Privacy Policy

Here at Sealife Bahamas, we recognize that privacy is important.

Sealife Bahamas adheres to the US safe harbor privacy principles of Notice, Choice, Onward Transfer, Security, Data Integrity, Access and Enforcement, and is registered with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s safe harbor program.

If you have any questions about this Policy, please feel free to contact us through our website.

Information we collect and how we use it

In the future, we may offer services that do not require you to register for an account or provide any personal information to us, such as a search or reporting service.  Currently, for our flagship service, we require users to register.  In order to provide our full range of services, we may collect the following types of information:

Information you provide

When you sign up for Sealife Bahamas service or promotion that requires registration, we ask you for personal information (such as your name, email address and an account password).  We also request credit card or other payment account information which we may maintain in encrypted form on secure servers.  We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Sealife Bahamas services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.  For certain services, we may give you the opportunity to opt out of combining such information.

Sealife Bahamas cookies

When you visit Sealife Bahamas, we send one or more cookies – a small file containing a string of characters – to your computer that uniquely identifies your browser.  We use cookies to improve the quality of our service by storing user preferences and tracking user trends, such as how people search.  Most browsers are initially set up to accept cookies, but you can reset your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent.  However, some Sealife Bahamas features and services may not function properly if your cookies are disabled.

Log information

When you use Sealife Bahamas services, our servers automatically record information that your browser sends whenever you visit a website.  These server logs may include information such as your web request, Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser.

User communications

When you send email or other communication to Sealife Bahamas, we may retain those communications in order to process your inquiries, respond to your requests and improve our services.

Affiliated sites

We may offer services in connection with other web sites.  Personal information that you provide to those sites may be sent to Sealife Bahamas in order to deliver the service.  We process such information in accordance with this Policy.  The affiliated sites may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies.

Links

Sealife Bahamas may present links in a format that enables us to keep track of whether these links have been followed.  We use this information to improve the quality of our services.

Other sites

This Privacy Policy applies to web sites and services that are owned and operated by Sealife Bahamas.  We do not exercise control over the sites displayed as search results or links from within our various services.  These other sites may place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data or solicit personal information from you.

Sealife Bahamas only processes personal information for the purposes described in the applicable Privacy Policy and/or privacy notice for specific services. In addition to the above, such purposes include:

• Providing our products and services to users, including the display of customized content and advertising;
• Auditing, research and analysis in order to maintain, protect and improve our services;
• Ensuring the technical functioning of our network; and
• Developing new services.

You can find more information about how we process personal information by referring to the privacy notices for particular services.

Sealife Bahamas processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries.  In some cases, we may process personal information on a server outside your own country.  We may process personal information to provide our own services. In some cases, we may process personal information on behalf of and according to the instructions of a third party, such as our advertising partners.

Choices for personal information

When you sign up for a particular service that requires registration, we ask you to provide personal information.  If we use this information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.

If we propose to use personal information for any purposes other than those described in this Policy and/or in the specific service notices, we will offer you an effective way to opt out of the use of personal information for those other purposes.  We will not collect or use sensitive information for purposes other than those described in this Policy and/or in the specific service notices, unless we have obtained your prior consent.

You can decline to submit personal information to any of our services, in which case Sealife Bahamas may not be able to provide those services to you.

Information sharing

Sealife Bahamas does not share personal information (such as phone numbers, email addresses, names, or any other identifiable information) with other companies or individuals outside of Sealife Bahamas except in the following limited circumstances:

• We have your consent.  We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
• With our subsidiaries, affiliated companies or other trusted businesses or persons, for the express purpose of conducting your business activities on your behalf. We require that these parties agree to process such information based on our instructions and in compliance with this Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
• We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request, (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues, or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Sealife Bahamas, its users or the public as required or permitted by law.

If Sealife Bahamas becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, we will provide notice before personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal information, such as the number of users who searched for a particular term, for example, or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify you individually.

Information security

We take appropriate security measures to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data. These include internal reviews of our data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures, as well as physical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to systems where we store personal data.

We restrict access to personal information to Sealife Bahamas employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to operate, develop or improve our services.  These individuals are bound by confidentiality obligations.

Data integrity

Sealife Bahamas processes personal information only for the purposes for which it was collected and in accordance with this Policy or any applicable service-specific privacy notice.  We review our data collection, storage and processing practices to ensure that we only collect, store and process the personal information needed to provide or improve our services.  We take reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we process is accurate, complete, and current, but we depend on our users to update or correct their personal information whenever necessary.

Enforcement

Sealife Bahamas regularly reviews its compliance with this Policy.  Please feel free to direct any questions or concerns regarding this Policy or Sealife Bahamas’s treatment of personal information by contacting us through this web site. We will cooperate with the appropriate regulatory authorities, including local data protection authorities, to resolve any complaints regarding the transfer of personal data that cannot be resolved between Sealife Bahamas and an individual.

Changes to this policy

Please note that this Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We will not reduce your rights under this Policy without your explicit consent, and we expect most such changes will be minor. Regardless, we will post any Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice (including, for certain services, email notification of Policy changes).

Sealife Bahamas and GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation governing the privacy of consumer data.

Sealife Bahamas, Inc. is a US-based company, with no subsidiaries or legally-registered operations in the European Union.  As such, we are not directly subject to European regulations.

However, our European clients are.  As such, Sealife Bahamas has been designed to be compliant with the requirements of the GDPR.

First, to resolve one common misunderstanding – the GDPR doesn’t require a consent checkbox for the use of personally identifiable information (PII).  A consent checkbox is one way, perhaps the most common one, to bypass all other GDPR restrictions and do whatever you want with the data — track them with cookies and Google Analytics, add them to mailing lists etc. (as the data subject has given consent to that).

But, the GDPR allows the use of PII for necessary operations without a checkbox. Consent is only required for unnecessary data collection, and we carefully only collect necessary data from your guests during the booking process.

Booking Widgets

Our booking Widgets, and the overall Sealife Bahamas booking process, is built with good data-handling requirements and best practices in mind.

1. A guest can come to the widget and enter just dates, or dates and guest counts, and get a quote without providing any PII at all.
2. If after seeing the quote, the guest chooses to continue the booking process, either by sending inquiry or starting an instant book, the name, phone, and email are collected so that the guest can receive the quote and be communicated with during the booking process. The guest has clearly communicated their intent to send an inquiry or book the property at that point by entering their email address and clicking the button labeled “Send Inquiry” or “Book Now”. You can’t respond to an inquiry without an email address, neither can you book without an email address, so that’s a required bit of information to collect – which is allowed by the GDPR.
3. During the reservation process, no other information is sent to Sealife Bahamas until after the guest has signed the renter agreement and pressed the final “confirm” button at the end of the process to run the booking.  The signed rental agreement, just as with a common checkbox, provides you all necessary legal authority to receive and use the guest’s PII under GDPR rules.
   Any additional information that the guest enters during the booking process is not saved by Sealife Bahamas until they press that “confirm” button in the final step. You can verify this by creating a quote with yourself as a guest and walking through the process.

The acceptances are kept on record with dates in the form of the inquiry/quote/booking/signed-agreement records for the guest in Sealife Bahamas. Upon receipt of a data removal request, it is straightforward for you to pull up Sealife Bahamas, search for the guest by name or email and remove any PII from their record.

Sealife Bahamas is not designed as a bulk email marketing program, and cannot be used for that purpose.  It is of course possible for you to export data collected through Sealife Bahamas and then to use that in any other marketing system you prefer, but in that case, you are responsible for following all applicable regulations in your local jurisdiction.  This is not an Sealife Bahamas function.  At the least, you should be getting separate consent for the use of their data in a mailing list, and provide a clear, effective means for them to unsubscribe.  Most major email marketing systems (e.g. Constant Contact, MailChimp, etc.) provide these functions and are themselves compliant with GDPR requirements.