In association with heise online

Privacy Policy of h-online.com

h-online.com is a service provided by Heise Media UK Ltd. ("Heise").

If you register with h-online.com you give certain personal information to Heise. We have legal obligations towards you in the way that we use any such data and explain here the nature of those obligations and the technical and organisational measures we have taken to ensure that we, and any relevant service provider, meet those obligations. The use of such data is regulated under U.K. law by the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998.

Personal Information

Personal information is any information that may determine your identity. This includes such things as your correct name, postal address, telephone number, and so forth. It does not include such things as your favoured web pages or other preferences and choices. In general, any personal information that you provide to Heise will only be used within Heise and by its agents and service providers.

You can use most of our on-line services without disclosing your identity. However, if you register for one of our personalised services, we shall need to request your name and other relevant personal information. It is your choice whether you then provide us with these data.

Any such personal information that you give us is stored on highly protected servers in Germany. Access to this information is limited to a few specially authorised people who are involved with technical, business or editorial maintenance of the servers.

Together with your access data there is also stored on our servers other data which could possibly be used for identification purposes, such as IP address, date, time, viewed pages, and so forth. However, no personal use is made of these data, although we reserve the right anonymously to perform statistical analyses of such data.

We store IP addresses for a period of 7 days. This information is held for reasons of data security, in order to maintain the stability and reliability of our system. No personal information of any kind is made available to third parties. The administration of such data is solely the responsibility of Heise.

Transfer of personal information to third parties

Your personal information is only used in the case of any orders you might place to the Heise company or associated third party. No such data are ever transmitted to third parties without you explicit consent.

Should it be necessary to pass on certain information held with the service provider in the context of processing an order, this will only be done in accordance with the terms of the Data Protection Act 1998, and the requirements of the Heise Privacy Policy. We will also pass on to relevant parties any such data as we may be required to do, either by law or by Court Order.

Contributions made on our discussion forums are available to everybody. Before posting any contribution you should check that it contains no information that you would not wish or consider suitable to be made available to the general public.

You should also bear in mind that without any action on the part of h-online.com, your contributions may be accessed by search engines and in this way become available worldwide. Your original contribution may well thereby remain accessible elsewhere, even if deleted or corrected on h-online.com.

Right of cancellation

Any personal information that you have given to us can be deleted at any time. Only information that may be required for invoicing or accounting purposes are not deleted by such a cancellation.
You can close your account in h-online.com registration in the section "Close account".

The use of cookies

Some parts of our site use cookies in order to enable certain user functions, and this is indicated where relevant. Certain pages contain adverts from companies or agencies. Cookies may be used by these but we are unable to indicate when this occurs.

It is possible to use our site without cookies. Most browsers are configured by default so that they accept cookies automatically, but they can be set so that either the storage of cookies is disabled or that you are warned whenever a cookie is sent.

Children

Persons under 16 years should not reveal personal information about themselves or anyone else without the permission of their parent or guardian.

Links to other websites

Our on-line material contains links to other websites. We have no control over these other sites and whether they meet the same criteria for data security as h-online.com. You connect to these sites at your own risk.

Questions and comments

For questions, suggestions or comments on the subject of data protection, please send an email to the data protection representative of Heise publishing company at: [email protected]. The rapid development of the internet and the services that it enables requires that our Privacy Policy needs to be adapted from time to time. You will be informed on this page of any such amendments.