PRIVACY POLICY
1.0 Our Core Beliefs
- We have a duty of care to the people who use this website
- We loathe spam as much as you do!
- We will never sell, rent or otherwise distribute or make public your personal information
2.0 Personal Information This Website Collects And Why We Collect It
This website collects and uses personal information for the following reasons:
2.1 Site Visitation Tracking
Like most websites, this site uses Google Analytics (GA) to track user interaction. We use this data to determine the number of people using our site, to better understand how they find and use our web pages and to see their journey through the website. The information collected by Google is mostly anonymous traffic data, including device information, internet browser and operating system. In addition, GA uses your IP address to provide geolocation data. We use GA with the IP Anonymization feature enabled, this stops GA from storing your full IP address. None of the information we see in GA statistics personally identifies you to us. We consider Google to be a third party data processor (see section 4.0 below).
Our server may collect and store your IP address as part of our web servers logs. This is for the purposes of detecting and preventing server errors, fraud and unauthorized access, and maintaining the security of our systems.
2.2 Cookies
What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are stored by the browser (for example, Internet Explorer or Safari) on your computer or mobile phone. They allow websites to store things like user preferences, so the website can remember this information as you browse, or when you return.
How does the Deep Underground Poetry website use cookies?
User Settings Cookies
We use cookies to remember certain settings or preferences. For example, we use a cookie to remember your time zone, enabling us to show accurate dates and times attributed to user content. User settings cookies do not contain personally identifiable information.
Session Cookie
If you log in to Deep Underground Poetry, we use a session cookie to remember you. This allows you to stay logged in as you browse the website. The session cookie itself does not contain any personally identifiable data, rather it is used together with a secure file on the website server, in order to identify you. The session cookie files are removed from your browser, and our server, if you log out of this website. Furthermore, session files on our server are automatically deleted, if not accessed for three months.
Third Party Cookies
Our third party data processors may also generate cookies associated with this website. Please refer to their respective privacy policies in section 4.0
2.3 Website Membership
If you choose to create a member account at Deep Underground Poetry, you are required to provide a valid email address. This email address will be saved to the website’s database. You can edit your account email address on your Edit Profile page, a link to which can be found on your My Home page. It is important that you keep your account email address up to date, in order to keep control of your personal data and user content. Your email address is used to identify you as a member, and send you information related to your account, for example, if you choose to reset your password. Your email address is not made public.
You can optionally add additional personal information, for the purpose of displaying on your public profile. This includes; your name (not necessarily your real name), country of residence, gender, relationship status, age or birthday.
Your account and it’s associated data will remain on this website's database, unless you choose to delete it. Your user content (for example; poem submissions, comments, forum posts and group posts) will remain public on this website, unless you delete this content individually, or delete your account. You should avoid entering personally identifiable information in user content you submit on this website. We store modifications you make to some of your public user content, including submissions (poems), forum posts, group posts and comments. The content of these modifications are not made public, but are accessible by the website administrator, for the purpose of helping to protect against abuse, harassment and plagiarism.
If you are under 16 years of age you MUST obtain parental consent before joining this website.
When you use this website as a member, we record your computer’s IP address and store information about the device, internet browser and operating system you are using to access the site. This helps us maintain security and assist members in resolving technical issues.
2.3.1 DU Supporter Membership
If you choose to become a DU Supporter, you are required to set up a payment subscription with PayPal. We provide your username to PayPal as an identifier, in order to associate the new subscription with your Deep Underground Poetry account. PayPal provides us with the email address associated with your PayPal account, and also information about when payments are made. We store this information, in order to verify you as an active DU Supporter. Deep Underground Poetry does not have access to financial information about you.
2.4 Contact Form
Should you choose to contact us using the contact form on our help page, the data you supply will be stored by this website and visible to members who have the role of Guardian of Shadows (moderators) and the website administrator. If you are not logged in, you will be required to supply an email address so we can respond to your enquiry. This email address will only be visible to the website administrator.
2.5 Email Newsletter
If you join our email newsletter, your username and the email address associated with your Deep Underground Poetry account, will be forwarded to SendinBlue who provide us with email marketing services.
Your email address may remain within SendinBlue’s database for as long as we continue to use SendinBlue’s services for email marketing, or until you specifically request removal from the list. You can do this by unsubscribing using the unsubscribe links contained in any email newsletters that we send you, or by changing the newsletter preference in your settings If you unsubscribe, there can be a small delay before this change is reflected in SendinBlue's database.
Email newsletter subscribers will receive periodic (approximately three times a year) newsletter-style emails from us.
If you are under 16 years of age you MUST obtain parental consent before joining our email newsletter.
2.6 Social Share Buttons
We use Shareaholic to provide our social media share buttons, this allows Deep Underground Poetry visitors to easily share pages on a variety of social media platforms. Shareaholic provides us with statistics about which pages have been shared on which social media websites. You can opt out of Shareaholic functionality, so will no longer see social share buttons on Deep Underground Poetry.
2.7 Advertising
We use Taboola to show adverts to visitors of Deep Underground Poetry, this helps pay for the running of this website. Taboola uses interest-based advertising and analytics, you can opt out of receiving interest-based adverts.
2.8 reCAPTCHA
If you sign up to join Deep Underground Poetry, you will need to verify that you are not a bot, this is to prevent spam robots from joining. We do this using a third party service by Google, called reCAPTCHA. Google may analyse existing cookies they placed on your computer, along with hardware and software information, in order to determine that you are human.
2.9 YouTube Videos
This website allows members to include their spoken word poetry videos from YouTube, which is owned by Google. YouTube videos are embedded into this website using privacy-enhanced mode. This means YouTube won't store information about Deep Underground Poetry visitors, unless they choose to play a video.
3.0 About This Website’s Server
This website is hosted by Digital Ocean in US data centres in New York and San Francisco.
Some of the data centre’s security features are as follows:
- 24/7 Physical security guard services
- Physical entry restrictions to the property and the facility
- Full CCTV coverage externally and internally for the facility
- Biometric readers with two-factor authentication
- Secure loading zones for delivery of equipment
Full details of Digital Ocean’s data centre security can be found here
Traffic (transferral of files) between this website and your browser is encrypted and delivered over HTTPS.
4.0 Our Third Party Data Processors
- Google for site visitation tracking as outlined in section 2.1 reCAPTCHA as outlined in section 2.8 and YouTube for spoken word videos as outlined in section 2.9 Google Privacy Policy
- PayPal handles DU Supporter subscriptions as outlined in section 2.3.1 PayPal Privacy Policy
- SendinBlue for sending email newsletters as outlined in section 2.5 SendinBlue Privacy Policy
- Shareaholic for 'share this page' buttons and related stats section 2.6 Shareaholic Privacy Policy
- Taboola for advertising as outlined in section 2.7 Taboola Privacy Policy
5.0 Data Breaches
We will report any unlawful data breach of this website’s database or the databases of any of our third party data processors to any and all relevant persons if it is apparent that personal data stored in an identifiable manner has been stolen.
6.0 Data Controller
You can contact the data controller of this website by emailing webmaster@deepundergroundpoetry.com
7.0 Changes To Our Privacy Policy
This privacy policy may change from time to time in-line with legislation or industry developments. We will not explicitly inform our website users of these changes. Instead, we recommend that you check this page occasionally for any policy changes. Specific policy changes and updates are mentioned in the change log below.
