Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Policy

Thanks for checking out our Privacy Policy. We take privacy of your data seriously, and explain below our approach to privacy, and what this means for you in practice.

The most important things we cover are:

  • Why we ask you to share data with us
  • Our approach to privacy and protecting data
  • What data you share with us by using our site, and what it’s used for
  • How we use and protect that data
  • Your choices about sharing data with us, and how to exercise them (including where to find out more about internet privacy)
  • Specific cookies we store on our website

We’ve tried to make it simple, but if you have any questions or comments about this, please contact us using the contact page on this website.

Why We Ask You to Share Data With Us

There are currently three reasons we receive and store data from our readers, and in the future we’ll be adding two more:

Today:

  • Improving our website by tracking, analysing and understanding what people read, how they move between pages on the website, and how they interact with us, for example what they click on.
  • Allowing readers to view our articles free of charge by making money in other ways, initially advertising and recommendations.
  • Keeping in touch with readers who want to know more about us, such as when new articles have been published.

In the Future

  • We'll personalise what readers see based on what they’re interested in, which means we’d like to know about our readers’ interests.
  • We intend to sell products readers are interested in from our website. Data about buyers will be different to what we know about readers.

Our Approach to Privacy and Protecting Data

We will always meet our legal obligations around data privacy and protection.  As legislation changes, we’ll update our Privacy Policy to stay compliant.  But we also want to keep up with industry best practice, so we regularly check what others do and say, so we can go beyond the minimum.

Our Privacy Policy follows four key principles:

  • We only hold data about you we need to improve your visit or protect our ability to keep our content free of cost to readers.
  • We hold all data securely, and make sure it stays safe.
  • The data about you belongs to you, and you have full control over it.
  • We don’t share information about you without your permission.

If we’re ever involved in a merger, acquisition, sale or major partnership, we’ll aim to maintain or improve the way we handle personal data. If our Privacy Policy changes, we’ll publish our new relevant policies, and give anyone affected notice of any changes.

As with all businesses, we may have to share personal information if we reasonably believe it’s required in order to:

  • meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request
  • detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues.
  • protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of us, our users or the public as required or permitted by law.

From time to time we may amend our Privacy Policy. If we do, we will update this page, and if appropriate we’ll make extra efforts to notify readers and/or publicise the change.

To protect your data and ours we ensure high cyber-security for our website.  This includes using high quality security software, and monitoring our site for viruses and other malware. We run our website from a data centre in the UK run by Siteground, a leading hosting company. They have high standards of data security and privacy, which is one of the reasons we chose to use them.

What Data You Share with Us and How We Use It

General Browsing on the Internet

When you visit any website, your computer provides information to the site, such as what kind of browser you use and the IP address you’re using. We don’t receive or store any personal information about you in this way, nor can we identify you personally from this information.

Cookies

Like most websites, when you visit this site, a small piece of text (called a cookie) is stored on your computer about your visit.  This helps us understand how people use our site, including what pages are visited. We don’t receive or hold any personal information about you in this way.

Cookies also tell our website a computer has been used to visit us before, so we can improve the visit. For example, if you’ve clicked on a pop-up window asking you to accept our website privacy policy, you shouldn't see it again if we've been allowed to save a relevant cookie.

Some of the information stored is put there by other companies whose software we have added to our site to make it work better.  This can also impact your experience of other websites you may visit after leaving ours.

If you continue to use this site, you are in effect agreeing to this use; but you do have the choice to change this, as explained below.

Email sign-up

If you complete one of our sign-up forms, we hold the name and email address and name you give us.  We use this to can send you the updates you’ve asked for by email. We use one of the industry’s leading email management companies, GetResponse, to hold the information. One of the reasons we use them is that we believe they meet the highest standards of security and data protection available in our industry.

Analytics

We use 3rd party systems to analyse our website traffic. This means we get anonymous data from them that shows us trends, patterns and statistics about how our readers have used our site, which allows us to make our site better for our readers.  The companies we use for this are only leading, reputable firms with strong privacy policies in place for their analysis systems.  These include Google, Microsoft and Automattic.

Social Media

We have social share buttons on our site, such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. All of these services rely on cookies and other tracking to understand how their services are being used. If you have an account with them, you have full control of how they share your personal information. We don’t receive any personal information from any of them about you.

Links to Third Parties - Advertising & Affiliates

Our website includes lots of links to other websites, and we continually add and change these.  We only include links which we believe provide benefit to our readers, for example further reading about an article or products/services which might be useful to someone interested in a topic we're writing about.  We only include links because we think they may be useful or interesting.

For some of these links, we may have or establish commercial relationship with the people we're linking to. This means we may get a small payment from them when our readers see a link, visit a site via a link or buy something from a site we link to.  You don't pay anything extra as a result of this, and most of our links are not commercial.  We never include links just because of a commercial relationship, we must believe there's reader benefit.

These commercial relationships are known as advertising, sponsorship or affiliate links, and we rely on them for our income.  That's why we can provide our articles free of cost, and don't need to charge a cover price to read our articles.

If you click on an advert or affiliate link, you’ll be passing data to the third party advertiser or vendor telling them you visited them from this site. We don’t pass personal data to these third parties, but if you reach another site from ours, you’re subject to their privacy and data policies, not ours. We arrange advertising through reputable companies with professional advertising programmes with strong data policies advertisers must comply with.

Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to our website.  Google's use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to show you adverts based on your visit to this and/or other websites.  You can opt out of using the DoubleClick cookie for interest-based advertising from the Ads Settings at google.com, and you can also control which type of advertisers are allowed to use your cookies for interest-based advertising at aboutads.info

Your Choices About Sharing Data with Us, and How to Exercise Them

We don’t hold personal data about you unless you subscribe to our email list. When you sign up, you receive instructions on how to check, change and delete the data we have received, and a reminder of those instructions are included with every email we send you.

If you’re unsure how to manage the email list data you’ve given us, we’ll be happy to change or remove it for you if you let us know by email.

You have full control over how cookies and other data is stored and shared on your computer. You can set your browser to block all cookies, or notify you/ask your permission when a cookie is being set. If you disable cookies completely, you may get a lesser experience from some websites, or even be unable to use them properly. That isn’t the case with us, but you may get the odd inconvenience such as having to reconfirm you accept our Privacy Policy each time you visit us.

If you share any of our articles through social media, you have full control of what personal information can be shared by the social media company you’re using. You can manage this through your account settings at Facebook.com, Twitter.com and Pinterest.com . We have no influence or control over how they use your data when sharing our content.

You can find links to policy information from relevant partners below, in particular Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.

Google

How Google uses cookies

Data shared with Google because of Google Analytics and Adsense

Facebook

How Facebook manages data privacy and information about you

Twitter

How Twitter manages data privacy and information about you