Our Privacy and Cookies Policy
We are committed to safeguarding the privacy of our website visitors, readers, and service users.
Any data you send us will be used in a lawful way, we won’t do anything with it that we did not tell you about in advance, and it will all remain private unless you give us permission to send specific data to a third party for a good reason.
There are laws around the world restricting what we can do with your data (your email address, name, phone number, and other identifying information), and the policy below complies with current laws.
Lawful basis: Consent
1. The reason we use this basis: You gave us consent to use your data when you signed up to receive our newsletter, or when you contacted us through the contact form, or applied for membership or affiliation through this site.
2. We process your information in the following ways: To send you our newsletter, to respond to your contact, or to process your application.
3. Data retention period: We will continue to process your information until it is no longer necessary for the intended purpose, or until you ask us to remove it.
4. Sharing your information: We do not share your information with third parties except in the unlikely case that we are required by law to do so.
How We Use Your Personal Data
We may process data about your use of our website through a third-party analytics tracking system, such as Google Analytics. This usage data may include your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, operating system, referral source, length of visit, page views and website navigation paths, as well as information about the timing, frequency, and pattern of your service use. We may process your account and profile data, which will include your name and email address and phone number and any other demographic information you voluntarily provided to us. This information is used only to provide you with our services and communicate with you. We may also process information you supply to us in contributing to our website or in transactions, including purchases of goods and services. Also, we may process information you gave us in subscribing to our email notifications and/or newsletters.
Providing Your Personal Data to Others
Financial transactions relating to our website and services may be handled by our payment services providers. We will share transaction data with them only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing your payments, refunds, and dealing with queries. Personal data that we process for any purpose will not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose.
Personal Data of Children
Our website and services are targeted at persons over the age of 18. If we have reason to believe that we hold personal data of a person under that age in our databases, we will delete it.
Email Newsletter
We operate a newsletter to notify readers of news from this site. This newsletter is sent irregularly, generally a couple of times a month. You will only receive this newsletter if you subscribe through the sign up form, and confirm your subscription by clicking the link in the email you receive after you have subscribed. Each newsletter sent out has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, should you no longer wish to receive the newsletter.
Your address will remain stored on the mailing list until you unsubscribe.
The signup form asks for your name and email address. The newsletter software is provided by MailerLite, and includes tracking facilities to monitor activity. You can read MailerLite’s privacy policy on their web site.
We will never share your details with anyone else except in the unlikely event that we are required to do so by law.
Embedded Content
Some posts on this website may include embedded content from other websites, such as but not limited to: Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo. When you view embedded content, it is as if you had visited that site. These sites may collect data about you, use cookies or other third-party tracking. This includes tracking your visit if you have an account and are logged into that website. For details of their privacy policies, please visit the relevant sites.
Sponsored Links, Affiliate Tracking & Commissions
Our website may contain adverts, sponsored and affiliate links on some pages. These are served through our advertising partners.
Clickable sponsored or affiliate links may be displayed as a website URL like this; www.somesite.com or as a titled text link like this: Some Web Site (these are shown only as examples. Clicking them will only take you back to our home page.)
Clicking on any adverts, sponsored or affiliate links may track your actions by using a cookie saved to your device. You can read more about cookies on this website below. Your actions are usually recorded as a referral from our website by this cookie. We might earn a very small commission from the advertiser or advertising partner, at no cost to you, whether you make a purchase on their website or not.
We use advertising partners in these ways to help generate an income from the website, which allows us to continue our work and provide you with the best overall experience and valued information.
Third Party Websites
Our website includes hyperlinks to, and details of, third party websites. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties. If you are concerned about any of these sites, we suggest you read their privacy policies before proceeding in your interaction with them.
Security of Personal Data
We will take appropriate technical and organizational precautions to secure your personal data and to prevent its loss, misuse, or alteration. We will store all your personal data on secure servers, personal computers and mobile devices, and in secure manual record-keeping systems.
Your rights
Your principal rights under data protection law are:
- The right to access: You have the right to confirm the personal data we have on you and we must provide access if you request it.
- The right to rectification: You have the right to have any inaccurate personal data about you corrected and to have any incomplete personal data about you completed.
- The right to erasure: Also known as the “right to be forgotten,” you have the right to the erasure of your personal data without undue delay for any reason. There are a few exceptions to this right, though, if we are complying with a legal obligation or defending against a legal claim.
- The right to restrict processing: In some circumstances you have the right to restrict the processing of your personal data. That could happen if you contest the accuracy of the data or we no longer need the data, but you would like it retained for legal reasons.
- The right to object to processing: If you make such an objection, we will cease to process the personal information unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests.
- The right to data portability: You have the right to object to our processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes (including profiling for direct marketing purposes). If you make such an objection, we will cease to process your personal data for this purpose.
- The right to complain to a supervisory authority: If you consider that our processing of your personal information infringes data protection laws, you have a legal right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority responsible for data protection.
- The right to withdraw consent: You have the right to withdraw your consent to handle your data at any time.
About cookies
This website uses cookies. A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.
Cookies may be either “persistent” cookies or “session” cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before then; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.
Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies.
We use cookies to identify you when you visit our website, determine if you are logged in, and maintain the status of your shopping cart. They may also be used to help us to analyze the use and performance of our website and services.
Our service providers, such as Google Analytics and Google Adsense, use cookies that may be stored on your computer when you visit our website.
Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies and to delete them. The methods for doing so vary from browser to browser, and from version to version.
You can however obtain up-to-date information about blocking and deleting cookies via these links:
Where to Change Your Cookie Settings
(a) https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647?hl=en (Chrome);
(b) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-websitepreferences (Firefox);
(c) http://www.opera.com/help/tutorials/security/cookies/ (Opera);
(d) https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/17442/windows-internet-explorerdelete-manage-cookies (Internet Explorer);
(e) https://support.apple.com/kb/PH21411 (Safari); and
(f) https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10-microsoft-edge-andprivacy (Edge).
If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features on our website.
More Information
Answers to questions about laws concerning handling of data privacy can be found in this guide to General Data Protection Regulation for the European Union.