Privacy

Contents:

EO is committed to protecting you and your family's personal information when you are using EO’s services. We want the forum to be a safe and enjoyable environment for our members. This Privacy Policy relates to our use of any personal information you provide to us through the education-otherwise.org website.

In order to provide you with the full range of EO services, we are sometimes required to collect information about you.

This privacy policy explains the following:

• what information EO may collect about you;

• how EO will use information we collect about you;

• when EO may use your details to contact you;

• whether EO will disclose your details to anyone else;

• your choices regarding the personal information you have provided to us;

• the use of cookies on EO's website and how you can reject these cookies.

As set out above, EO is committed to safeguarding your personal information. Whenever you provide such information, we are legally obliged to use your information in line with all laws concerning the protection of personal information, including the Data Protection Act 1998 (these laws are referred to collectively in this Privacy Policy as the "data protection laws").

The website contains hyperlinks to websites owned and operated by third parties. These third party websites have their own privacy policies, including cookies, and we urge you to review them. They will govern the use of personal information you submit or are collected by cookies whilst visiting these websites. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of such third party websites and your use of such websites is at your own risk.

When you sign up to participate in any education-otherwise,org website, such as message boards, we may ask for personal information about you. This can consist of information such as your name, email address, postal address, membership number or date of birth. Different webpages may ask for different personal information. Your account will at a bare minimum contain a uniquely identifiable name (ie "user name"), a personal password used for logging into your account and a personal, valid email address. Your information in your account at EO Members' Forums is protected by the Data Protection Act 1998.

Any information beyond your username, your password and your email required by EO Forums during the registration process are at trustees' descretion as to what is mandatory and what is optional. In all cases, you have the option of what information in your account is publicly displayed. Furthermore, within your account, you have the option to opt-in or opt-out of automatically generated emails form the phpBB software. EO also collects IP addresses (an ip address is a number that can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on the internet).

Your password is ciphered (a one-way hash) so that it is secure. However, it is recommended that you do not reuse the same password across a number of different websites. Your password is the means of accessing your account at EO Forums, so please guard it carefully and under no circumstances will anyone affiliated with EO or another 3rd party, legitimately ask you for your password. Should you forget your password for your account, you can use the "I forgot my password" feature provided by the phpBB software. This process will ask you to submit your username and your email, then the phpBB software will generate a new password to reclaim your account.

Education Otherwise will use your personal information for a number of purposes including the following:

• for "service administration purposes", which means that EO may contact you for reasons related to the service you have signed up for, as set out in paragraph 4 below (e.g. to provide you with password reminders or to notify you that a particular service has been suspended for maintenance;

• IP addresses are used to identify the location of users, and also to block disruptive use.

Where EO proposes using your personal information for any other uses we will ensure that we notify you first. You will also be given the opportunity to withhold or withdraw your consent for your use other than as listed above.

EO may contact you:

• in relation to the functioning of any service you have signed up for in order to ensure that Education Otherwise can deliver the services to you;

• where you have opted to receive further correspondence;

• in relation to any contribution you have made to education-otherwise.org, e.g. on forum boards.

Education Otherwise won't contact you for marketing purposes unless you specifically agree to be contacted for this purpose.

We will keep your information confidential except where disclosure is required or permitted by law (for example to government bodies and law enforcement agencies) or as described in the section below. Generally, we will only use your information within Education Otherwise. However, sometimes EO uses third parties to process your information. EO will require these third parties to comply strictly with it's instructions and EO will require that they do not use your personal information for their own business purposes.

If you post or send offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content anywhere on or to education-otherwise.org, or otherwise engage in any disruption, Education Otherwise may use your personal information to stop such behaviour.

Where Education Otherwise reasonably believes that you are or may be in breach of any of the laws of England or Wales (e.g. because content you have posted may be defamatory), Education Otherwise may use your personal information to inform relevant third parties such as law enforcement agencies about the content and your behaviour.

If you are aged 16 or under, please get your parent/guardian's permission beforehand whenever you provide personal information to EO. Users without this consent are not allowed to provide us with personal information.

We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant service, or as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with EO or EO's retention schedule (this is a record that defines which documents should be kept and for how long). We know that members will leave the EO Forums (of their own free will or otherwise) from time to time and to that end, we do not delete accounts, posts or other content posted in the forums.

All content is granted to use with perpetual electronic publishing rights because any content posted in the forum becomes a part of the community, even if you no longer are. You may request an item to be removed at any time, but this is at the discretion of the moderators. If you wish to no longer be identified with EO's Forums, we will be glad to close your account and alter yhour profile information to remove all identifying characteristics. After account closure, you will no longer be able to participate in the EO Forums.

Under the Data Protection Act you have the right to request a copy of the personal information EO holds about you and to have any inaccuracies corrected. (We charge £10 for information requests and will require you to confirm your identity.) We will use reasonable efforts to supply, correct or delete personal information about you on our files.

Please address requests and questions about this or any other question about this Privacy Policy to:

This privacy policy may be updated from time to time so you may wish to check it each time you submit personal information to any education-otherwise.org website. The date of the most recent revisions will appear on this page.

A cookie is a small text file, which often includes a unique identifier that is sent to your computer browser from a website's computer and is stored on your device's hard drive. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser's preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites. Many sites do this whenever a user visits their website in order to track online traffic flows.

Your information is collected in two ways. Firstly, by browsing this website the phpBB software creates a number of cookies that are downloaded onto your computer's web browser temporary files. The first two cookies just contain a user identifier and an anonymous session identifier, automatically assigned to you by the phpBB software. A third cookie will be created once you have browsed topics witin EO's Forums and is used to store which topics have been read, thereby improving your experience.

We may also create cookies external to the phpBB software whilst browsing EO's Forums. The second way in which we collect your information is by what you submit to us. This can be, and is not limited to: posting as a guest, registering on EO's Forums, and post submitted by you after registration and whilst logged in.

Users have the opportunity to set their devices to accept all cookies, to notify them when a cookie is issued, or not to receive cookies at any time. The last of these means that certain personalised services cannot then be provided to that user and accordingly you may not be able to take full advantage of all of education-otherwise.org features. Each browser is different, so check the "Help" menu of your browser to learn how to change your cookie preferences.

If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy please contact: