Progressive Media Markets Limited is committed to safeguarding your privacy online. It is very important to us that you should be able to use and enjoy our web sites without having to compromise your privacy in any way. This policy will help you understand how your personal information will be treated. This policy may change from time to time so please check back regularly. The Progressive Media Markets Limited Group includes companies which are members of the Direct Marketing Association, the Directory & Database Publishers' Association, the Audit Bureau of Circulations and BPA International. Where you see the symbols of these organisations on any of our web sites you have the further assurance of our commitment to the standards set by the relevant body. Please keep in mind that whenever you voluntarily disclose personal information online - for example on message boards, through email, or in chat areas - that information can be collected and used by others. In short, if you post personal information online that is accessible to the public, you may receive unsolicited messages from other parties in return. Ultimately, you are solely responsible for maintaining the secrecy of your passwords. Progressive Media Markets Limited staff will NEVER compromise your security by asking for your password online. Please be careful and responsible when you are online. Please note, your rights under the Data Protection Act 1998 are provided for on the registration page. What personally identifiable information does Progressive Media Markets Limited collect from me? Progressive Media Markets Limited collects information in several ways from different parts of our network of web sites. Some personal information is gathered when you register for our web sites, publications or events. During registration, Progressive Media Markets Limited asks for your name, email address, birth date, gender, address and post code and personal and professional interests and responsibilities. The more accurate the information you volunteer, the better we are able to customise your experience of our web sites. Once you register you are no longer anonymous to Progressive Media Markets Limited - you are given a password and are able to take full advantage of our services (subject to payment for certain services). In addition to registration we may ask you for personal information at other times, for example when you enter a competition or promotion run or sponsored by Progressive Media Markets Limited and when you report a problem with one of our sites or services. If you contact Progressive Media Markets Limited we may keep a record of that correspondence. Progressive Media Markets Limited also occasionally asks users to complete surveys that we use for research purposes. Whenever Progressive Media Markets Limited collects personal information we try to include a link to this Privacy Policy on the page in question. Your responses help us to sell appropriate advertising space and so minimise the cost of our services to you - or even provide some of them at no charge at all. They also enable us to personalise services to our readers. Progressive Media Markets Limited uses cookies as a means of offering and providing customisable and personalised services. However, your browser has settings that will allow you to accept all cookies, be informed as cookies arrive or reject all cookies. The downside of rejecting all cookies is that we are then unable to match the site content we offer you to what we know about your preferences from your previous visits. In addition, advertising networks that serve ads onto Progressive Media Markets Limited sites may use their own cookies. Progressive Media Markets Limited collects IP addresses for system administration, for independent audit and to report aggregate information to our advertisers. By this we can see how our sites are being used, for example, what services and facilities are popular, and how long users spend on particular pages. This is data about our users' browsing actions and patterns and it does not identify anyone individually. When you telephone a Progressive Media Markets Limited company, or someone who is dealing with calls on our behalf, we may record the conversation to ensure the security of any transaction discussed, to help us to review our quality of service and to assist in the training and development of the employees who take such calls. How does Progressive Media Markets Limited use my information? Progressive Media Markets Limited's primary goal in collecting personal information concerning subscribers is to provide them with a customised experience of our site. By knowing a little about you, Progressive Media Markets Limited is able to deliver more relevant advertisements and content to you, and by demonstrating the quality of our users we are able to secure advertising funding which keeps down the costs to the users. When delivering targeted advertisements, Progressive Media Markets Limited acts merely as the middleman. Advertisers give us an advertisement and tell us the type of audience they want to reach (for example, design specialists, or pump buyers in process industries). We take the advertisement and display it to users meeting the relevant criteria. When you join one of our email newsletter services the emails you receive may include advertising material and links to advertisers' web sites. This does not mean that your details have been passed to the advertiser in question. Furthermore, at the end of each newsletter you will find either a hyperlink or a description of a route to have yourself removed from further editions of that newsletter. Progressive Media Markets Limited undertakes research on our users' demographics, interests and behaviour based on the information provided to us upon registration, during a promotion, from our server log files or from surveys. We do this to better understand and serve you, the user. This research is compiled and analysed on an aggregated basis. Progressive Media Markets Limited may share this aggregated data with advertisers or business partners. We will use our best endeavours to ensure, where reasonable, that our business partners and advertising customers have effective on-line privacy policies and are registered under the Data Protection Act (as all of our relevant businesses are). |
