any breach of this Agreement, waives any other breach of this Agreement.

These terms embody all the terms of agreement between you and the company about use of the forum. These terms entirely replace any other agreements about your use of the forum, written or not.

Contact Terms Of Service

You may notify the company under these terms, and send questions to the company, at tos @ worldwatercommunity.com.

The company may notify you under these terms using the e-mail address you provide for your account on the forum, or by posting a message to the homepage of the forum or your account page.

Changes

The company last updated these terms on September 8, 2020, and may update these terms again. The company will post all updates to the forum.

For updates that contain substantial changes, the company agrees to e-mail you, if you’ve created an account and provided a valid e-mail address. The company may also announce updates with special messages or alerts on the forum. Once you get notice of an update to these terms, you must agree to the new terms in order to keep using the forum.

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

This is the Privacy Policy of World Water Community (hereinafter referred to as “World Water Community”, “we”, “us”, or “our”), a company having its address at Marconistraat 16, 3029 AK Rotterdam. World Water Community is registered with the Chamber of Commerce under number 84677694. Our Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, share, and protect information in relation to our websites https://www.worldwatercommunity.com, https://www.worldwatercommunity.org, including all subdomains (the “Service”). We collect this information when you visit our website with your computer, tablet or mobile phone (“Computer”). We process personal data in a manner that is in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”), the GDPR-based legislation and the other current privacy legislation.

By using the Service, you understand and agree that we are providing a platform for you to post content, including photos, comments and other materials (“User Content”), to the Service and to share User Content publicly. This means that other Users (as defined below) may search for, see, use, or share any of your User Content that you make publicly available through the Service, consistent with the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy and our Term of Service. Our Privacy Policy applies to all visitors, users, and other who access the Service (“Users”).

What kinds of information do we collect?

Information you provide

We collect the following information you provide us with directly:

1. Your username, password and e-mail address when you register for a World Water Community account;
2. Information you provide on forms, for example when signing petitions. (e.g. legal requirements, date-of-birth, country of residence) 
3. Profile information that you provide for your user profile;
4. User Content (e.g., photos, comments, and other materials) that you post to the Service; and
5. Communications between you and World Water Community (e.g., we may send you Service-related emails).

Log file information

We collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our Service. This log file information may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our Service that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics.

Metadata

Metadata is usually technical data that is associated with User Content. For instance, metadata can describe how, when and by whom a piece of User Content was collected and how that content is formatted. Users can add or may have metadata added to their User Content including a hashtag (e.g. to mark keywords when you post a photo), geotag (e.g. to mark your location to a photo), comment or other data. This makes your User Content more searchable by others and more interactive.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics services (non-personally identifiable information only)

We use third-party analytics tools to help us measure traffic and usage trends for the Service. These tools collect information sent by your device or our Service, including the web pages you visit, add-ons, and other information that assists us in improving the Service. The tools use ’cookies’, which are text files place on your device, to collect your log information and behavior information in an anonymous form. We collect and use this analytics information with analytics information from other Users so that it cannot reasonably be used to identify any particular individual User. With respect to Google Analytics, although Google Analytics plants a permanent cookie on your web browser to identify you, the cookie cannot be used by anyone but Google. Google’s ability to use and share information collected by Google Analytics about your visits is restricted by the Google Analytics Terms of Use and Google Privacy Policy. You can prevent Google Analytics from recognizing you on return visits by disabling cookies.

DoubleClick Cookie

Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our Service, Google’s use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to our users based on their visit to our Service or other websites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DoubleClick Cookie for interest-based advertising by visiting the Google Ads Settings web page.

How do we use this information?

We use all of the information we have to help us provide and support our Services. Here is how:

1. Remember information so you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit the Service;
2. Provide, improve, test, and monitor the effectiveness of our Service;
3. To help you efficiently access your information after you sign in;
4. Monitor metrics such as total number of visitors, traffic, and demographic patterns;
5. Diagnose or fix technology problems; and
6. Develop and test new products and features.

Communications

We may use your information to contact you with newsletters, marketing or promotional materials and other information that may be of interest to you. You may opt out of receiving any, or all, of these communications from us by following the unsubscribe link.

How is this information shared?

We will not rent or sell your information to third parties outside World Water Community.

People you share and communicate with

Any information or content that you voluntarily disclose for posting to the Service, such as User Content, becomes available to the public. Once you have shared User Content or made it public, that User Content may be re-shared by others. Subject to your profile, any User Content that you make public is searchable by other Users. If you remove information that you posted to the Service, copies may remain viewable in cache and archived pages of the Service, or if other Users or third parties have copied or saved that information.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Change of control

If we sell or otherwise transfer part or the whole of World Water Community or our assets to another organization (e.g., in the course of a transaction like a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, dissolution, liquidation), your information collect through the Service may be among the items sold or transferred. The buyer or transferee will have to honor the commitments we have made in the Privacy Policy.

Legal requests and preventing harm

We may access, preserve and share your information in response to a legal request (like a search warrant, court order or subpoena) if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so. We may also access, preserve and share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity; to protect ourselves, you and others, including as part of investigations; and to prevent death or imminent bodily harm. Information we receive about you may be accessed, processed and retained for an extended period of time when it is the subject of a legal request or obligation, governmental investigation, or investigations concerning possible violations of our terms or policies, or otherwise to prevent harm.

Safety and security

World Water Community has taken appropriate technical and organizational measures by using the latest technologies to protect your information against loss or unlawful processing. We use safeguards to help keep the information collected through the Service secure and take steps (such as requesting a unique password) to verify your identity before granting you access to your account. However, World Water Community cannot ensure the security of any information you transmit to World Water Community or guarantee that information on the Service may not be accessed, disclosed, altered, or destroyed. We request you to do your part to help us. You are responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your unique password and account information, and for controlling access to emails between you and World Water Community, at all times. We are not responsible for the functionality, privacy or security measures of any other organization.

International transfer

Your information may be transferred to, and maintained on computers located outside of your state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the data protection laws may differ than those from your jurisdiction. If you are located outside Netherlands and choose to provide information to us, please note that we transfer the information to The Netherlands. You consent to this Privacy Policy followed by your submission of such information represents your agreement to that transfer.

Retention period

In accordance with the law, World Water Community does not retain data any longer than is required for attaining the purposes for which they were collected.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Inspection and correction

If you wish to know which of your data World Water Community has recorded or if you wish to amend or remove data that you cannot amend via your account, please contact World Water Community.

This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Third-party applications, websites and services

We are not responsible for the practices employed by any applications, websites or services linked to or from our Service, including the information or content contained within them. Please remember that when you use a link to go from our Service to another application, website or service, our Privacy Policy does not apply to those third-party applications, websites or services. Your browsing and interaction on any third-party application, website or service, including those that have a link on our Services, are subject to that third party’s own rules and policies. In addition, you agree that we are not responsible and do not have control over any third-parties that you authorize to access your User Content. If you are using a third-party app, website or service and you allow them to access your User Content you do so at your own risk.

Children’s privacy

Our Service does not address anyone under the age of 13 (“Children”). We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information for children under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Children have provided us with personal information, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13 without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from our servers.

Mobile application Terms of Service and Privacy

These terms and conditions (“Terms”, “Agreement”) are an agreement between Mobile Application Developer (“Mobile Application Developer”, “us”, “we” or “our”) and you (“User”, “you” or “your”). This Agreement sets forth the general terms and conditions of your use of the World Water Community mobile application and any of its products or services (collectively, “Mobile Application” or “Services”).

Mobile accounts and membership

If you create an account in the Mobile Application, you are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and you are fully responsible for all activities that occur under the account and any other actions taken in connection with it.
We may, but have no obligation to, monitor and review new accounts before you may sign in and use our Services.
Providing false contact information of any kind may result in the termination of your account. You must immediately notify us of any unauthorized uses of your account or any other breaches of security.

We will not be liable for any acts or omissions by you, including any damages of any kind incurred as a result of such acts or omissions. We may suspend, disable, or delete your account (or any part thereof) if we determine that you have violated any provision of this Agreement or that your conduct or content would tend to damage our reputation and goodwill.
If we delete your account for the foregoing reasons, you may not re-register for our Services. We may block your email address and Internet protocol address to prevent further registration.

Mobile services

1. The service is used 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. However, the Service may be suspended for business or technical reasons of the Company. Also, the service may be suspended for operational purposes for a period set by the Company.
   In such cases, the Company will notify you in advance or after.
2. Location information may cause errors depending on the development of related technologies.

Mobile user content and your privacy

We do not own any data, information or material (“Content”) that you submit in the Mobile Application in the course of using the Service. You shall have sole responsibility for the accuracy, quality, integrity, legality, reliability, appropriateness, and intellectual property ownership or right to use of all submitted Content. We may, but have no obligation to, monitor and review Content in the Mobile Application submitted or created using our Services by you. You grant us permission to access, copy, store, transmit, reformat, display and perform the Content of your user account solely as required for the purpose of providing the Services to you.

Without limiting any of those representations or warranties, we have the right, though not the obligation, to, in our own sole discretion, refuse or remove any Content that, in our reasonable opinion, violates any of our policies or is in any way harmful or objectionable. Unless specifically permitted by you, your use of the Mobile Application does not grant us the license to use, reproduce, adapt, modify, publish or distribute the Content created by you or stored in your user account for commercial, marketing or any similar purpose.

Prohibited Uses

In addition to other terms as set forth in the Agreement, you are prohibited from using the Mobile Application or its Content:

1. for any unlawful purpose;
2. to solicit others to perform or participate in any unlawful acts;
3. to violate any international, federal, provincial or state regulations, rules, laws, or local ordinances;
4. to infringe upon or violate our intellectual property rights or the intellectual property rights of others;
5. to harass, abuse, insult, harm, defame, slander, disparage, intimidate, or discriminate based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, race, age, national origin, or disability;
6. to submit false or misleading information;
7. to upload or transmit viruses or any other type of malicious code that will or may be used in any way that will affect the functionality or operation of the Service or of any related mobile application, other mobile applications, or the Internet;
8. to spam, phish, pharm, pretext, spider, crawl, or scrape;
9. for any obscene or immoral purpose; or
10. to interfere with or circumvent the security features of the Service or any related mobile application, other mobile applications, or the Internet. We reserve the right to terminate your use of the Service or any related mobile application for violating any of the prohibited uses.

Intellectual property rights

“Intellectual Property Rights” means all present and future rights conferred by statute, common law or equity in or in relation to any copyright and related rights, trademarks, designs, patents, inventions, goodwill and the right to sue for passing off, rights to inventions, rights to use, and all other intellectual property rights, in each case whether registered or unregistered and including all applications and rights to apply for and be granted, rights to claim priority from, such rights and all similar or equivalent rights or forms of protection and any other results of intellectual activity which subsist or will subsist now or in the future in any part of the world.

This Agreement does not transfer to you any intellectual property owned by Mobile Application Developer or third parties, and all rights, titles, and interests in and to such property will remain (as between the parties) solely with Mobile Application Developer.

All trademarks, service marks, graphics and logos used in connection with the Mobile Application or Services, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Mobile Application Developer or Mobile Application Developer licensors. Other trademarks, service marks, graphics and logos used in connection with the Mobile Application or Services may be the trademarks of other third parties. Your use of the Mobile Application and Services grants you no right or license to reproduce or otherwise use any Mobile Application Developer or third party trademarks.

Severability

All rights and restrictions contained in this Agreement may be exercised and shall be applicable and binding only to the extent that they do not violate any applicable laws and are intended to be limited to the extent necessary so that they will not render this Agreement illegal, invalid or unenforceable. If any provision or portion of any provision of this Agreement shall be held to be illegal, invalid or unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction, it is the intention of the parties that the remaining provisions or portions thereof shall constitute their agreement with respect to the subject matter hereof, and all such remaining provisions or portions thereof shall remain in full force and effect.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may modify or update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page. You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.

How to contact us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy of the Service, please send an email to legal @ worldwatercommunity.com .