Here at Flashbak, we take the privacy of our readers very seriously and operate by the following guidelines.
Flashbak is strongly committed to protecting your privacy.
This Privacy Notice tells you how we collect, use and store personal information when you visit Flashbak on all digital platforms and use our services.
We collect personal information from:
- visitors to our websites;
- people who subscribe to our e-newsletters;
- people who use our public comment section;
- people who contact us via social media;
- people who share our content via social media;
- people who donate;
- people who attend our events;
- people who email;
- people who write for Flashbak;
- Current and former staff.
Collection of information
The information we gather falls into two categories:
1. Information anonymously and automatically tracked that is gathered as visitors navigate through our site and/or use our email newsletters, share our content on social media and donate to Flashbak. This information is collected by third-party service providers on our behalf. Third parties featured on or linked to by our the Website are Google Analytics, MailChimp, and PayPalay. These third parties may be gathering information through processes we don’t control and their Privacy Policies are linked to below.
2. Information voluntarily supplied by visitors to the site when they register, sign up to receive our e-newsletters, post comments on our public posting areas on our site, respond to user surveys, participate in interactive activities such as polls, get tickets for our events or donate to Flashbak.
We have third-party agents, subsidiaries, affiliates and partners that perform functions on our behalf, including, but not limited to, hosting, content syndication, content-management tools, social-media integration, marketing, analytics, billing and customer service. These entities may have access to personally identifiable information if needed to perform their functions. If such access is required, the third parties will be obligated to maintain the confidentiality and security of that personally identifiable information. They are restricted from using, selling, distributing or altering this data in any way other than to provide the requested services to the Sites.
We use a third-party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not allow Google to find out the identities of visitors to our website. Read Google’s privacy policy.
Flashbak also uses cookies on the Website
A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive. We use cookies in a limited way to make interactive parts of the site (such as forms) more convenient to use, to identify unique browsers that visit us, and to track usage throughout our site.
A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive. We use cookies in a limited way to make interactive parts of the site (such as forms) more convenient to use, to identify unique browsers that visit us, and to track usage throughout our site.
To find out more about cookies, including how to manage and delete them, visit here or here.
Advertising on Flashbak
We may partner with third-party ad-serving companies and other unaffiliated advertisers to display advertisements on our site. These third-party advertisers and ad-serving companies may use cookies alone or in conjunction with web beacons or other tracking technologies to collect information about you when you use the Sites. As part of their service, they may place a separate cookie on your computer, device, or browser, or utilise other data collection and tracking technologies, to collect information such as your IP address, browser type, the server your computer, device or browser is logged on to, the area code and zip code associated with your server, and whether you responded to a particular advertisement. They may collect information about your online activities over time, across different computers, devices, and browsers, and across different websites and other online services. They may use this information to provide interest-based advertising or other targeted content.
We will not provide these online-advertising partners or ad-serving companies with access to your name, address, email address, telephone number or other personally identifiable information, without your consent. They may, however, use persistent identifiers to anonymously track your Internet usage across other websites in their networks beyond these Sites. While we restrict any attempts to re-identify this information, such third parties may, with sufficient data from other sources, be able to personally identify you, unknown to us. Third-party advertisers may also already possess personally identifiable information about you, obtained from other sources, and may combine such information with information they collect about you when you use the Sites.
If we want to collect personally identifiable information through our website, we will tell you directly, explain what we intend to do with it and you will have a clear way of opting in or out.
WordPress
We do not collect, store or use any of your information from WordPress.
E-newsletters
We use a third-party provider, MailChimp, to deliver our e-newsletters. Flashbak can access the name you provide, your email and your geolocations as well as statistics around email opening and clicks using industry-standard technologies. For more information, please see MailChimp’s privacy notice.
Online public commenting
You can comment under each article. To do this the person has to sign up to Facebook, the third-party provider we use to deliver our online public-comment sharing platform. For more information, please see Facebook’s privacy notice. We also use Disqus. Their privacy policy is here.
Social media
Flashbak uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. For more information, please see Twitter’s privacy policy, Facebook’s privacy policy, Instagram’s privacy policy and Pinterest’s privacy policy.
Donations
Flashbak (owned by Alum Media Ltd) uses PayPal to collect and store information about donations. For more information about these third parties, please see PayPal’s privacy policies.
Alum Media Ltd can view each donator’s name, email address if provided to the third party, amount received and in some cases the location and address if the donator agrees to provide that information. The only control Alum Media Ltd has is to cancel a donation.
Alum Media Ltd stores the name, email, amount of donation and duration internally for our financial records to keep track of monthly income and to thank people for their donations. All other information remains solely within the third-party systems.
On occasion, individuals contact Alum Media Ltd directly asking if there is any other way of donating and sometimes we provide them with our direct bank details so an individual can set up a direct debit. Alum Media Ltd only sees and stores the donator’s name. We may link that manually to the person’s contact details if we’ve had direct contact with them to track their donations and to say thank you.
Emailing the team directly
We use Googlemail which uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt and protect email traffic by default. If your email service does not support TLS, you should be aware that any emails we send or receive may not be protected in transit.
We will also monitor any emails sent to us, including file attachments, for viruses or malicious software. Please be aware that you have a responsibility to ensure that any email you send is within the bounds of the law.
Writers
We keep writers emails and contact details and any other information writers provide in our inboxes and internal databases.
Current and former staff
For staff, we store name, email, address, and financial information so we can pay them!
Links to other websites
This Privacy Notice does not cover the links within this site linking to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.
Changes to this privacy notice
We keep our Privacy Notice under regular review. This Privacy notice was last updated on March 2018. We are currently reviewing our Privacy Notice.
How to contact us
If you want to request information about our Privacy Policy, you can contact Paul Sorene, managing editor, on psorene@gmail.com.
Cookies
We use cookies you can manage your consent here.
By using our website, you (the visitor) agree to allow third parties to process your IP address, in order to determine your location for the purpose of currency conversion. You also agree to have that currency stored in a session cookie in your browser (a temporary cookie which gets automatically removed when you close your browser). We do this in order for the selected currency to remain selected and consistent when browsing our website so that the prices can convert to your (the visitor) local currency.