EARWIG PRIVACY POLICY

Earwig Academic Reporting Limited (Earwig) holds private information about people. Protecting your privacy and the security of your information is a vital part of our business. The following policy statement describes how we provide this and the terms under which we hold your data.

• Providing data security, in this context means ensuring:
• that the data is never lost or corrupted and is always available to the data holder
• that only authorised people can access the data
• that your email address is not given to any third parties

Earwig has been set up to store data securely. All the data recorded, input or uploaded by a member is backed up daily and stored in secure facilities in more than one location around the country.

For some aspects of our service we need to collect specific personal details from you. We collect and store personal information in line with the Data Protection Act 1998. This means:

We will only use the information for the purposes we have stated.

We will only hold on to the information as long as is necessary for these purposes.

We will not pass on your details to other organisations without your permission, unless we are legally obliged to do so.

You have the right to see what personal details we hold about you.

Personal information is information that is unique to you (such as your name, address, e-mail address, telephone number). We do not collect or retain your credit card information. We only collect personal information from you to offer you our service. Because protecting your information is important to us, we do not sell any personal information to third parties. This information is only available to certain employees who have a need to it in the execution of their job.

We may use independent contractors to provide services on our behalf such third parties may have access to your personal information in the course of providing services on our behalf. Any personal information that we provide to such third parties is protected under a confidentiality agreement. Such third parties will take commercially reasonable measures to keep your personal information safe, private and secure. Independent contractors who service our technical hardware and software requirements have no possible access to this information.

Payments made to Earwig for vouchers designed for use by others at a later date are held separate from the business funds of Earwig in the Memory Library Ltd Escrow Account until the vouchers are cashed in order to pay for Earwig services. This ensures that, if the company is unable for any reason to fulfil its obligations to the voucher holder, the person who paid for the voucher can receive a full and immediate refund.

We automatically collect and store: the name of the domain and host from which you access the Internet; the Internet protocol (IP) address of the computer you are using; the date and time you access our sites; and the Internet address of the site from which you linked directly to our sites.

We use this information only as anonymous aggregate data to determine the number of visitors to different sections of our sites, to ensure the sites are working properly, and to help us make our sites more useful. We do not use it to track or record information about individuals.

When you use our services as a registered user, we utilize cookies to store information about your visits to make your revisits more efficient for you and us. It is necessary to place the cookie on your computer's hard drive in order for us to do this. This is a common practice used by most websites. We do not sell or give this information to any outside parties. A "cookie" is a small text file that a Web site can place on your computer's hard drive in order, for example, to collect information about your activities on the site or to make it possible for you to use an online "shopping cart" to keep track of items you wish to purchase. The cookie transmits this information back to the Web site's computer which, generally speaking, is the only computer that can read it. Many consumers do not know that "cookies" are being placed on their computers when they visit Web sites. If you want to know when this happens, or to prevent it from happening, you can set your browser to warn you when a Web site attempts to place a "cookie" on your computer.

Protecting your information is very important to us, and we use commercially reasonable measures to provide secure transmission of your personal information to us. You should be aware that there is a level of risk involved in transmitting information over the Internet. As a result, we cannot ensure or warrant the security of the information that is transmitted over the Internet, and that you do so at your own risk.

Currently, Earwig does not work with third parties that provide advertisements to our site. This could change in the future, and if it does, a revised privacy policy will be issued.

Our website may contain links to other sites for your convenience. In most cases, those sites are not under our control, and they have their own policies regarding privacy, which you should review before using them. We bear no responsibility for linked websites and provide these links solely for your convenience and information.