This page explains how Age Concern England uses any information visitors gives to us on the Age Concern Discussion Forum website, and the ways in which we protect visitors’ privacy.

The Data Protection Act
Under the Data Protection Act, we have a legal duty to protect any information we collect from you. We use appropriate technologies to safeguard your data, and keep strict security standards to prevent any unauthorised access to it. We do not pass on your details to any third party unless you give us permission to do so. We do not send you subsequent communications unless you give us permission to do so.

What information do we collect?
We use customer contact information from the ‘contact us’ form to send the visitor information or materials requested by the visitor. The visitor's contact information is also used to contact the visitor when necessary, for example, to fulfil a query. 

From time to time, our site may use an order or donation form for visitors to request information, products, services and make donations. We collect visitor's contact information (like their email address), demographic information (like their age, profession), and financial information (like their account or credit card numbers).

Contact information and financial information from the order and donation forms are used to fulfil orders. The visitor’s contact information is also used to get in touch with them when necessary, for example to be able to fulfil an order.  Financial information that is collected is kept secure using encryption.

Our online surveys and campaign forms may ask visitors for contact information (like their email address) and demographic information (like their zip or post code, organisation, age, or income level).

We use "session cookies" on our website, which store some of the visitor’s "preferences" while they move around the site (like font sizes). Cookies are pieces of data created when users visit a website. Visitors can set their computer not to accept cookies. Session cookies are deleted when visitors leave the site. They do not contain any personal information about users, and do not hold any information about which sites they visited before the Age Concern England website.

We collect log file information from all our visitors, which we use to make changes to the layout of the site and to the information in it, based on the way visitors move around it. Log files allow us to record visitors' use of the site. Our hosting provider, Star Internet, uses the log file information to provide us with website usage information.

What happens when visitors link to another site?
Age Concern England website contains links to other websites. This privacy policy applies only to our site, so visitors should always be aware when they are moving to another site and read the privacy statement of any site which collects personal information.
We do not pass on any personal information about our visitors to any other site.

Access to your information
The information we hold will be accurate and up to date. Visitors can check the information that we hold about them by e-mailing us. If visitors find any inaccuracies we will delete or correct it promptly.

Changes to this privacy policy
If this privacy policy changes in any way, we will place an updated version on this page. Regularly reviewing this page ensures visitors are always aware of what information we collect, how we use it and under what circumstances, if any, we will share it with other parties.

New privacy information
The Age Concern discussion board is, first and foremost, a public forum where anyone can get involved, as long as they follow our guidelines (link). As such, the information held on the discussion board is accessible by anyone, regardless of whether they have registered to use the board. This includes profiles which have chosen to be shared.

Users of this board can have all their details kept private, except their username, which would appear on the board when they posted a message, or when their name was mentioned in a post. It is the user's choice as to whether they want any details known publicly about themselves.

The discussion forum is indexed by search engines. The reason for this is to make it easy for people who may not know about Age Concern discussion forum to find discussions they would like to read about or participate in. This also includes usernames and, if you choose to share it, profiles.

Search engines cannot access any further information that users have not already agreed to be public. If a user chose not to share their profile, then a search engine will not be able to access that profile, just as a user on the board would not be able to access that profile.

If users do not want any information known about them, then they have the option to hide their profile, so the only thing public will be the username, which users can make as random as they like, if they wish to remain anonymous.

To re-iterate. There is no information a search engine can display that cannot already be seen by anyone who choses to visit discussions.

How to hide your profile
Click on the 'Your Profile' tab at the top of the Discussions page. This will open up a box with your registration details.

There are two statements:
Tick here if you want to share your registration details with other users of this website
and
Tick here if you want to share your email address with other users of this website

If you do not want your profile to be shared, untick the boxes next to them by clicking in the boxes.