Our Privacy Policy

www.ScottishTories.com

Scottish IT is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We do not intend to sell, share, or rent this information to others in ways different from what is disclosed in this statement. Scottish IT collects information from our users at several different points on the SCOTTISHTORIES.COM web sites.

Registration

In order to use our free email service, a user must first complete the registration form. During registration a user is required to give their contact information (such as name and email address). This information is owned by our outsourcing provider Everyone.Net, and under the terms of registration, you grant them the right to make such information available to us if they so choose. Everyone.Net is an entirely separate organisation to Scottish IT, and their usage of the data provided differs greatly from ours. Details of their use of your registration data, can be found on their site www.everyone.net

It is optional for the user to provide demographic information (such as income level and gender), Scottish IT doesn’t use such optional information, as it is merely collected so that Everyone.net can provide a more personalised experience on our site (namely banner ads that will be of interest to you). So if you’re 18, you won’t be shown an ad for a funeral service, and if you’re 70 you won’t be shown ads for the latest Garage music compilations. Such information also helps advertisers, who kindly pay for the servers, and software, and bandwidth that your use of the service requires.

It is the view of Scottish IT that personalisation of banner ads is a positive development. If you’re going to have an annoying ad hogging your bandwidth and flashing at you, it might as well be for something that might be of interest to you. Also, the more you find them useful, the more advertisers will pay, and the better service you will receive.

All information provided in registration is provided because Everyone.Net wish to collect it. Scottish IT don’t necessary get access to all such information, even though you have granted Everyone.Net the right to provide such information to us in the future, should they see fit to do so.

There are a great number of uses which we could think of for the information, including:

Informing you of new sites that may be of interest to Scottish Tories (on a non-commercial basis)

Such sites would be weighted towards Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party sites, Scottish IT sites, and Imperial Tories sites that would be of interest to Scots.

For instance, by keeping a copy of your email username in a cookie, the next time you visit our site, we can fill in your username for you, saving you time and effort. The same goes for your password, if you decide that we should store it. If a user rejects the cookie, they may still use our site. Cookies can also enable us to track and target the interests of our users to enhance the experience on our site.

Some of our oursourcing partners have banner ads on their sites. The advertisers use cookies to help serve ads that are interesting to you, and to decrease the chances of you viewing the same ad banner over , and over, and over again. As far as privacy goes, it is certainly the advertising banner network companies that tend to freak out the paranoid. However, as the same companies run banner ads on nearly all the web sites you visit, including all the main popular ones, if you have a problem with their activities, you had better disable all cookies, or give up using the web entirely. Please note that Scottish IT has no access to (or control over) cookies sent to servers not under our operational control. .

Log Files
Whenever you visit a web site, you send a message to the server with a unique number at which you can be contacted. Such a number is called an IP number, and is typically assigned to you temporarily when you connect to the Internet. If you visit our site via a web-proxy, we get sent the proxy’s IP number, instead of that of your computer. In most cases, the IP number contains no information that can be traced back to an individual. In a very, very small proportion of cases, the IP number can theoretically be traced back to a named user account. More specifically, if you have a ‘fixed IP address’ which reserve-DNS traces back to a subdomain with your service provider and your user ID forms part of the hostname returned, then we can probably tell it’s you. Unless you have an ADSL/Leased Line connection or a Demon Internet Dial-up account, with the account used solely by you, with your username giving away your email addresss/web address, and that acting as a search term to use to find personally identifiable information via search indexes, or speculative guessing at your personal website URL, you are probably safe! It should be pointed out that this potential issue is not unique to our site, and any site you visit could do exactly the same.

We want to create a site that is useful. One of the ways we do that is to have a look at our web stats, to see which pages on our site interest our visitors, how those visitors found our site (a clue to what they are looking for), and how long they spend looking at each page.

The IP address may also give us an idea of which ISP the surfer is using, or the name of their employer (if you’re surfing from work). The plus-point is that we can spot Guardian journalists, EU/Scottish/UK Parliament visitors and Search Engines at twenty paces.

The way we tell the separate requests for web pages from one user from those of another, is from the IP address.

IP addresses are never intentionally linked to personally identifiable information.

Sharing

We will share broad-brush information about the level of usage of these services with the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, and with Scottish IT’s parent organisation Imperial Tories. With minor exceptions that have already been mentioned, this is very unlikely to contain anything that could identify the actions of any individual surfer.

We partner with Everyone.net and they partner with their advertisers. When the user signs up to our free email service, they also agree to allow Everyone.net to have access to that information, and for Everyone.net to share aggregated information with the advertising networks that it uses. These parties are not allowed to use personally identifiable information except for the purpose of providing these services.

Links
This web site contains links to other sites, such as news sites, and search engines. Please be aware that Scottish IT and the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects personally identifiable information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this Web site.

Username Monitoring

Scottish IT wish to ensure that our free email service is not abused. The ScottishTories.com email service is open to the public, and is not operated on a pre-approval basis. Consequently, there is always the risk of users impersonating others. We will use the information available to us, to watch for such misuse, and to attempt to verify whether those whom we believe to be misusing the service are in fact doing so.

Security
This web site takes precautions to protect our users’ information. With the exception of web-stat summaries, most personally identifiable information collected by Scottish IT is deleted almost as soon as we receive it (i.e. within 48 hours of us receiving it) When we access the data stored by Everyone.Net, our outsourcing email provider, we do so via an encrypted SSL link. Everyone.net, the company that stores the details submitted when you join our free email service, is committed to security. Given the security scares that hit Hotmail, the Whitehouse, the FBI, the US Department of Justice, the Scottish Parliament, and the Labour Party, we won’t be making any bets on any organisations security, save to say, we believe them to be competent.

Access to personally identifiable information that we receive is restricted to approximately 3 people. Later this year, Scottish IT will move over to using PGP for our email communications.

Our internal phone conversations take place over digital mobiles.

Supplementation of Information
In order for this website to help prevent users misusing our email service, or attempting to act on behalf of groups for whom they are not entitled to act, it is necessary for us to supplement the information we receive with information from 3rd party sources.

Scottish IT and Imperial Tories keep information that we need to contact our service recipients. We do not over-zealously purge our email inbox, so if you email us with personally identifiable information, we’ll probably keep it until we finally clear it out.

Out of respect for the privacy of our users we present the option to not receive these types of communications. Please see our choice and opt-out below.

Critical Service Developments.
In general, we do not email users of our service if they are asked not to receive such emails.

However, if at any point in the future, we feel we should warn users of something (security alerts, advance warning of downtime, changing the outsourcing service provider used), we may nevertheless decide to email users of our service to inform them of such developments. Members are not able to un-subscribe from such service announcements, which contain vital important information about the service.

Correction/Updating Personal Information:
If a user’s personally identifiable information changes (such as your Postcode), or if a user no longer desires our service, we will endeavor to delete such information from our databases, and other records. You are reminded that the Everyone Benefits program is an entirely separate program, completely outside the control of Scottish IT. If you wish to unsubscribe from that, you should contact Everyone.net directly. You should be able to unsubscribe from your user account automatically though.

Choice/Opt-out
Our users are given the opportunity to ‘opt-out’ of receiving all but non-critical email bulletins.

Having logged on to their email account, they can unsubscribe at any moment, should they choose to do so. Users of our site are always notified when their information is being collected by any outside parties. We do this so our users can make an informed choice as to whether they should proceed with services that require an outside party, or not.

If we are required by law to release information to law enforcement agencies, the courts or some other body, we will do so. We reserve the right to gather and use personal identifiable information for the purposes of preventing and detecting illegal activity, preventing and detecting misuse of our services, and preventing and detecting breaches by our users of the Terms of Service.

Notification of Changes
If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on our Homepage so our users are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under circumstances, if any, we disclose it. If at any point we decide to use personally identifiable information in a manner different from that stated at the time it was collected, we will notify users by way of an email. Users will have a choice as to whether or not we use their information in this different manner. We will use information in accordance with the privacy policy under which the information was collected.