Privacy - EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Updated: 12/03/2023)

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thecaretaker
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Sep 2020 12 12:32

Privacy - EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Updated: 12/03/2023)

EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The GDPR is Europe's framework for data protection laws. The legislation is designed to "harmonise" data privacy laws across Europe as well as give greater protection and rights to individuals.

To comply with the EU GDPR you need to be made aware of the following:

The Caretakers' Forum does hold some personal data which could be used to identify you. This includes email addresses and a users ip address. The sole purpose of this is:
  • to manage any registered account that you hold with us;
  • to verify your identity;
  • to improve the functionality of the forum and to give users a better experience.
In addition to the above, The Caretakers' Forum will also store all of the IP address that you use to post with.

Your IP address maybe used to check your country of origin.

Your IP address and email address is sent to a third party CleanTalk to be checked against known spam lists and filtered through a personal firewall. Please refer to the CleanTalk Privacy Policy to understand how CleanTalk comply with the GDPR regulations.

Depending on your preferences, The Caretakers' Forum may send you emails to the email address that you used when you registered or you have subsequently changed, but you are able to change these preferences from your User Control Panel (UCP) at any time should you wish to stop receiving them.

The personal details that you gave us when you signed up will be used solely for the purposes of The Caretakers' Forum board functionality. They will not be used for anything else and neither will they be passed on or sold to any third party without your explicit consent.

The only other information about you is what you decide to post on the forum, whereupon it is considered to be publicly available as it will have been indexed by search engines as well as on-line archive sites.

User controls include:

You have the ability to see any personal information held about you in the 'User Control Panel' at any time.
Within your account, you have the option to opt-in or opt-out of automatically generated emails.
You can see all posts where you may have entered personal data which has become publicly available by clicking on the 'Your Post' link in the forum links menu.
You can request that your account is deleted, all your posts are deleted and any personal information is removed by sending the administrator a Private Message (PM) or by making a request via email by clicking on the "Contact Us" link on the forum (Please allow 24 hours).

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, so please guard it carefully and under no circumstance will anyone at The Caretakers' Forum, phpBB or another 3rd party, legitimately ask you for your password. Should you forget your password for your account, you can use the forgot my password feature provided by the forum software. This process will ask you to submit your user name and your email, then the forum software will generate a new password to reclaim your account.

All communication to and from the forum is secure and encrypted using SSL certificated https:// (port 443) using TLS 1.2, AES with 256 bit encryption (High); ECDH with 256 bit exchange.

By clicking on the agree to these terms button when registering for the forum your acceptance of these terms will be recorded.


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How do we use cookies on this board?
We use files known as cookies on The Caretakers Forum to improve its performance and to enhance your user experience. By using The Caretakers Forum you agree that we can place these types of files on your device.

What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that a website may put on your computer, or mobile device, when you first visit that site or one of its pages.

There are many functions that a cookie can serve. For example, a cookie will help the website, or another website, to recognise your device the next time you visit it. The Caretakers Forum uses the term "cookies" in this policy to refer to all files that collect information in this way.

Certain cookies contain personal information for example, if you click on "remember me" when logging on, a cookie will store your username. Most cookies will not collect information that identifies you, but will instead collect more general information such as how users arrive at and use The Caretakers Website Forum, or a user's general location.

What sort of cookies does The Caretakers Forum use?
Cookies can perform several different functions:

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Some cookies are essential for the operation of The Caretakers Forum. These cookies enable services you have specifically asked for.

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These cookies may collect anonymous information on the pages visited. For example, we might use performance cookies to keep track of which pages are most popular, which method of linking between pages is most effective and to determine why some pages are receiving error messages.

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The Caretakers Website Forum may also allow third parties to serve cookies that fall into any of the categories above. For example, like many sites, we may use Google Analytics to help us monitor our website traffic.

Can a board user block cookies?
To find out how to manage which cookies you allow, see your browser's help section or your mobile device manual - or you can visit one of the sites below, which have detailed information on how to manage, control or delete cookies.

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thecaretaker
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Nov 2022 18 13:18

Re: Privacy - EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Updated: 12/03/2023)

To comply further with the GDPR regulations, all data used to determine the legitimacy of users is now handled solely on European servers. Previously, the servers were located "globally" (they didn't specify which countries). Even though the United Kingdom isn't part of the EU, we still have to comply with the GDPR regulations.

I am assured this will have no affect on the speed of data flow (although it should improve it somewhat being more local).

CleanTalk says: We have developed a data storage system based on geographic location to help you comply with the GDPR policy. If you choose to store data only in the EU, you will be sure that this data will not be stored in other locations. The choice of storage location will not affect the speed of data processing. 

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thecaretaker
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Mar 2023 12 19:33

Re: Privacy - EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Updated: 12/03/2023)

Updated: 12/03/2023

Added the following:

Your IP address and email address is sent to a third party CleanTalk to be checked against known spam lists and filtered through a personal firewall. Please refer to the CleanTalk Privacy Policy to understand how CleanTalk comply with the GDPR regulations.

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