Privacy statement for ainslie.org.uk

What information do we collect?

It's pretty simple - in general, this site doesn't collect personally identifiable information.

No email addresses, credit card numbers, phone numbers or inside leg measurements. There's no cookies being stored on your hard drive to track where you go, no poking around existing cookies to see where you've been. And neither are there third parties connected with this site sneakily grabbing personal information to weasel round this statement - no advertisers, audit bureaux, service providers or anything like that.

The only exception is that you have the option to add your email address (and any other details) to the guestbook for the benefit of other family history researchers. If you take up that option, you are agreeing for your email address (and other data) to be published on the web, and for us to make backup copies of the database. We won't include your address in any 'live' mailto links which dramatically reduces the odds of you getting spam from web-crawling robots. If you're really worried about that kind of thing, get yourself a 'disposable' address from a service such as Spam Motel, or an account with someone like Yahoo or Hotmail. Or even do what we do and provide a link to a contact webpage or an image of your email address eg :

<img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/address.gif" width="100" height="20">

If you want to send us email, that's great, we won't send out any unsolicited bulk email, but there might be the odd one to individuals on specific points of family history. If you want your address to be removed from the guestbook, just contact us and it will be deleted or edited.

However, the Supanames servers do need to know some things about your computer in order to send web pages to it, such as its IP address. Data like that which we can't trace back to you personally may be stored in the server logs.

What do we do with the information we collect?

Data from the server logs gets aggregated and sent to us via SSL. It only gets used for internal purposes - all we're really interested in is the number of hits, file-not-founds, what URL's direct people to this site and what browsers people are using. Just general stuff to help run the site better, nothing more than that. No data will ever get sold, traded or rented to third parties, and it won't leave the European Economic Area - in fact, it's unlikely to leave England. Now for the boring legal bit :

Legal Requests

We may disclose information to protect ourselves as well as to comply with any applicable law or valid legal process. This includes, but is not limited to:

Requests by Government Agencies. We will disclose any information we have in our possession to law enforcement or government officials in response to any inquiry or investigation or if in our sole discretion, we believe it is necessary or appropriate in connection with any investigation or activity that is or may be illegal or may expose us or you to legal liability.

Pursuant to the Data Protection Act 1998, we will disclose information:

Where the disclosure is required by or under any enactment, rule of law or by the order of a court.

Where the disclosure is necessary:

For the purpose of, or in connection with, any legal proceedings (including prospective legal proceedings);

For the purpose of obtaining legal advice; or

For the purpose of establishing, exercising or defending legal rights.

I've no idea how our server logs could possibly be useful to anyone, but you've been warned that Big Brother might want to look at them :-(

Other Data Processors

This site has many links to other sites. If you follow these links away from our site, you should be aware that these other sites have their own privacy and data processing practices. We have no responsibility or liability for these independent policies. For more information regarding a site and its privacy policies, check that site.