Privacy statement
The Transdiffusion Broadcasting System is entirely not-for-profit and run by volunteers.
The Staff Editors, Meta Editors and contributors are unpaid and 'work' for Transdiffusion for the love of the subject, not for material gain. Additionally, the majority of our pages are Open Content, meaning we give them away for free to anybody who wishes to use them in print or on the web.
As part of this, we believe that all our contributors and readers are entitled to privacy as they use our pages. The following constitutes our policy on your privacy and applies to every user of our sites:
We do not collect email addresses in anyway, except for our voluntary mailing lists, all of which give clear instructions on unsubscribing and require positive confirmation that you wish to join. This means that entering an email address into a web form on our sites, or subscribing to a list via email will provoke a further email that requests confirmation that you wish to join. No one can sign you up for one of our lists without your permission, unless they have access to your computer.
Emails sent to us are not stored once replied to and the addresses used to send us email are not recorded. However, if unsolicited ('spam') mails are sent to our addresses, we reserve the right to store, propagate, take legal action against and otherwise report or misuse the address as we wish - your fault for sending spam and helping to ruin the internet for everybody. We reserve the right to run emails of this nature through proprietary software and services to find the originator and have the offending servers closed. No ifs, no buts.
As the above makes clear, we hate spam emails, and therefore all addresses we become aware of are specifically held privately to prevent misuse.
Advertising
None of our sites feature advertising that we benefit from in anyway. Third Party sites we link to, or reference dynamic content from, may contain advertising. There's no way round this, so our advice is to not click on anything that looks like an advert, or examine the web address that appears in the bottom left of your browser before you click.
Cookies
Cookies are a method by which a small text file (usually readable with a text editor) is stored on your computer in order to identify you to the web server at a later date. No Transdiffusion server makes use of cookies, with the exception of certain members-only pages, where use is required to prevent you having to log in on multiple occasions. For the vast majority of users of this site, this does not apply.
Certain elements of dynamic content from Third Party sites referenced by us may leave cookies. For the most part, we're confident that these contain nothing other than generically useful information - which ITV region you're in for TV listings, for instance. Other cookies are generally blocked by modern (generation 6+) browsers anyway, and these browsers produce an icon that indicates a blocked cookie.
It is possible to turn cookies off completely, and you may wish to do this. However, you will lose functionality of certain websites and dynamic content on Transdiffusion sites. Only you can make this decision (though we advise leaving them switched on and regularly deleting any cookies that don't say what they are!).
IP Addresses
The internet works by giving each server and user a unique number - referred to as an IP Address - either permanently or on an ad-hoc basis. In theory, it is possible to trace a specific IP Address back to a particular user or computer. In practice, this takes more time than it would actually be worth, in our opinion.
Our servers use IP Addresses in 3 ways. First, to provide the pages your web browser has requested. There's no easy way round this, unless you use a Third Party anonymiser service, as this is how the internet works.
Secondly, emails (and web form entries) sent to us generally record automatically the IP Address of the sender. If you need to hide this information, you should consider whether you need to be emailing us at all, as we wouldn't be able to reply anyway.
Finally, our servers have the potential to record the IP Addresses of those who visit. We don't bother to do so, but the potential is there.
Web browsers
Your web browser (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera etc) tends to report back certain information to our server. This information is pretty anonymous - browser type, screen resolution, operating system - and this anonymous data is used by us to make sure we're not producing pages that the vast majority can't read. We can't identify you personally through this information, and don't want to.
Your browser also sends us slightly more specific information. This includes the page that referred you to us, any terms you used in a search engine to find us and which search engine you used, and which pages you visited whilst you were touring our sites (though not where you went afterwards, or unlinked sites you visited beforehand). We use this information to track the popularity of articles on our sites, the most popular search engines and what people are searching for. This information, although more specific, is still anonymous. We can't, and, frankly, don't want to identify you personally.
Viruses
If you get infected with a virus and send the virus on to one of our email addresses, we'll block your address automatically and never see another email from you again. If you think that's happened to you, your only choice is to write to us by snail mail. And invest in a virus detection program.