Privacy Policy

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Please note: We currently use Matomo (GDPR compliant) to provide analytics for our site.

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General principles of The Meteor Privacy Policy:

Limits

We strictly limit the processing of your personal data to our requirements, and only use data processing services that also observe equally strict limits.

Necessity

We only collect information about you that we need in order to provide the product or service you have requested, to run our business, to contact you and to comply with legal obligations.

Resistance

Wherever possible, we will resist attempts by government agencies, public bodies or private-sector organisations to gain access to any information that you give us.

Transparency

We provide a detailed and full privacy policy for transparency and clarity, which you can find below.

Who we are

The Meteor is an independent, not-for-profit media co-operative based in Manchester. We believe that the media should be democratically accountable and managed by its members and communities.

We respect your privacy and wish to be transparent in the way we process and store the data of members and visitors to our website. Below is our Privacy Policy so that you are aware of how we handle you data and for what purposes.

Questions, comments and requests regarding this Privacy Policy are welcomed and should be sent to: editor@themeteor.org

1. Privacy policy for The Meteor

1.1 The Meteor: Manchester Independents Media legal name is ‘The Manchester Meteor Limited’, registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a type of co-operative known as a Community Benefit Society, with the registration number: 8151.

The Manchester Meteor Ltd is registered at this address: 24 Wetherall Street, Levenshulme, Manchester, M19 3GE, United Kingdom. We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy.

1.2 This policy (together with the Terms and Conditions for the themeteor.org (“our website”)) sets out the basis on which any personal data we collect from you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data, how we will handle it and what your rights are in terms of accessing it or having us delete it. In visiting our website you give us information and therefore acknowledge the practices described in this policy.

1.3 Our website may occasionally contain links to and from the websites of third parties, for instance payment processors. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

1.4 This Privacy Policy was last updated in October 2019. Although most changes are likely to be minor, we may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. Where material changes have been made, you will be notified of changes we make to this Privacy Policy.

1.5 You can contact us with any privacy related enquiries at editor@themeteor.org.

2. Information we may collect from you

2.1 We may collect and process the following information in accordance with applicable data protection laws:

(a) The email address provided by you if you register or post content, to validate such registration or content and for password reset purposes.

(b) Information provided via online form submission such as:

An enquiry;
A report of a problem with our website; or
In response to a communication from us.

In this correspondence we may be provided with certain personal data such as your name, email address and information (which could tell us something about the individual’s preferences).

The individual contacting us is in control of the personal data and other information that they share with us. We need this information to be able to respond to the enquiry and to administer our website.

(c) Details of registration, membership and subscription transactions you carry out in relation to our website, including but not limited to name, order information, billing information, address, type of subscription, hashed payment details, and a notification of whether payments have been accepted or declined. We need this information to be able to provide our products and services to you.

(d) Information provided when individuals visit our website. We capture access data such as IP address, browser type and version, time zone setting, operating system and platform, date and time of the access, requests made. This information does not allow us to identify you. We may also capture other information about visits to our website such as site usage and traffic patterns.

While we may be able to identify an individual device and therefore an individual from this information, the purpose of collecting information is to administer, maintain and improve our website and not to analyse individual visits to our website (please see the “purposes for processing” section below for further details).

(e) We use the Akismet anti-spam service for the comments section on our website. When visitors leave comments, this service uses the data shown in the comments form, the commenter’s IP address, user agent string, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself) to help spam detection. The Akismet service privacy policy is available here: https://akismet.com/privacy/.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also known as a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

(f) Images uploaded to the website. Please be advised to avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

(g) Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if you were visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

(h) If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

2.2 Where you provide us with personal data about other individuals, you warrant that you have the authority to pass this information to us. Please note this does not apply to information of journalistic interest. For more on passing information to us see here (link to ‘Contact Meteor securely’ page).

2.3 We are required to comply with certain legal and regulatory requirements, and may process your personal data for compliance with such legal or regulatory obligations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to which we or regulators or law enforcement agencies are subject. In this eventuality we may seek independent legal advice to determine the lawfulness of any data access request.

2.4 If any of your personal details change during your use of our website, you are responsible for updating them by accessing the relevant section of our website, or by contacting us at editor@themeteor.org.

3. Why and how we process your data

3.1 Any personal data we process will be used in accordance with applicable data protection laws. We describe below our purposes for processing personal data.

3.2 We may use information you give us or that we collect from you:

(a) To provide our products and services, run our organisation and administer user accounts and user content;

(i) We have a legitimate interest to process the personal data of our users in order to provide products and services, administer user accounts and run our organisation;

(b) To inform individuals about promotions and our products and services:

(i) We may use personal data to inform individuals of information, promotions, suggestions, recommendations, products and services that may be of interest where they are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about such as membership and events (unless you opt-out), we are legally permitted to do so or where an individual has consented to receiving direct marketing from us.

Individuals may be contacted by post, email or telephone as we regard as appropriate and as legally permitted;

(ii) We have a legitimate interest to process the personal data of our users for direct marketing purposes to provide our products and services, to run our business and rely on consent from the user as a basis for direct marketing where we are legally required to do so; and

(iii) If you are an existing user, we will only contact you with information about products and services similar to those which were the subject of a previous transaction by or expression of interest with you.

(i) We have a legitimate interest to process this personal data in order to deal with enquiries, requests, complaints or comments that users submit to us;

(d) To administer and improve our website:

(i) We use “cookies” to monitor site user traffic patterns and site usage. This helps us to understand how our users and potential users use our website so that we can develop and improve its design and functionality.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience; it means you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

If you do not agree with our usage of cookies, you can block our cookies.

(ii) To process the personal data of our users in order to administer, maintain and improve our website;

(e) To notify you about changes to our service. This processing is necessary for the performance of our contract with you;

(f) For internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and survey purposes;

(g) To allow you to take part in interactive features of our service;

(h) To help us keep our website and your information safe and secure; and

(i) To comply with any legal or regulatory obligations to which we or regulators or law enforcement agencies are subject. This processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we, our users or the regulator/law enforcement agency are subject.

(j) To deliver digital advertising on our site. We share data with our advertising partner Glimpse Protocol – a privacy-focussed and cookieless advertising platform that keeps your data private and does not share it with any third party. To learn more about Glimpse Protocol please see their FAQ page (https://www.glimpseprotocol.io/faq).

3.3 If you have any questions about how we use your data please contact us at editor@themeteor.org.

4. Disclosure of your information

4.1 We do not share your personal data to third parties without your consent. However, we may share your personal data if we are under a duty to or permitted to disclose it in order to comply with any legal, financial or regulatory obligations; or in order to enforce or apply our website Terms and Conditions and other agreements; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of The Meteor Limited, our users, or others’ personal data. In these circumstances we will notify you in advance wherever possible.

5. Where we store your data

5.1 You acknowledge that by posting or uploading any content on our website, including any articles submitted for publication on our website, that such content and articles will be viewable and available worldwide by other users who view our website.

5.2 If we or our service providers transfer any personal data out of the European Economic Area (EEA), it will be done with the relevant protection (stated under UK law) being in place.

6. How we protect your data

6.1 We encrypt any data we receive from you via our website through SSL certificates to ensure a secure connection between your browser and our web server.

7. Retention of your data

7.1 We take appropriate measures to ensure that any personal data is kept secure. We will store your personal data for the duration of your use of our website. If you delete your account, we will continue to store your personal data for as long as is required by legal, regulatory, financial and business requirements. We also keep a record of correspondence for as long as is required by legal, regulatory, financial and business requirements. We will delete such personal data and correspondence once it is no longer required.

8. Access to information and your rights

8.1 As a result of us collecting and processing your information through your possession of an account or from posting a comment on the website, you have the following legal rights:

(a) To access personal data held about you. You can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you (this does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes).

(b) To request us to make any changes to your personal data if it is inaccurate or incomplete;

(d) To object to, or restrict, our processing of your personal data in certain circumstances;

(e) To object to, and not be subject to a decision which is based solely on, automated processing (including profiling), which produces legal effects or could significantly affect you;

(f) Where our processing of your personal data is based on your consent you have the right to withdraw consent at any time by contacting us; and

(g) To lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, which in the UK is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

8.2 To exercise any of your rights as set out above, please contact us at editor@themeteor.org.