Privacy Policy

You can see our previous Privacy Policy here

Updated January 19, 2024

What does this policy cover?

We are F6S Network Limited (registered number 08522020), whose registered office is at 124 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom (“our”, “us” and “we”). We will refer to you as “you” and “your”.

We value your privacy and the security of your data and we want to be transparent about the collection, use and sharing of information about you. This Privacy Policy is for your use of the services we make available (“Service(s)”) and our website (f6s.com and related sites). It also applies to your interaction with us through other means such as customer service, discussing or contracting one of our professional services, direct conversations and events.

This Privacy Policy is part of our group of Policies as set out in our Terms of Service which provides information that is likely to be useful to complement this Privacy Policy. Please do not access or use the Services or website if you do not agree with the terms of this Privacy Policy or any of the other Policies.

We have produced this Privacy Policy to communicate and explain how we process personal information that we collect about you when you use the Services and interact with us such as:

how we collect information about you;
how we use information we collect;
how we control your information;
how we store and secure your information;
how your information is shared;
how we transfer your information to other countries; and
additional information we think might be useful to you.

You have choices about the use of personal information which we hold about you. You can access, update and request the removal of the information we hold about you. If you don’t agree with the Policies, please do not access or use the Services, or interact with us.

What information do we collect about you?

We collect information, including your personal information, to provide the Services. In order for us to provide the Services to you, we need to collect and use personal information as described in this Privacy Policy and the other Policies. The collection and processing of personal information by us is necessary to enable the relationship we have with you, and when that isn’t the case we have a legitimate interest in collecting the information. We collect information about you when you provide it to us through use of the Services as well when it is provided by another source - we talk more about this below. For the purposes of the applicable data legislation, we are the ‘data controller’ in respect of your personal information. In general, we are responsible for the Policies and the handling of your personal information.

Information you give us. This includes personal information that you provide to us when you use the Services by directly inputting it or by other means. Our Services change from time to time so the options for the information you provide (as with other information) may change. Also, the personal information may vary depending on how you interact with the services. For example, it is possible to create an account using an e-mail or by using a social login, and different types of profiles you use to connect with opportunities may have different items to complete.

Here are some examples where you may give us personal information:

Account and Profile Information - This includes the name, email address and password you provided at the time of registering for the Service. It also includes information you input into your profile, any messages you send or receive, any information you provide to us by other means such as e-mail or forms, as well as any data you provide while using the Service;
Information you give us when you receive professional services from us - We collect information from you regarding you and your business, including personal income and tax information, identification information for the purposes of compliance with anti-money laundering regulations, and other information as required to fulfill our obligations to you and third parties. We access and store information comprised in submissions made with our assistance to government agencies and organizations, and communications with those agencies by you on your behalf. With your agreement, we record telephone conversations to ensure service quality;
Information you give us through the Service - You can post, send, access and share information through our Services. For example, you can make a post to a discussion board, send a message asking us to provide a professional service, send a message to other user(s), reply to a message you receive in your e-mail, start or update an application, connect with an opportunity, provide us with feedback or upload a file;
Information about Racial and Ethnic Origin - Some users of our community that offer opportunities to other users, such as accelerator programs or start-up funds, want to track their progress towards providing opportunities to a range of races or ethnicities. In order to help them do so, they may ask you for information about your racial or ethnic origin. You are not required to provide this information. Please be aware that data about racial and ethnicity is a special category under Article 9 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (commonly called “GDPR”);
Information you give when you are asking for support or we are providing it - You may choose to give us information about a problem you are having, or ask us how to use the Service and in doing so you may provide us with information by e-mail, through live chat, by voice, through third-party platforms or by other means;
Information you give us so we can collect money from you or send money to you - If you pay us for all or any part of the Service, or if we need to send you money, we may ask you to give us information we require to collect such as bank information, card details, direct debit details, names of people responsible for payment or billing contacts. We do not store payment card details. All payments taken by us are handled by a third party payment processor and while our payment pages might look like they are operated by us, they are in fact operated by such payment processor (which we may choose from time to time at our absolute discretion).

Information we get automatically when you use the Services. This is personal information we receive and that is collected by automated systems involved in delivering the Services or when you take specific actions while using the Services.

Cookies - We and third parties use cookies and other tracking methods to deliver you the Service. Please see our Cookie Policy and Cookie Table for more information, and for links that can show you how to control the use of cookies and tracking methods;
Logs and Analysis - We log data about your use of the Service and your response to any communications from us by email or by means of the Platform in order to provide you with the Services, identify issues and understand usage. We do this by means of technology solutions that we have built ourselves and through technologies provided by third parties;
Information about how you use the Services - We track some aspects related to how you use and interact with Services. For example, we may track the areas of the Service you visit, what you search for, how often you visit us, what devices you use to access the Service, your IP address and location, the URL you enter or exit the Service, data around failures or imperfections that may be triggered when you use the Service and other items.

Information we get about you from others. This is information we receive that you do not directly provide when you use the Service. We get it from other users of the Service, third-party services we use to provide the Services, from information we collect and from our partners and vendors in the following circumstances:

Sign-up and Related Services - If you sign up for the Service, renew your login or request additional services on the Service using your LinkedIn, Facebook, Eventbrite, Twitter, Google, Google Analytics, or Weibo account, you hereby give consent for us to obtain information from those accounts that you approve such as your email address, current employment position, education, profile picture, site traffic and/or location. We also use your IP address to derive an approximate location of where you are using the Service from if none is otherwise provided. The information we get from those services depends on the choices you make in their settings, so please be sure to check those settings before signing up that way. Additionally, some services offer you the choice of what personal information is provided to us and we encourage you to carefully select the information you want to share if that option is available. We also use third party services that help us to provide services like identifying and alerting you if you have duplicate accounts;
Other third-party services you may choose to connect to your account - You can choose to authorize us to access information from your calendar, email or other service accounts. For example, you may do this so we can help you find out how you’re connected to other people and try to relate the items to your deal flow tools or other features. If you authorize us to access that information, we receive items such as e-mail sender, receiver information, the content of your and your calendar appointments until you remove our access. If you don't specifically choose to authorize access, we don't get this information. The information we get from these services depends on the settings and permissions you choose, as well as this Privacy Policy that is controlled by the third-party service. We recommend you always check these settings and permissions to understand the information that would be shared with us;
Scouting - We may collect information directly from you, use public record sources or create editorial content about you or your start-up in order to identify opportunities for you or your start-up. For example, we may engage with you verbally, by e-mail or use other sources to get this information. As further examples, we may provide this information to third-parties to help them scout appropriate startups to accept into a start-up program, identify potential partners or other engage with you;
Information submitted by other users of the Service - Other users of the Service may provide information about you when they add information during their use of the Service. As examples, an evaluator for a start-up program you’ve connected with on F6S may give you a numeric score and write notes about you, another user may provide your e-mail address to invite you to appear on their start-up profile or another user may connect their e-mail account to the Service and give us information related to your correspondence with them. Some other users may add your startup, information they have about you and other related information to their deal flow tools on the Service - such as Pipeline - and also add their information (such as notes, markets or location) to appear along with the information they or you have given us. The information provided by the other user may result in a communication with you;
Information we get from other partners - We get information about you from third-party partners including those carrying out market research, advertising and lead generation services and who provide us with information about your potential to use our Service and your engagement with us. For example, a third-party may provide us with information because they think you may be interested in one of our professional services that we may use to contact you.

How we use the personal information we collect

Our use of the personal information we collect depends on how you use the Services, as well as the settings and preferences you’ve provided to us.

To provide and personalize the Services - We use information about you to provide you with the Services. This includes logging you in, authenticating you when you login, operating the Services, responding to your use of the Services, maintaining the Services in line with your requests and providing support to you. As examples:
- your name and profile picture is used to identify you when you connect with or contact other users of the Service;
- we use your personal information to personalize the Services, such as identifying jobs and possible people or organization connections that match with your skills, location, availability, interests or other information;
- we provide your name, affiliation, e-mail address and other information to other users when you get a benefit from them such as hosting, e-mail infrastructure or travel;
- we notify you or another Service user that you are using the Services based on information you have provided through a third-party or based on your affiliations such as schools or companies;
- when you connect with other users of the Service, such as a start-up program, and in order for them to evaluate delivering the opportunity you are interested in receiving from them, we provide them with your start-up public information profile, your start-up private information profile, your contact information including e-mail and the profile information for those associated with start-up.
In order to provide an integrated experience, your information is available across the various aspects of the Service. For example, the skills you enter on your personal profile may be used to help a start-up program you connect with understand what you know how to do as well as identify job opportunities that match you. We believe that this allows us to provide you with an enhanced user experience in respect of the Service;
To maintain your profiles - We are a community which is based on real identities and so we use your information so that you and the organizations you are associated with can create and maintain profiles in relation to the Service. A profile will be created for you when you first use the Service and many aspects of the Service require a “Startup” or other entity profile. Each profile has options and tools that allow you to customize it with your personal information such as descriptions, educational history, associations and more. We associate you to organizations with which your profile has links and provide you with an option in each profile interface to immediately hide your profile(s) as well as an option to remove your profile from search indexing;
Providing other users of the Service with information about you - We might also use your personal information to suggest that others connect or interact with you where we think this might be in your best interests. For example, by connecting you with a user of the Service that is conducting an event in your area, or identifying you as a potential candidate to another user of the Service that is operating a Start-up program or fund;
To help users direct opportunities to other users of the Service - Some users of the Service provide opportunities to start-ups, founders and developers. These users often use the Service’s deal flow management tools. These tools allow them to access, add, share, manage and analyze information related to the organizations and users that use the Service. Access to personal information in the deal flow management tools is controlled based on permissions that are set by the organization and/or users within each organization using the tools;
To improve safety and security of the Services - We use information about you to identify suspicious activity, to investigate potential violations of the Policies and to verify user accounts;
To market, promote and drive engagement with the Services - We use information about your use of the Services, your contact information and other personal information about you to send you communications that may be of specific interest to you. This type of use has the goal of alerting you when there are events in respect of the Services which we think you’d like to know about, or to provide information, products and services we think you may be interested in. You can control what communications we provide to you in the settings section of the Services, which includes the option to unsubscribe from all communications from us other than core service messages and system functions, such as password reset;
To provide you with support - We use your personal information to resolve issues you have using the Services and to reply to your requests;
In relation to our legal rights and legitimate business interests - We will use personal information about you as required by law and when we believe it is necessary to protect our legal rights/interests, the rights/interests of others and in relation to any legal claim, regulatory requirements, audits, disclosures in the event of an acquisition, merger or sale and compliance activities;
When you give us your consent - You can give us your consent to use your personal information in a way that is or is not covered by this Privacy Policy or any of the other Policies;
To generate research and reports - We write and publish information, articles and content in relation to start-ups, industries, markets and other areas related to our community. This might include information we hold about you that you have provided that is generally visible in the Services (such as name, tag-line and location), information we generate on our own or aggregated anonymized data derived in part from your own personal information;
For marketing purposes - This means advertising, commercial affiliation, interacting with social media, remarketing and behavioral targeting, interacting with online survey platforms and public relations;
To improve the Services - We use feedback, aggregated data and may use your information as well to make the Services work better, faster, more securely and more in line with user needs. As an example, we use the search terms that users look for on the Services to identify new features that are in demand and which we believe we should develop further;
To communicate with you about the Services - We use information about your use of the Services, your contact information and other personal information to send you transactional communication that relate to your use of the Services. As examples, we may send you communication by e-mail or other means when you receive a message from another user of the Services or to confirm the details about claiming a benefit you’ve taken. You can control what communications we send to you in the settings section of the Services, which includes the option to unsubscribe from all communications other than core service messages and system functions like password reset.

Legal basis of our processing of your personal information

We will only collect and process your personal information where we have a valid legal basis for doing so. The legal basis for processing your personal information depends on the Services you use and how you use them.

In general, we collect and use your personal information where:

we have a legitimate interest. This is applicable when the interest is not overridden by your data protection interests;
we are required to do so under Contractual Performance;
you give us your consent to collect and use your personal information; or
we need to process your personal information to be in compliance with our legal obligations.

As set out above, in some cases, the legal basis for the processing of your personal information is your consent. This is the case, for example, if you agree to us emailing you with relevant information. In other cases, the processing will be necessary for the purposes of our providing you with the Services as referred to in this Privacy Policy and the other Policies. An example of processing personal information in accordance with our legitimate interest is protecting our legal rights, engaging in research and development or offering products and services of value to you, other users of the Services and our business partners. As mentioned above, processing of personal information by us based on our legitimate interests will only take place provided that those interests do not outweigh your rights and interests.

You have the right to withdraw your consent to use your personal information for a specific purpose at any time. Removing your consent will not change any processing that has already occurred. If you do withdraw your consent, and if we do not have another legal basis for processing your personal information, then we will stop processing your personal information. If we do have another legal basis for processing your personal information, then we may continue to do so subject to your legal rights. If we are processing your personal information because we or a third-party have a legitimate interest you have the right to object to this processing, but this may mean that it is no longer possible for you to use the Services.

We provide a Service that is a community where users share and collaborate together. This means that information is shared throughout the Services and with third-parties. Our business is not to sell personal information, rather our goal is to offer you the best collaborative community possible. We will share your personal information with our third-party service providers as required to deliver the Services.

When you connect with other users of the Platform - You connect with other users of the Services by a variety of means. When you connect with another Service user, you give them permission to see, share, edit, copy and download information you add to the Services. Examples of connections include applying to a start-up program, expressing interest in an employment position, asking for a benefit, following another Service user, applying for office hours, getting a ticket to an event, completing a survey, adding information to our deal flow tools such as Pipeline, requesting professional services and more. Some community and collaboration features of the Services show all or some of your profile information when you share or interact with content or other users through the Services. You can provide information that is freely visible to other users, such as the information on your personal profile. You can also provide information that is not freely visible to other users, such as the information designated as such in the basic information section of our website (“Basic Information”). For example, you may share both your personal information that is freely visible on your personal profile and Basic Information that is not visible on your personal (or start-up) profile when connecting to another Service user that has an application profile or office hours profile.

As another example, you share personal information such as your skills, languages spoken, location and other information when applying for a job offered by another user of the Services. You can control the visibility of your freely visible profile information, including hiding your profile from other users and telling search engines not to index your profile, using tools we provide you in the “Edit” section of your personal profile. Please note that hiding your profile will mean that your profile will no longer be visible, but your personal information will still be visible to other Service users you have given the ability to see your personal information. You will still show up in comments, groups and other environments you have joined.

Discussion Boards and Groups - You can post information on Discussion Boards or Public Groups, Private Groups and similar features in the Services that are available to some or all other users of the Services and can be indexed and visible in search engines. You should be aware that the personal information you post is available to access, copy and be used by anyone that can access it. As an example, when you post to our Public Groups or Discussion Board, which are organized around a profile, a specific technology or a specific interest, any other user of the Service can view, comment on, upvote and copy what you have posted or written. If you post or provide information on one of our Private Groups, all other users that are in such Private Group will have similar access to the information which you have posted. As set out elsewhere in the Policies, your personal information in these areas may be retained by us even if you terminate your account with us.

As an F6S user, you may be added to a group. For example, an admin of a Private Group that has invested in or supported you or your startup may add you to the corresponding Private Group or you may be added to a Private Group when you connect to an opportunity. You may also add yourself or be added to a Public Group because of your actions, activities and interests related to the Service.

Survey Registration Pages - You may be asked to complete a registration or survey by another Service user. For example, if you choose to complete the team registration for an event that you are attending you can provide your team members' information and technology products you use which will result in your information being shared with the Service user that corresponds to the team registration.

When we need to comply with applicable laws and requests - When we believe that sharing your personal information with third-party is required to comply with an applicable law, regulation or request by a government entity, to protect ourselves, our users or others from harm or illegal actions, to respond to an emergency that threatens a person, to fulfill your support requirements and/or to generally protect the security and integrity of the Service.

Our Partners - Third-parties help us deliver some parts of the Services. For example, we employ partners to collect funds owed to us in some regions, to localize the Services regionally and into new languages, and to support us in delivering the Services.

Affiliates - We may share your information with our affiliates, parents or subsidiaries. For example, we may share your personal information with our affiliate that provides professional services in order to deliver a financial service to you if required.

Service Providers - We share information with third-parties in order to provide, market, improve and support the Services, and these third-party service providers are essential to us in providing you with the Services. This includes service providers that perform services for us such as data hosting, e-mail delivery, testing, e-document signing, analytics, support infrastructure and many other areas. The use of these services requires the relevant third-party to access or use personal information about you. We monitor these third-party service providers carefully and have policies and procedures in place to maintain the security of your information.

With your consent - We share your information with third-parties when you give us your explicit consent to share it.

From time to time, business needs might require that we share, sell, or transfer information about you in connection with a merger, bankruptcy, financing, a reorganization, acquisition of all or part of our business by another entity, winding up, sale of our assets, or similar event. This Privacy Policy will apply to your personal information that is shared with us before and after the close of any transaction or transfer to a new entity.

With regard to sharing your data with other Service users and third-parties, please note that we will comply with your requests with regard to all future access to your information but your requests will not apply to any existing off-line information held by another Service user. As an example, when you connect to a start-up program through an application profile or populate your personal profile some other Service users have the ability to access your information through functionality such as a file data download, printing as a paper version, accessing it by API and other means.

Users of the Platform may have the functionality to export personal information of F6S users who have expressed interest by sharing and collaborating with other users in the Services’ community, consistent with the users’ preferences. For purposes of the GDPR, where there is a user-directed export of personal information or where the user already may access such personal information, the user and F6S will be independent controllers of that personal information originally derived on the F6S Platform. The parties agree that, for such cases, they would each act as a data controller with respect to their particular copy of the personal information. For clarity, parties agree that a joint controllership does not arise as the user has separate and independent reasons/purposes for processing the personal information. Each party will reasonably cooperate with the other party to enable the exercise of data protection rights as set forth in law only in relation to the personal information as processed on the Platform. Where the user exports data from the Platform, and that export results in a transfer of personal information out of the UK or the EEA, the user shall be solely responsible for compliance in relation to that data export/transfer.

How we store your information

We collect information globally and primarily store that information in the United States on our own servers and that of our service providers as part of providing the Services. These service providers are based outside the European Economic Area, in countries which may have different data privacy standards and protections than those which apply to us in the United Kingdom. We take steps to ensure that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this Privacy Policy when we transfer or store your personal information outside the EEA.

International transfer of information we collect

We operate globally and in doing so we transfer personal information using service platforms and service providers so that we can deliver you the Service as described in the Policies. Some of the countries where these service providers are located and where our team members work may not have privacy and data protection laws which are similar to or as protective as the laws of the EEA or the UK. In the event of the cross-border transfer by us of personal information which we collect from the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, we ensure that appropriate safeguards for the protection of such information are in place. These may include signing the EU approved Standard Contractual Clauses, binding corporate rules or any other appropriate safeguard available from time to time to ensure adequate security for transfers of your personal information. Transfer Impact Assessments or Transfer Risk Assessments are conducted before transferring personal data to third countries. Where a recipient US organization has self-certified its compliance with EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework Principles, there is no longer a need to put in place an alternative transfer mechanism. Processors will be assessed for self-certification with EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework Principles, and, where applicable, transfers will be carried out according to EU-US or UK-US Data Privacy Frameworks.

Data Retention - We apply data retention policies in line with the type of personal information retained. We retain personal information for no longer than is required for our legitimate processing purposes. After a data retention period has expired, we either delete or anonymize your personal information. The retention policies we apply to different types of personal information are:

Your Account Information - This personal information is retained as long as your account is active and you have not requested its deletion, and nor has it been deleted under the Policies. We may keep some of your personal information to the extent needed to be in compliance with our legal obligations, to resolve disputes and enforce any agreements we have with you;
Information you have shared on the Services - We retain personal information from deleted and deactivated accounts as required to allow other users of the Services to continue to make use of the Services. For example, (i) your name will continue to appear on any messages you have sent to other users of the Services after account deletion and any posts you have made will continue to appear, or (ii) where your name or other personal information has been added to the Service by you or another user other than in association with your account (such as where your name has been added, with authority, as the founder of a startup and such record is not specifically linked to your account). You acknowledge and confirm that this may result in certain personal information remaining on the Service in these circumstances.

Apart from what we’ve described above, we’ll archive and stop processing any personal information about you in accordance with our data retention policy when you delete your account (and we’ll continue to act in line with the other parts of the Policies) or when it’s no longer necessary or required for us to process your personal information to provide our Services, whichever comes first. The decision about what’s necessary or required to provide our Services depends upon factors such as actions you take, the type of data held by us, archive provisions, legal and regulatory requirements for data retention and the data required for our operations. By way of examples, we will delete back-ups containing your personal information within one year of first storage and web logs are deleted within six months. As another example, if we are providing you with professional services the period of data retention can be up to ten years from your last use of the Services due to legal and other regulatory requirements.

Security of your information

We take security of your data seriously and work hard to avoid loss, misuse, unauthorized access or disclosure. No security system is perfect and despite our efforts and the distributed nature of the Internet, we can’t guarantee that your personal information will be absolutely secure, either while it is being transmitted or while stored on our systems. You can find more information on our Data Security.

Access and Control of your Information

You have rights with respect to your personal information. We have compiled a list of choices below that you may make with additional information on how to make them happen.

You have the right to:

request access to personal information we hold about you;
deactivate your account;
update your personal information;
delete your personal information;
ask us to stop using your personal information;
ask us not to use your personal information to profile you or make automated decisions about you;
stop receiving communications from us; and
ask us to port your data to another service provider if technically feasible, or to provide you with a copy of personal information we hold about you in a structured, electronic format.

You can accomplish most of these directly using the tools we provide to you as part of the Service. If you are unable to do so using the tools we provide, please contact our support through the help section of our website, or e-mail us at support@f6s.com. Depending on the choices you make, it may not be possible for us to continue to provide you with the Services after we implement your choices. This may result in us closing your account or your use of the Services being limited or not possible.

Your rights are subject to any exemptions provided by law and we rely on our legitimate interests to process your information. Our response to your requests may be limited in some cases, such as when providing your requested information would reveal another person’s personal information or if you ask us to delete information we are permitted to retain by law or have a compelling legitimate interest to retain. You may also need to contact third-parties directly that you have asked us to share information with, as separate and independent data controllers, to have your information deleted. One example is when we are providing you with a professional service that uses third-party financial software.

We may also process information that contains your personal information for marketing purposes and you also have a right to object to our use of this information for that purpose.

If you e-mail us directly instead of using the tools provided in the Service, we will provide you with the information within one calendar month of your request, unless doing so would adversely affect the rights and freedoms of others. That would include, for example, another person’s confidentiality or intellectual property rights. We’ll tell you if we can’t meet your request for that reason.

Subject to applicable law, you have the rights above as well as the right to take any unresolved concerns to a data protection authority.

More about using our Service

Giving us information about other people - You confirm that you have the right to authorize us to process information you give us about other people on your behalf in accordance with this Privacy Policy. As an example, you can give us information about employees of your start-up, business or other entity.

Special category data - We will not collect any “Special Category Data” about you except where you provide it to us, with your explicit consent, or where it is necessary to do so to comply with the law. For these purposes that means data regarding your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data, data concerning health or data concerning your sex life or sexual orientation and offenses or alleged offenses committed by you.

More about data protection - You can read more about data protection law by visiting the United Kingdom Information Commissioner's website, where you can also view our data protection notification number ZA011243.

Data Protection Contact Details

Our Data Protection Officer / GDPR Owner and data protection representatives can be contacted on email at dataprotection@f6s.com

You as the Data Subject have the right to complain at any time to a supervisory authority in relation to any issues related to our processing of your Personal Data. We would like to hear from you first if you have a complaint about how we use your data so that we may rectify the issue.

For European related matters, you can contact the Data Protection Commission:
Website: www.dataprotection.ie
Phone: +353 1 7650100 or 1800437 737
Address: Data Protection Office – 21 Fitzwilliam Square Dublin 2. D02 RD28 Ireland

For United Kingdom related matters, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office:
Website: www.ico.org.uk
Phone: (+44) 0303 123 1113
Address: Head Office - Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF, UK