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Privacy policy and terms of use

This privacy policy explains how we collect and use personally identifiable information when you use the site or contact us. In addition, the policy details the areas of the site where user privacy is concerned, the obligations and requirements of the owners of the site and its users, and the way we process, store and protect data. By using this website, you accept this policy and its terms of use, and confirm that any data provided by you is accurate.

This website is owned and operated by Laura Read Ltd, a registered company in England and Wales (9968524). The company takes a proactive approach to user privacy and takes necessary steps to protect the privacy of its customers/users.

Information we collect

We collect personally identifiable information with your consent (such as your name and email address) when you:

  • Sign up to receive our e-newsletter, so we can notify you about our latest news, special offers and new products/services that we think might be of interest.
  • Sign up to receive an offer, place an order or access our products/services.
  • Participate in competitions and/or complete surveys – e.g. we may ask questions about your gender, age and country of residence, or what genre of books you prefer to read. This information helps us to build a more complete picture of our customers/target audience, and also helps us to improve our site, products/services and marketing/advertisements.
  • Ask questions, make queries or provide feedback – e.g. by commenting on a blog post or emailing us.
  • Contact or follow us, or like or share one of our blog posts, on social media or our site.

Please be aware that if you place personal details on social media, comments or a publicly accessible page, under these circumstances data may not be covered by this privacy policy.

Website usage information is collected using cookies and page-tagging techniques to help us monitor, update and improve the site. (See below for more about cookies and tracking.) We may use personal information to deliver targeted advertising on our website and other sites you might visit – e.g. adverts about our products/services or special offers you might be interested in.

In addition, we may collect and/or process personal data for the purposes of business operations. This could include processing information for the performance of a contract or to enter into a contract, administration, accounting and auditing, processing of orders, marketing, analysis, monitoring, business planning, etc.

We will use and store your personal data only for as long as necessary, bearing in mind the uses of your personal data as described in this privacy policy and otherwise as communicated to you. We review the personal data we hold at regular intervals and delete permanently or anonymise any data which is no longer necessary.

Cookies and tracking

This website places small text files (or ‘cookies’) on your computer/device to collect standard internet log information and visitor behaviour information. Cookies are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to owners about their sites.

We use cookies, tracking and similar technologies to administer this website, analyse trends and compile statistical reports about website activity, and gather anonymised demographic information about our user base as a whole. We want to ensure that we meet the needs of our visitors; analysing such information helps us to make updates and improvements to the site and our products/services.

We use software to collect information about how visitors use the site. This software will save cookies to your computer/device to track and monitor your engagement and usage of the website. For example, analytics software stores information about pages that users visit and how long they spend on each page; how users got to the site and any links they click on; how many people visit the site and whether they’ve visited before. The data retention period for analytics is 26 months, except for anonymised aggregated data that is retained indefinitely.

In addition, we may use software and/or websites to collect responses to our surveys. If you take part in a survey, this software and/or these websites will save cookies to your computer/device to track your progress through a survey.

Other cookies may be stored on your computer/device by external vendors when this website uses referral programs, sponsored links or adverts (see below for more information about third parties). Such cookies are used for your convenience (e.g. if you’re logged in to WordPress), conversion and referral tracking, and typically expire within one year, although some may take longer.

If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year. Also, if you have a WordPress account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine whether your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser. In addition, if you log in to WordPress on our site, WordPress will set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select ‘Remember Me’, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

Please note that our aim in using cookies is to be able to make the site better for you – e.g. to remember that you’ve seen notifications or to enable you to like or share one of our blog posts. We assume that a user has accepted the use of cookies on this website if a user continues to use the site, and we provide a cookies notice when you first visit the site.

For further information about cookies, please visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org. These websites explain how to remove cookies from your web browser, but if you do not accept the cookies on our site then some features may not function as a result.

E-newsletter

This website’s owner operates an email newsletter used to inform subscribers about our latest news, special offers and new products/services that we think might be of interest. Users can subscribe through an online automated process should they wish, but do so at their own discretion. Every effort has been made to ensure that a safe and secure form has been provided for our email submission process but we advise users that they use such forms at their own risk. Some subscriptions may be manually processed through prior written agreement with the user. All personal details relating to subscriptions are held securely (see the ‘Security’ section and the MailerLite privacy policy below).

You may request a copy of the personal information held about you by this website’s email newsletter programme(s). Email laura@laurareadauthor.com if you would like to know what personal data we hold about you, or if you would like to change or remove your details.

Subscribers are given the opportunity to unsubscribe at any time through an automated system. This process is detailed at the footer of each email campaign. If an automated unsubscribe system is unavailable, clear instructions on how to unsubscribe will be detailed instead, or email laura@laurareadauthor.com.

Our email marketing campaigns may contain tracking facilities on our website and within emails. For example, when we send emails to subscribers, we may track behaviour such as who opened or forwarded emails, who clicked on links, the times/dates/frequency of activity, etc. This allows us to measure the performance of our email campaigns, improve features and content for subscribers, and refine future emails. To do this, we include single pixel GIFs, also called web beacons, in the emails we send. Web beacons allow us to collect information such as when you open an email, your browser or email client type, and other similar details. Subscriber activity is tracked and stored in our email service provider’s (or providers’) database(s) for future analysis and evaluation.

Sharing your information

Your personal information is held securely for use by Laura Read Ltd and we do not sell, trade or rent personally identifiable information to others, except as described in this privacy policy. We may share information:

  • With carefully selected third parties (business partners, trusted affiliates and advertisers) for the purposes of advertising, marketing and public relations.
  • With service providers and vendors/consultants who work with us on our website or products/services, who need access to such information to carry out work for us.
  • When a user gives consent to do so, including, and not limited to, if we notify a user through our site/services/in an email/on social media that the information provided will be shared in a particular manner and a user provides such information (e.g. if a customer emails us feedback about a book and we ask permission to publish their feedback on our blog or on social media).
  • When we are lawfully authorised or required to, or we believe in good faith that doing so is reasonably necessary or appropriate in order to comply with the law or legal processes, or to respond to lawful requests or legal authorities, including responding to lawful subpoenas, warrants, or court orders.
  • To enforce or apply this privacy policy, our terms of use, or other policies/agreements.
  • Relating to, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing or acquisition, or in any other situation where personal information may be disclosed or transferred as one of the business assets of Laura Read Ltd.

In addition, we may share the information we have collected when a user agrees to receive information from third parties. A user may be presented with an opportunity to receive information and/or marketing offers from one or more third parties. We are not responsible for the privacy policies and practices of third parties and, therefore, a user should review the privacy policies and practices of third parties prior to agreeing to share their personal information. If the user later decides that they no longer want to receive communication from a third party, they will need to contact that third party directly. Nothing herein restricts the sharing of aggregated or anonymised information, which may be shared with third parties.

Third parties, sponsored links and adverts

By using this website, you agree to the disclosure of collected personal data to carefully selected third-party recipients for the purposes of advertising, marketing and public relations. For example, we use services offered by Google, Facebook, Twitter, MailerLite, WordPress, Elegant Themes, InstaFreebie/Prolific Works, Wattpad, Goodreads and Amazon, and you can find the privacy policies of each company at the end of this policy. We may use your data for the purpose of custom audience generation and the development of targeting criteria for other audiences in advertisements.

This website uses the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for owners of websites to earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon websites.

In addition, this website may contain sponsored links and adverts served by third parties, who may have detailed privacy policies relating directly to the advertisements they serve. Clicking on any such advertisement will send you to the advertiser’s website through a referral program, which may use cookies and track the number of referrals sent from this website. Users should click on sponsored external links at their own risk, as this website and its owners cannot be held liable for any damages or implications caused by visiting external links.

Also articles and pages on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as when the visitor has visited those particular third-party websites. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

External links

This site contains links (sponsored and unsponsored) to and from other websites, and allows you to share content on other sites/services, but we don’t have any control over the content on these websites/services. Although this site only looks to include safe and relevant external links, users are advised to adopt a policy of caution before clicking on any external links on this site, including clickable text and banner/image links. If you transfer to another site/service/transaction from a link within this website, our privacy policy does not apply.

We recommend that you read the privacy policies, terms and conditions, and end-user licences relating to all third-party websites/services before using them, to understand how they will use your personal information. We’re not responsible for the protection of any information that you give to these websites/services, or any loss, damage or implications that may come from your use of these sites/services and any sites/services they link to. You agree to release us from any claims or disputes that may arise from using these websites/services.

Although we link to other websites/services and allow you to share content, this is not an endorsement, authorisation or representation that we are affiliated with that third party, nor is it an endorsement of their privacy or information security policies or practices. Other websites and services follow different rules regarding the use and disclosure of personal information.

Following a link from another site

If you came to visit this site from another website, we may receive personal information about you from the other website. You should read the privacy policy of the website you came from to find out more about this.

Shortened links

This website and its owners through their social media accounts, blog and emails may share links to relevant web pages. Some social media platforms shorten lengthy URLs (website addresses). Users are advised to exercise caution and good judgment before clicking on shortened URLs published on websites and social media platforms by this website and its owners. Despite our best efforts to ensure only genuine URLs are published, many social media platforms are prone to spam and hacking, and therefore this website and its owners cannot be held liable for any damages or implications caused by clicking on shortened links.

WordPress

By default, WordPress does not collect any personal data about visitors, only collecting the data shown on the User Profile screen from registered users. However, some third-party plugins and widgets may collect personal data. For example, Smush (a plugin to compress image sizes) sends images to the WPMU DEV servers to optimise them for web use. This includes the transfer of EXIF data, which will either be stripped or returned as it is. It is not stored on the WPMU DEV servers. Also Smush uses the Stackpath Content Delivery Network (CDN). Stackpath may store web log information of site visitors, including IPs, Universal Analytics, referrer, location and ISP information for seven days. Files and images served by the CDN may be stored and served from other countries. For more information, Stackpath’s privacy policy can be found here.

Comments/social media

We write a public blog and include this on our website. Any information you include in a comment on our blog or social media may be read, collected and used by anyone indefinitely. If your personal information appears on our blog and you want it removed, please email laura@laurareadauthor.com.

When you leave a comment on our site, we and WordPress collect the data shown in the comments form, as well as your IP address and browser user agent string, to help with spam detection. Also an anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service (used to create a WordPress user identity – e.g. where you can upload your profile picture) to see whether you are using this service. (The Gravatar service privacy policy is available at automattic.com/privacy/). After approval of your comment, your Gravatar profile picture will be visible to the public in the context of your comment.

In addition, our website includes widgets and social media features, such as the Facebook ‘Like’ button. These features may collect information such as your IP address and which page you visited on our website, and may set a cookie to make sure the feature works properly. Social media features and widgets are either hosted by a third party or hosted directly on our website.

We maintain a presence on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Any information, communications or materials you submit to us via a social media platform is done at your own risk without any expectation of privacy. We cannot control the actions of other users of these platforms or the actions of the platforms themselves. Your interactions with these features and platforms are governed by the privacy policies of the companies that provide them. Communication, engagement and actions taken through external social media platforms, which this website and its owners participate on, are custom to the terms and conditions and privacy policies held on each social media platform respectively.

Users are advised to use social media platforms wisely, and communicate and engage with due care and caution in regard to their own privacy and personal details. We encourage users wishing to discuss sensitive details to contact us through private communication channels such as email.

This website may use social sharing buttons to share web content directly from web pages to social media platforms. Users are advised before using such sharing buttons that they do so at their own discretion. Please note that social media platforms may track and save your request to share a web page respectively through your social media accounts.

Using this site

You agree only to use this site for lawful purposes. You must use it in a way that doesn’t infringe the rights of, or restrict or inhibit the use and enjoyment of, this site by anyone else. Please note that we update this site often and can change or remove content at any time without notice.

When using this website, you must not introduce viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs or any other material that is malicious or technologically harmful. You must not try to gain unauthorised access to this site, the server on which it is stored, or any server, computer or database connected to it. You must not attack the site in any way; this includes denial-of-service attacks. We’ll report any attacks or attempts to gain unauthorised access to the relevant law enforcement authorities.

Please use virus protection when accessing this site. You must make sure that the way you use this site doesn’t expose you to the risk of viruses, malicious computer code or other forms of interference that can damage your computer system. We’re not responsible for any loss, disruption or damage to your data or computer system that might happen when you use the site.

Disclaimer

We don’t publish advice on this website. You should get professional or specialist advice before doing anything on the basis of the content.

Users contacting the owners of this site do so at their own discretion and provide any personal details requested at their own risk. Your personal information is kept private and stored securely until a time that it is no longer required or has no use, or if you ask us to change or remove your data.

While we make every effort to keep this website up to date, we don’t provide guarantees, conditions or warranties that the information will be entirely current, secure, accurate, complete, or free from bugs and viruses. We’re not liable for any loss or damage that may come from using this site, and this includes the inability to use this website and any websites linked to or from it. We’re not liable if we fail to comply with these terms and conditions because of circumstances beyond our reasonable control.

Governing law

These terms and conditions are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales. Any dispute you have that relates to these terms and conditions, or your use of this website and our products/services, will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

Security

Transmitting information over the internet is generally not completely secure and no one can completely guarantee the security of your data, but we have various procedures and security features in place to try and keep your data secure from accidental loss, destruction or damage and unauthorised access, use and disclosure. For example, on this website we use a plugin called Wordfence Security, which monitors malicious web traffic and security features (the privacy policy for Wordfence can be found here). We will notify you and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if necessary if we become aware that there has been a personal data breach.

Any data that you transmit is at your own risk. Your data is stored on a secure server or servers, perhaps via a cloud-based system, which may be based outside of England and Wales. By submitting your personal data, you agree to this.

The site and its products/services may be hosted outside of England and Wales. If you access the site or products/services from any region with laws and regulations governing personal data collection, use and disclosure that differ from the laws in England and Wales, please be advised that through your continued use of the site and products/services you may be transferring your personal information outside of England and Wales and you consent to that transfer. Additionally, you understand that your personal information may be processed in countries where laws regarding processing personal information may be less stringent than in your country.

Minors

We do not knowingly collect/maintain personal information from individuals under 16 years of age, and no part of our site, or our products and services, are designed to attract people under 16. If we obtain knowledge that a user is under the age of 16, we will take steps to remove that user’s personal information from our systems.

Changing/removing information

We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate and up to date. You may ask us to correct details that are inaccurate (e.g. if you change your name or email address) or to remove your information. Please email laura@laurareadauthor.com if you want to change or remove the personal information we hold about you.

In addition, you can ask for content to be changed or removed from this site. We’ll only do this in certain cases – for example, if you want to remove a comment that you wrote on one of our blog posts. We may choose to remove some comments posted by users ourselves – for example, if we believe the content contains sensitive personal information or may be considered obscene or defamatory. Contact laura@laurareadauthor.com to ask for content to be changed or removed. Send us the web address (URL) of the content and explain why you think it should be removed. We’ll reply to let you know whether we’ll remove it. Please note that we change or remove content on our site at our discretion, but you can still request a copy of the information that we hold about you (see below).

Access to your information

You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. If you would like a copy of your personal information, contact laura@laurareadauthor.com.

Make a complaint

If you think your personal information has been misused or we haven’t kept your data secure, please let us know by emailing laura@laurareadauthor.com.

If you’re unhappy with our response, or you need advice, you can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent body that upholds information rights. The ICO provides people with advice about data protection issues, investigates claims and takes action against individuals/companies who misuse personal data. Visit https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/ for more information or phone the ICO on 0303 123 1113 (call charges might apply; see https://www.gov.uk/call-charges).

Contact us

Please email laura@laurareadauthor.com if you have any queries regarding this privacy policy or in relation to your personal information.

Changes to the policy

We reserve the right to amend our policy at any time and for any reason without notice, but if we make changes to the way we use your personal information we will first seek your consent to do so. This privacy policy was last updated on 21 September 2021 by Laura Read Ltd, 28 Butt Lane, Hinckley, LE10 1LD, UK. You acknowledge and agree that it is your responsibility to review this privacy policy periodically and become aware of any modifications.

Further information