Privacy Policy

Who are we?

The Guinea Pig Forum is an online community provided as a public service for our users. We are run by Guinea Pig owners for owners. We are acting as the “data controller” in the collection, using, storing, protection and transfer of the personal data you provide to us when using our website.

Our Commitment to your Privacy
Your privacy is important to us. The Guinea Pig Forum (referred to in this document as “we” or “us” or “our” or 'the forum') is committed to protecting your privacy. We are providing this Privacy Notice along with our Terms of Service and Rules which can be found at Terms of Service and Rules to be transparent in the use of your personal infomation. Any Personal Information provided by you to us when using the forums services, by which you can be identified, will only be used in accordance with this privacy policy.

What sort of Personal Information do we collect?

The personal data that we collect, and store in most cases is:-

  • Your email address (the one you register on this site with)
  • Internet Protocol (IP) address (whenever you visit the site as a guest or a user)
  • Your Date of Birth (which you enter upon registration)
  • For your security, we’ll also keep an encrypted record of your login password.

When do we collect your Personal Information?

We collect your personal information from when you :-

  • You register an account to join www.theguineapigforum.co.uk
  • Contact us via our contact form or via email
  • Visit or browse our website in accordance with our Cookie Policy

How we use your Personal Information?

The reasons for processing your personal information are detailed below:-

  • Access to our website
  • We use your basic personal information to allow you to set up an account on our website
  • Your email address is used to validate you are in control of the email address you register with and to make sure you are not a spambot signing up to post adverts. We also use your email address to send transactional emails to you e.g. to inform you that a thread you have started on the forum has a reply or someone has replied to thread you are watching or has sent you a pm. You can turn off this feature or at any point in your ‘Alert Preferences’ on your account or click ‘Stop receiving these emails’ in a transactional you receive from us. We do not send out newsletters or marketing emails ever.
  • Your Date of Birth is used to verify you are old enough to use our website and to ensure you are over the age of 16 when you sign up to the forum.
  • Your IP address is recorded when you perform certain actions on our site. Your IP address is never publicly visible.
  • To respond to queries through our ‘Contact Us’ form
  • We make no use at all of voluntary profile information that you may add to your user account (eg. location, occupation etc….).
Where is your Personal Information Stored?

We use third-party service providers to provide the following necessary business functions and services:-
  • Web hosting.
  • Backup of website and storage.
  • Forum Technical support.
  • Provision of Transactional emails.
  • Incoming Emails from contact form.
All personal information you provide to us on www.theguineapigforum.co.uk is stored on secure third party hosting servers managed by our current hosting company

The following third-party services act in accordance with our instructions to supply our services as a forum and they comply with this policy and their own Privacy Notice. They have committed to being GDPR Compilant and conform with all other applicable data protection laws and appropriate confidentiality and security measures:-

Sharing and disclosing your personal information

We take all reasonable steps to ensure that your personal information is processed securely. We do not disclose or share any of it without your consent, other than for the purposes specified in this Privacy Policy, or where there is a legal requirement such as a court order, assist with law enforcement or to enforce our Terms and Services.

Additionally, we may access or disclose information including the content of your posts and messages, for the following reasons: (a) to comply with the law enforcement; (b) to protect the rights or property of other forum members; (c) to protect the personal safety of our members or the public; or(d) to protect our rights.

Data Security

Appropriate measures (user authentication, authorization, data encryption, SSL) are taken to ensure that the data we collect is safeguarded and secure from unauthorized access.
Regarding the data submitted in Forum: private profile fields can only be accessed by site administrators, and I.P. addresses attached to the threads/posts can only be accessed by site administrators and moderators.
Our host Mattwservices has a range of appropriate technical and organisational measures in place in regards to security, these are available to view in their Privacy Policy here Privacy Policy

Use by Children

We do not collect any information from anyone under 13 years of age; accounts on our website, are only provided to users who are at least 13 years old or older. The forum is now only open to registrants over the age of 16 years of age.
We however strongly recommend that users under 18 years of age refrain from offering any personal information either in their user profile or in the forums themselves, and we encourage parents to stay involved in the online life of their children.
We recomend that at all times our younger members are mindful of their online safety. We have details on how on younger members can keep themselves safer online here Children's Online Safety

Links to other websites

This Privacy Policy applies only to this website. When browsing our website you may find links posted to other websites or organisations. However, due to the nature of the internet, we cannot guarantee the privacy standards of websites to which there may be links or be responsible for the contents of sites other than this one even if you access them using links from our website.

Accessing your Information

Wherever it is possible, we provide a way for you to edit and update your personal information. In the case of our forum, you can edit your personal information and site preferences via your profile ( you can do this when you are logged in by clicking on your username in the top right of the page). There are various areas within your profile settings to add and edit data.

Within Account Details You can change you email address, Add or remove an avatar, Change your birth date, and year of birth visibility preference. There are several optional information fields which you may populate should you wish, it is your responsibility what you wish to populate here and any indfomation you chose to save in these fields is your sole responsbility, please be mindful of online privacy and security. These include, Location; Website URL; Number of Guinea Pigs; Gender; Occupation; About you. Fields for your social media identies – AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger; Skype; Google Talk; Facebook;Twitter. All of these fields are optional and you can clear them out anytime you want.

Within Privacy you may choose to show your online status or current activity on the forum. You can select the user types who can view your details your profile page, Receive your news feed, Start Conversations with you or view your social media identities – You can set the access level to: All Visitors (Guests included), Members Only , People you follow, Nobody.

Within Preferences Various options are available to customise your Forum experience. The ‘preferences’ settings include: Choosing to togle the following options on/off – Receive Site Mailings, Receiving an email to alert you when a new conversation message is received, Automatically watch content you create…( and receive email notifications), Automatically watch content you interact with… …(and receive email notifications), Receive email when a new conversation message is received, Receive site mailings, Show people's signatures with their messages, Show your online status, Show your current activity. Within this section you can also toggle your alert preferences on/off. And finally miscellaneous options like the Date / Time / Timezone selection and options like the Forum’s color scheme / layout (if multiple selections are available)

Your Rights

If you believe that the information we hold is incomplete or inaccurate and you cannot amend it through your account settings, you have the right to contact us and ask us to amend this for you. We will try to amend it as quickly as possible, unless there is a valid reason for not doing so, at which point you we will notify you of this and our reasoning behind our decision.

You have the right to request a copy of the personal information that we hold about you. Please do this by using the Contact details in the section on this page

You also have the right to request the erasure of your personal data in any of the specific circumstances set out in Article 17 of the GDPR or to restrict its processing. If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact us to have the matter investigated.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy as and when necessary. It is your responsibility to periodically check this privacy policy to ensure you agree with any changes that may have been made. You are hereby acknowledging and agreeing that it is your responsibility to review this Privacy Policy periodically.

Acceptance of this policy

Continued use of our site signifies your acceptance of this policy. If you do not accept the policy then please do not use this site. When registering we will further request your explicit acceptance of the privacy policy. Contact Us

You can contact us via email [email protected]

Back
Top