Terms & Conditions of the Personio Voyager Community

Personio Community is a public community platform for customers and other people on which customers discuss matters regarding the products and services of Personio SE & Co. KG (“Personio”) and can provide each other mutual support and/or seek to talk with other people, who are currently not Personio customers, about topics related to Personio, Personio’s offerings, and other current HR issues (hereon in “Personio Community” or “Community”). Furthermore, the Community offers a platform on which selected HR-industry experts and our H.U.G. speakers share ideas about HR issues relevant for the future and on which these ideas can be discussed with other Community members. The platform is provided and its technology operated by inSided (Singel 118A, 1015 AE Amsterdam) on behalf of Personio.

The headings used in these Terms of Use are for clarity and better legibility; they will not have any influence on the interpretation of the Terms of Use. 

1. Registration

When first signing up for the Community (on “registration”), You must agree to the Privacy Policy terms and conditions and these Terms of Use by checking a box.  

For registration for Personio Community, You must enter Your first name and surname, in case Your company uses Personio:  the email address saved in Your company’s Personio customer account as well as the confirmation and verification of the active Personio customer account or - in all other cases - a valid business email address, a username (see section 2), and a password. You are required to provide correct and complete personal details about Yourself in order to have permission to use Personio Community. If Your details change, You must update Your data immediately.

Your Personio Community membership is free of charge for all customers and other people (hereon “Type of Membership”) and cannot be transferred. Only one Registration per person is permitted.

Personio Community members must be above eighteen years of age. 

2. General Terms of Use 

You give Your undertaking to Personio to use the Personio Community service lawfully. You may only use Personio Community in such a way or for purposes that do not violate these Terms of Use or applicable German laws and that do not violate rights held by third parties.

The Community provides depending on Your Type of Membership various forms of participation: Ideation, Questions and Discussions. When You participate in the Community, write posts, or comment on other posts, You receive points that provide You with a specific rank and status within our Community. 

Personio is entitled to score posts from You or other Personio Community members according to criteria. This can mean, for example, that We give a higher score to posts from Community members who leave many ratings than We do to posts from members who submit fewer posts. The same applies accordingly to the ratings of posts of Yours that are rated positively by other Personio Community members. We are entitled to present the rankings created in this manner to the Community. 

You are responsible for all activities in Your Community account. You are required to inform Personio immediately of any unauthorized use of Your account or any other security breach. Personio will not be held liable for losses that You incur from third parties’ usage of Your password or account with or without Your knowledge.

If You culpably violate these Terms of Use or applicable laws, Personio may take necessary actions for an appropriate response. Major violations may lead to Your Personio Community log-on being fully blocked or to an immediate cancellation of Your Personio Community membership.

Personio is entitled to report suspected violations of criminal law or regulations of prosecution or government authorities to these authorities, to the extent permitted by law, and to support their investigations without having to review the lawfulness of such investigations or demands for information.

Personio has the right, but no obligation, to check if all aspects of the service comply with these Terms of Use, particularly the rules of conduct governed by this section, to the extent permitted by law.

3. Username

You are free to choose Your own username. However, Your username may not violate applicable German laws and especially may not violate rights held by third parties or these Terms of Use.

In particular, You may not do any of the following for Your username:

• use the name of another person
• use Your company’s Personio customer number
• use any name protected by copyright, trademark, or another industrial property right
• use any name that violates or can violate the rights of other persons or legal entities or could provoke or offend other users
• use any vulgar or insulting usernames, especially names that are racist, pornographic, obscene, offensive, or indecent or glorify or downplay violence
• use any name that contains codes with which persons in an extremist environment identify, even if the coded meaning of the username is not immediately recognizable for outsiders

4. Use of Images in the Community

Personio lets You upload a profile picture and upload images within posts. However, the images that You submit may not violate applicable German laws and especially may not violate rights held by third parties or these Terms of Use.

You may not do any of the following for Your profile picture:

• use the image of another person
• use an image protected by copyright, trademark, or another industrial property right
• use vulgar, insulting, or discriminatory profile pictures, since these could upset many users
• use any profile pictures that have criminal content and/or could motivate others to perform criminal acts, including racist, pornographic, obscene, offensive, vulgar, or indecent profile pictures and ones that glorify or downplay violence

This applies to pictures in the directly visible part of Your posts as well as for links included in posts.

5. Due Diligence for Your User Data, Blocking/Closure for Misuse

You are responsible for all posts and content that are submitted under Your username. For this reason, choose a secure password and ensure that it stays secret. You must not share it with third parties. In accordance with section 10, You are responsible for any unauthorized use of Your username by third parties.

Personio is entitled to take necessary actions if it gains knowledge or has reasonable suspicion of Your username or password being misused by third parties. In particular, Personio is entitled to block or close membership or access to Personio Community partially and temporarily where possible, and/or fully and permanently in instances of ongoing misuse.

6. Writing Posts and Submitting Other Content

Depending on Your Type of Membership of the Personio Community, You can submit text posts as well as images and videos as original content or as a response to content from other Community members in all respectively some categories. You can create text posts as Ideation, a Question, or a Discussion and have them include links. You can put them in one of the following public categories that our Community provides You: Support Area, Product News & Updates, Events & Trainings, and HR Think Tank. For the Support Area, only community members who are Personio customers can actively participate and post articles.

If You as a Personio customer have questions about general functionality or configuration, using the Question format in the Support Area is appropriate. You have the option of selecting the response that answers Your question. Your question will then be shown as “Solved” and can help other members who have similar questions. Personio’s moderators will review the answers marked as “Solved” at specified intervals and archive or correct them as needed. 

Be aware that it is not permitted in any category to submit the following content to the platform:

• content that is racist, pornographic, obscene, offensive, vulgar, or indecent, that glorifies or downplays violence, that endangers children or young people, or that violates people’s dignity
• content that could motivate other users or third parties to perform criminal or other indecent acts
• hostile, offensive, insulting, or threatening statements against other users or third parties
• abuse, slander, insults, lies, false claims, or misinformation
• content for which You do not hold any rights
• personal data of third parties without their explicit consent
• sharing electronic content (including viruses, worms, Trojan horses) that is suitable to cause harm or any form of negative impact on computer systems and publishing URLs or links to websites or servers with such content
• links to websites with content that violates applicable laws, endangers young people, or is in some other way impermissible
• generating significant data traffic, e.g., by sending unwanted marketing emails, junk emails, other unrequested information, email bombs, etc. to a person, mailing lists, or other newsgroups (spamming) or integrating links to third-party websites for sales purposes

The following rules also apply to Your posts:

• Posts must be related to products and issues connected to Personio.
• Posts must correspond to facts and be objective and precise.
• Negative and critical posts are allowed but must be expressed objectively.
• Derogatory statements are not permitted.
• Personio business partners and contractors may only rate Personio and its products when they disclose their relationship.
• Marketing posts from members with a purpose of self-promotion are not permitted.

Please also observe the Community Rules that You can find at https://community.personio.com/welcome-to-the-personio-community-2/community-rules-78.

Being a Personio Community member does not entitle You to have Your posts and other content published. Personio is entitled to block posts that You submit to the Personio Community when there is a reasonable suspicion based on concrete indications that legal regulations or these Terms of Use are being violated. Personio is not required to monitor the Community. Nevertheless, Personio reserves the right to check content submitted to the Community at any time and to delete it if there are legitimate reasons to do so.

7. Personio Rights of Use

By posting, uploading, submitting, providing, or transmitting (“publishing”) Your posts and images, You grant Personio and Personio’s contractors (sublicensees) the permission and right to use Your post in connection with the marketing of services offered by Personio, including, but not limited to, rights of use to copy, distribute, transmit, broadcast, present publicly, reproduce, modify, translate, and reformat Your post, the right to publish Your name in connection with Your post, and the right to sublicense these rights of use to the service’s technology provider.

In particular, Personio is entitled to take Your posts and images uploaded to Personio Community and reproduce them, distribute them, make them publicly accessible, make them available on request (online, access, and transmission rights), archive them, and deposit them in databases, provided Personio respects the personality rights of You and the copyright holder.

Personio is only entitled to modify the content and images that You provide insofar as this modification is necessary for graphic presentation or for editorial reasons.

You give Your assurance to Personio that You possess all rights to the content and images that You submit, including the right to transfer the aforementioned rights to Personio. You give Your undertaking to upload only images in which the people visible are not minors and gave their consent to the images being uploaded.

You agree that Your posts in the Community are not confidential. If Personio acts on or implements a suggestion, e.g. for the improvement of Personio, based on Your Ideation posts in its original or a similar form, this will not produce any entitlement to remuneration or compensation of any kind. 

8. Cooperation of Personio Employees

Even though Personio’s employees participate in the Community as Community moderators and administrators, they have no obligation to respond to posts actively. They will provide help answering questions that were not answered by the Community within a set period of time after publication. Furthermore, they can review existing responses that were marked as answers and correct them if needed, especially if a solution pertains to a superseded version of Personio. All information provided by Personio’s employees is offered as is and without liability.

The help center at support.personio.de is also available for official product support. For all billing inquiries support is available at the following address: support@personio.de.

9. Stopping or Canceling Personio Community Membership

You have the right to cancel Your Personio Community membership in a regular manner at any time without providing notice. To cancel Your Personio Community membership and delete Your account for Personio Community, please send an email to community@personio.de. 

These Terms of Use do not affect Your right to cancel Your Personio Community membership for an extraordinary reason.

Personio has the right to cancel Your Personio Community membership in a regular manner at any time without providing notice.

Personio has the right to cancel Your Personio Community membership without notice if You culpably violate these Terms of Use in a not insignificant way. If Personio cancels Your membership without notice due to a violation of these Terms of Use, You can only reregister for Personio Community when You have the explicit approval of Personio. Personio Community members are not allowed to enable use of Personio Community for former Personio Community members whose membership of Personio Community was canceled without notice.

Personio has the right to keep content that You made public as a Community member (including, but not limited to, posts and comments) publicly accessible after Your member account is deleted. This is done without disclosing Your username or showing Your profile picture. Personio only does this for content that You did not remove Yourself when You were a user before canceling Your account.

10. Liability and Responsibility for Content

Any disclaimers of liability in these Terms of Use will not apply in the event of losses caused culpably through injury to life, limb, or health. Personio will have unlimited liability for losses caused culpably through injury to life, limb, or health. 

Personio will have unlimited liability for damage to property and financial loss caused willfully or through gross negligence. Personio will otherwise only have liability for damage to property and financial loss when it culpably breaches material contractual obligations, in which case the liability will be limited to damages for loss that is foreseeable and typical for the contract. A material contractual obligation is an obligation which needs to be fulfilled to enable due performance of the contract in the first place, which would jeopardize achievement of the contract’s purpose if it were breached, and which the user can normally rely on to be complied with. In the event of slight negligence causing a loss of data, Personio will only have liability based on the conditions and within the scope set out in this section insofar as You backed up Your data in a format that is suitable and at intervals that are appropriate when considering the relevant usage of the data so that this data can be restored with reasonable effort.

This provision does not affect liability under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), liability for willfully concealed defects, or liability under a provided warranty. Personio only ever issues warranties and guarantees in writing. They can only be interpreted to be warranties or guarantees when they are designated as “warranties” or “guarantees”.

Personio disclaims liability for all other losses to the extent permitted by law.

The responsibility for any content rests exclusively with the member submitting that content to Personio Community, and not with Personio. However, if Personio becomes aware of external content that violates these Terms of Use, Personio will respond appropriately based on these Terms of Use.

If there merely exists a suspicion of these Terms of Use being violated, Personio will not have liability for any omission to act unless evidence can be provided of the violation.

 If You culpably violate these Terms of Use or if third parties make claims against Personio due to content submitted by You and/or uploads and/or utilization of images (including due to violation of personality rights, copyrights, trademarks, or industrial property rights), You will be required to indemnify Personio for all losses incurred from this and for claims of third parties that arise from a culpable breach of obligation on Your part; this indemnity will also include the costs of legal defense at the amounts in the statutory fee schedule.

11. Data Protection

The Personio Privacy Policy, available at all times in the website’s data-protection section at https://www.personio.com/privacy-policy/, applies to registration for and use of Personio Community. 

Personio also collects and processes the personal data that You provide in order to award and display different ranks and badges in the Community using a point system. Rankings of top members may be maintained and displayed within Personio Community. Personio also collects and processes your personal data in order to inform you about community activities, such as new posts, by email.

In addition, Personio reserves the right to invite all or parts of the Community Members to participate in surveys by email in order to continuously improve the Community content and services. Participation in the surveys is voluntary and anonymous.

You can reach Your profile by clicking on Your profile picture or the “My Profile” menu item. Under “Settings”, You can view, edit, and add to the personal data stored in Your profile at any time. You can decide the visibility of the following personal data by choosing under “Edit Profile” whether to display the data publicly:

• user title,
• rating.

This section also lets You adjust Your settings for email notifications, especially but not limited to emails for participation in surveys and receiving private messages. 

12. Community Availability

Personio reserves the right to restrict Personio Community temporarily for maintenance and enhancement. Personio endeavors to keep these restrictions as minimal as possible. Personio also reserves the right to close the Community entirely and delete all content. This may be done without any further notice and without being preceded by a violation of the Terms of Use. It will not be possible to provide a copy of Your content in such a situation. 

13. Conclusion

Person is entitled to amend the provisions of these Terms of Use at any time without giving reason if the amendments are reasonable for Personio Community members when considering the interests of Personio, e.g., for changes to contact information, offers of additional services, or similar.

You will be advised of amended Terms of Use or Privacy Policy provisions with a pop-up when You next log on. By logging on, You agree to amended Terms of Use and Privacy Policy provisions. The most recent versions of the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy can be viewed by clicking on the “Terms of Use” or “Privacy Policy” hyperlinks at the bottom of our Community page. The Terms of Use and Privacy Policy apply to all actions that are performed after the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy take effect.

The laws of the Federal Republic of Germany will apply to any disputes arising in connection with usage of the Personio Community platform, including contractual rights and obligations, contract validity, and tort claims. Sole venue for all disputes between Personio and customers arising out of and/or in connection with usage of the Personio Community platform will, as far as legally permissible, be the court with jurisdiction for Personio’s domicile.

Version 03-2021