Privacy policy

Current updated and current from 1st May 2005.

We are committed to strict privacy in relation to our dealings with subscribers.

The following lays out our policy in more detail. If you would like more information about it, please feel free to contact us.

Note: This privacy policy should be read in conjunction with our Disclaimer, terms and conditions (to read them, click on the link at the end of this policy), which provides the exact legal basis on which you use our site and the Updates, including matters of privacy. Some of the terms used in this policy are defined there.

Personal information about you
In order for Arbor to efficiently run this website and offer resources to subscribers and users of the Updates, we collect specific information about our subscribers, such as their name, email address, country and state of residence and professional background.

This specific information about individual subscribers is strictly for internal use by Arbor only.

Arbor will not provide email address or any other contact or private identifying information about you to third parties (except as required by law) without your specific consent.

Arbor may use this information to email our subscribers with the Updates and such other topics as are directly relevant to their subscription (including information about our paid and Premium services, topics we are covering and administrative matters) and to recognise those subscribers when they respond to our emails. Subscribers may not opt out of these types of emails other than by unsubscribing and ceasing to be users of the Updates. Arbor may also use this information to customise and tailor our website and resources to our visitors and subscribers, to investigate violations of our terms and conditions of use or licences and for academic research conducted by us.

In the case of academic research, this will not involve personal identifying information (such as email address, name etc). We may also use collated data on our users (e.g. how many subscribers are university professors in North America etc.), to promote our services, but this will also not involve any personal identifying information.

Site statistics
In order for Arbor to efficiently run this website we also collect non-specific information about site visiting patterns, such as what pages and files visitors have accessed during their time on our site. Whilst this information can be tied to the IP addresses from which access is made, other than the recognition of email responders referred to above, this does not include any personal information about visitors as individuals. Specifically it does not include any identifying information such as name or email address.

Cookies
We do not use cookies to track your visiting history. (See also the section on Premium subscribers below).

Accuracy of our records
We keep records of our subscribers, based only on the information they submit to us in emails, through completing forms on the website or by other means, and in relation to subscriptions, resources that we may offer, downloads or other matters that they chose to contact us about. We also get information about status of their email address and themselves through emails or `holiday messages' that we receive back from attempting to email them at the email address they have given us.

We have no way of knowing whether the information that was supplied to us is correct or current, and whether it came from the person, mail server or organisation from which it purports to come. If subscribers convey corrected information to us, we do our best to make those corrections in a reasonably timely way. However, we do not offer any guarantees as to how quickly. Note that records of European subscribers are collected, maintained and stored outside the European Union.

Unsubscribing
A form for unsubscribing from the Updates and for requesting that you receive no further emails from us is available by clicking on this link and we refer to this in each issue of the Updates that we email to our subscribers. Provided that you follow these instructions, we will do our best to promptly comply with your request. (As stated on the form, we ask you to plan ahead as we cannot guarantee that we will be able to do this immediately. Also sometimes we cannot avoid emailing by mistake someone who has requested us not to, for example where they have subscribed more than once under different names or email addresses and have not told us this),

Ad-servers and invasive technologies
This website has no relationships with any ad-servers. Under no circumstances would we attempt to place any intrusive or monitoring software or code on your computer.

Premium subscribers
Although our commitment to privacy is just as rigorous for Premium subscribers as for other subscribers, the technical aspects of this differ in several respects:

Payment processing
As part of the payment process, we use third party providers to collect and process payment related to Premium subscriptions. In doing this the third party provider will collect certain personal information which may include, for example, credit card details.

The amount of this personal information they pass onto us about you is very limited and certainly does not include credit card details. However, whilst we feel that the third party providers are reputable companies and we are comfortable with their stated privacy policies in relation to this process, it is important that you should satisfy yourself about these matters and the data they will keep about you, since you are entirely responsible for making the choice to provide this information to them.

Login information
Our Premium subscribers have access to restricted resources, both sent to them by us via email and within password-protected areas on our website, for access to which we have supplied them with a personal password.

In order to administer these restricted resources and ensure that they are being used within the terms and conditions that apply to Premium subscribers (see link on the left near the top of the page) we monitor each subscriber's usage of the Premium resources within the website, based on identifying them through their password at the time they log-in. Unlike other users of the website, therefore, we can match things such as file downloads and log-in history to individual Premium subscribers.

Premium subscribers are responsible for maintaining the privacy and security of their Premium subscriber's password.

Our web server may place a cookie on a Premium subscriber's computer in order to maintain continuity of their log-in session once they have logged in. (This will enable them to come and go from the restricted pages without having to log-in again within any given session). This cookie is not used for any other purpose, and certainly not to collect any personal information about our subscribers' browsing habits.

For our Premium subscribers' convenience, certain information about them (e.g. name, email address, subscription and login details) may display on personalised pages on their screen once they have logged into the Premium subscriber's section. To ensure their own privacy, Premium subscribers should ensure they do not leave this information on the screen or in their browser's cache for others to see after the Premium subscriber has finished their own session. To assist with privacy we have also provided clearly marked buttons for the subscriber to log off from a Premium session, as well instructing our server to log them off automatically if there has been no activity on the site for 30 minutes.

Changes to this policy
We reserve the right to change this policy without notice at any time. If we do change it, we will place the new policy on this page with a notice that it has changed and the date of the change at the top of the page. Please check from time to time to see if we have done this.