Privacy policy

The policy:

At smart-media, one of our main priorities is the privacy of our visitors. This Privacy Policy document contains types of information that is collected and recorded by smart-media and how we use it.

If you have additional questions or require more information about our Privacy Policy, do not hesitate to contact us.

Log Files

Our servers keep access logs, as every web server does. A log line records the IP address the request came from, the page asked for, the time, the browser's user-agent string and the page you arrived from. An IP address is personal data under the GDPR, so we treat these logs as personal data rather than claiming otherwise: they are kept to operate and secure the site, which is our legitimate interest under Art. 6(1)(f), they are not used to build a profile of you, they are not combined with anything else, and they are deleted on a rolling basis. They are not shared with anyone except where we are legally required to.

Cookies and web beacons

We set two cookies of our own: one to keep you signed in and carry the token that protects our forms, and one to remember whether you agreed to anything optional. Neither identifies you to anyone else and neither is used to track you across sites. One further cookie, set by Google, appears only if you agree to third-party spam protection.

Rather than describe that in prose, we list it. Every cookie this site can set is named in a table with its purpose, its lifetime, who receives it and whether it needs your consent - and the controls to change your answer are on the same page. If you find a cookie on our domain that is not in that table, please tell us.

Advertising

There is none. We sell no advertising space, we run no ad network's code, and we have no advertising partners. The previous version of this page described third-party ad servers at length; it was inherited boilerplate describing a business we are not in, and we have removed it rather than leave you reading a disclosure about something that does not happen.

We also no longer use Google Analytics, and we removed it rather than putting a consent banner in front of it. Visits are now counted by software we run ourselves, on our own servers. It sets no cookie, stores no identifier in your browser, and follows you nowhere: it records that a page was requested, roughly where in the world from, and which page sent you, and nothing that could be tied back to you later. No third party is involved and no data about your visit leaves our infrastructure. It only runs if you agree to it, and you can withdraw that at any time on the cookies page.

Third party privacy policies

One third party can receive data about you, and only if you let it: Google, through the reCAPTCHA challenge that protects our forms from automated abuse. If you agree to it, Google receives your IP address and information about your browser, and processes it under its own privacy policy - which we do not control. If you decline, the challenge never loads and our forms fall back to spam checks that run on our own servers. Declining costs you nothing and does not prevent you from contacting us.

You can choose to disable cookies through your individual browser options. To know more detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers, it can be found at the browsers' respective websites.

Children's information

Another part of our priority is adding protection for children while using the internet. We encourage parents and guardians to observe, participate in, and/or monitor and guide their online activity.

smart-media does not knowingly collect any Personal Identifiable Information from children under the age of 13. If you think that your child provided this kind of information on our website, we strongly encourage you to contact us immediately and we will do our best efforts to promptly remove such information from our records.

Online privacy policy only

This Privacy Policy applies only to our online activities and is valid for visitors to our website with regards to the information that they shared and/or collect in smart-media. This policy is not applicable to any information collected offline or via channels other than this website.

Consent

This page used to say that by using the website you consented to it. That is not how consent works and it never was: under Art. 4(11) GDPR consent is a freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of your wishes, given by a statement or a clear affirmative action. Continuing to read a page is none of those things.

So we do not treat your visit as consent to anything. Most of what we do here does not rest on consent at all - keeping the site running and logging access rests on our legitimate interests, and answering a message you send us rests on the fact that you sent it. The one thing that does need your consent is the third-party spam protection described above, and for that we ask, in a notice you can refuse without losing anything.

You can see and change what you agreed to at any time on the cookies page, and withdrawing is one click, exactly like giving. Withdrawal does not undo processing that already happened, but it stops it going forward.