Your privacy and the protection of your personal data are important to us. As of May 25, 2018, we have an obligation to collect and protect your data in accordance with new European standards for data protection. The goal of the new framework is to make sure that we deal with your data in a lawful, fair, and transparent manner, and that we take steps to ensure that your data are adequately protected.
This Privacy Policy is where we explain to you how we collect, use, and store your personal data. You can request further information at any time about what personal information we are holding and how it is being used; you can ask for electronic copies of your personal information to be sent to you; and you can request that we erase your personal data.
We are limited to using your data under the following conditions: where you have consented to it, where we need to do so in order to fulfil our contract with you, or in certain special circumstances, such as compliance with legal obligations, or for other legitimate purposes.
We have adopted a “Privacy by Design” approach to your personal information, meaning that, to the best of our ability, we will employ state of the art means of collecting, storing, and transmitting your data, with a view to promoting privacy and data protection from the outset.
Depending on how you use our services and our website, we may request data from you for a variety of reasons:
Should you create a user account on our website, we may request information such as your name and email address to identify you to us. This is to allow you to use the services available to you on the website, such as the ability to comment on articles.
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 with 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. After approval of your comment, your profile picture may be visible to the public in the context of your comment.
When you contact us using email, a contact form on our website, via social media, or by any other method, we will use this information to reply to your message and to respond to your request.
We run a mailing list which we use to send you information about us, news and offers. You can sign up to the mailing list from our website. We will only send you emails from the mailing list if you choose to receive the messages. If you wish to change your email preferences or unsubscribe from the mailing list, you can do so by clicking on the “update preferences” or “unsubscribe” links in any newsletter we send you, or by contacting us using the methods described below.
Our site collects data about visits to the site in order to optimise our site, as well as to promote security by checking for unusual activity, hacking attempts, and other potential threats. The data that is collected also facilitates internal operations such as troubleshooting, data analytics, and research and testing. Data about visits to the site are generally anonymous or pseudonymous. If you are logged into the website and have provided us with personal information, it may be possible for us to track your activity on the site.
Information collected for technical purposes may include which pages you have visited (including the date and time), which services and pages you viewed or searched for, page response times, download errors, files downloaded, length of visits to certain pages, page interaction information (such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs), methods used to browse away from a page, and other metrics related to your visit to our site.
We use Google Analytics to track visits to the site. More information about Google Analytics can be found on the Google Analytics website.
On many of the pages on our site you will see “social feeds” for services such as Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and/or other social media services. These services enable you to share, comment, or bookmark pages on our site.
Some pages may also include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in exactly the same way as if the visitor has visited the other website directly.
You should be aware that all of these sites and services are likely to be collecting information about what you are doing all around the Internet, including on our site. We recommend that you check the respective policies of each of these sites to see how exactly they use your personal information and to find out how to opt out, or delete, such personal information if you should wish to do so at any time.
You have the right to determine how your data is collected and used by us. In particular:
You can exercise your rights at any time by contacting us. If you consented to us collecting and/or processing your personal information but change your mind, you can get in touch with us to request that we erase the personal information that we hold about you.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding any aspect of this policy, wish to find out what data we hold about you, or would like to request the erasure of your personal data, please contact us using one of the methods outlined on our contact page.