Privacy Policy
How are we handling your data?
This is our short and concise data handling policy that sets out our stance in regards to the General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR.
Condensed version
We are known as The Lighthouse Children’s Literary Consultancy.
We treat your data seriously. We only gather what we need, and we never share it with anyone outside our organisation without your consent.
Although we use common digital tools to process your data, we make sure that we put our trust in organisations who are either compliant with the European Union’s GDPR initiative or Privacy Shield, which sets the standard for storing the data securely outside of the European Union.
We will never use any of your details without asking you first.
Our website
Our website uses cookies. We track usage with Google Analytics. To make sure that your data is safe, we have anonymised the data collection – which means that data such as your IP address is not stored on Google servers.
Since we value your privacy, you can request us to remove any of your data from all our digital storage platforms – at any time.
All that you have to do is to contact us and request it.
We will do our best to do it within 7 days.
Should we ever suffer from a data breach, we will inform you as soon as we can.
Our data handling and privacy policy
This is the full version of our policy. Please read if you feel it’s important to you.
How do we collect information?
We only collect information when you interact with us via email or engage in a conversation with us on social media.
We collect mailing list subscribers’ email addresses using the form on our website.
If you are sending us an email or engage in a conversation with us on social media, we operate under the assumption that you have provided us with your details in order to reply to you.
In other words, it’s a dialogue – and to sustain it we have to rely on email and messaging systems. This means that your data is stored electronically.
What information do we collect and use?
We store minimal information including:
- Your name and surname
- Your email address
- Your project title and when we worked on it
- Your manuscript, query letter or synopsis
How are we storing your information and what systems we use?
At the time of writing this policy (August 2019) we use the following digital services:
- Gmail for email
- Twitter to publicise and share information
- MailChimp for email mailouts
- Adobe TypeKit for uniform representation of specific fonts.
To the best of our knowledge, all these digital services store data in an encrypted fashion.
If you have engaged with us in transactional capacity (in other words, if you paid money into our account), your bank account sort code and account number will be stored by our bank.
This is normal and allows us to run our business.
Banks do the best they can to store their data securely.
If you are interested in the data policies of these organisations, please refer to their websites.
Should we decide to use another digital service in the future, we will update this policy.
Our website
Encryption
Our website uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption for security reasons and for the protection of the transmission of confidential content, such as the enquires you send to us as the site operator.
You can recognise an encrypted connection in your browser’s address line when it changes from “http://” to “https://” and the lock icon is displayed in your browser’s address bar.
If SSL encryption is activated, the data you transfer to us cannot be read by third parties.
Cookies and trackers
Google Analytics use cookies on our website. We did not set any cookies on our own.
We have Google Analytics running on the site – and it does store three cookies on your machine. However, we have anonymised the settings of the application, so it doesn’t save information about your IP address, thus leaving you directly unidentifiable.
Server logs
Our website hosting provider automatically collects and stores information that your browser automatically transmits to us in server log files. These are:
- Browser type and browser version
- Operating system used
- Referrer URL
- Host name of the accessing computer
- Time of the server request
- IP address (anonymised by invalidating the last two address octets before storage)
This data will not be combined with data from other sources.
Who else has the access to information that we collect?
Your information is only used and accessed to help us provide our services. We never send any of your information to any third party. We would never do that without your consent.
Your data is yours and you can ask us to remove it from any storage we use at any time.
If you want to obtain access to information on what do we store, or request a removal of your information from our processing systems, please contact us. We will do our best to reply within 7 days and to provide you with all the required assistance.
What will we do if a data breach takes place?
In an unlikely event of a data breach taking place, we will inform you as soon as we can (usually as soon as the message about the breach hits our account). We will, of course, provide you with guidance on what to do.
What if any of this is unclear?
Please contact us. We will respond as soon as we can.