1. Introduction
Wired In is committed to protecting you and your family’s personal information when you are using wiredin.org.uk. We want our community to be a safe and enjoyable environment for our audience. This Privacy Policy relates to our use of any personal information you provide to us through wiredin.org.uk.

If an online community is to achieve what it sets out to do – to facilitate communication between people and enable the development of relationships – it is important that members of the community provide at least some basic information about themselves.

Whenever you provide such information, we are legally obliged to use your information in line with all laws concerning the protection of personal information, including the Data Protection Act 1998.

We hyperlink from wiredin.org.uk to websites that are owned and operated by other people. We urge you to review the privacy policies of these other websites. They will govern the use of personal information you submit or are collected by cookies whilst visiting these websites.

We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of such third party websites and your use of such websites is at your own risk.

2. What information will wiredin.org.uk collect from me, and why?
When you register to join our community, we ask for some personal information about you. The minimum information we need to register a user is a name (which can be an alias, if you wish to remain anonymous), an email address and a password. These registration questions are compulsory if you wish to participate in community activities.

We also ask several optional questions relating to your location (town and country), age, gender and occupation. You can write a short biography about yourself, and provide hyperlinks to your personal website, and Twitter and Flickr accounts, if you wish. Your personal profile page creates a persona for you, and helps us to develop the Wired In community.

So why do we collect this information? If someone finds a community in which they might be interested – in the real or virtual worlds – they want to know more about the members they encounter or might meet. They want to know who to talk to and what to talk about. They want the possibility of developing some form of relationship with other community members.

It is our job at Wired In to help facilitate relationships between community members, and one way we can do this is by helping people develop their own personal profiles. We are starting off with very basic information, but this will be expanded upon over time – if people want to fill in the information.

Your personal profiles also help us gain a better understanding of our community members which allows us to improve our overall community services and develop more personalised services. It is important to emphasise that we do not share your personal information with third parties.

Wired In also uses cookies (see Section 3) and collects IP addresses (numbers that can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on the internet). Being able to access IP addresses helps us to determine where traffic to our website is coming from (in particular, which countries), which is useful for statistical purposes. It also helps us deal with disruptive or offensive behaviour.

Wired In collects and may provide aggregate statistics about visitors and community members, traffic patterns and related site information to reputable organisations who sponsor or are considering sponsoring our website. We need funding to maintain and further develop wiredin.org.uk and sponsorship is our key source of income. Some sponsors want to know something about the numbers and type of people who visit our website – as do our community members.

We emphasise that these aggregate statistics include no personally identifiable information.

3. Cookies Policy: what information Wired In collects from you
A cookie is a small amount of data, which often includes a unique identifier, that is sent to your computer’s browser from a website and is stored on your hard drive. Each website can send its own cookie to your browser if your browser’s preferences allow it, but (to protect your privacy) your browser only permits a website to access the cookies it has already sent to you, not the cookies sent to you by other sites.

When you register with us, we generate a registration cookie. Our server uses this cookie to work out if you are registered with us and therefore can access community activities.

Every time a person visits our website, we generate another form of cookie. This cookie just tells us whether or not you’ve visited the site before. It allows us to track some important indicators, notably, how many individual unique users we have, and how often they visit the site. This cookie cannot be used to identify an individual; it can only be used for these statistical purposes.

4. When will Wired In contact me?
Wired in contacts you to confirm your registration and activate your account. We then contact you under the following circumstances:

• If there is information or news about our community activities or the functioning of our services
• In relation to any contribution you may have made to our community
• To invite you to participate in a survey related to our services (participation is always voluntary)
• If you have broken any of our agreements laid out in our Terms and Conditions (see also Section 5 below).

5. Will Wired In share my personal information with anyone else?
We will keep your information confidential, and not share with others, except where disclosure is required or permitted by law (for example to government bodies and law enforcement agencies) or as described in Section 6 below.

6. Offensive or inappropriate content on wiredin.org.uk
If you post or send offensive, inappropriate or objectionable content anywhere on or to wiredin.org.uk, or otherwise engage in any disruptive behaviour on this website, Wired In may use your personal information to stop such behaviour. This may involve us revealing personal information to law enforcement agencies.

We reserve the right to access and disclose individually identifiable information to comply with applicable laws and lawful government requests, to operate our systems properly, and to protect both ourselves and our users.

7. What if I am a user aged 16 or under?
If you are aged 16 or under, please obtain your parent or guardian’s permission beforehand whenever you provide personal information to wiredin.org.uk. If you do not have this consent you are not allowed to provide us with personal information.

8. How long will Wired In keep my personal information?
We will hold the personal information from your profile page on wiredin.org.uk for as long as you are a member of our website. If you request that we cancel your website membership, your account will be disabled such that your personal data is no longer visible on the public website, but we may retain your information for a period of one year for administration purposes before deleting it permanently.

9. Changes to Wired In’s Privacy Policy
This privacy policy may be updated from time to time so you may wish to check it each time you submit personal information to wiredin.org.uk. The date of the most recent revisions will appear on this page.