The British Comedy Guide's Privacy Policy
This page outlines how The British Comedy Guide uses and stores personally identifiable information.
Basically, we're nice people! We promise to never reveal your personal details to our website visitors or share your information with external parties unless you give us explicit permission.
Personal Information: What We Collect
If you choose to use any interactive elements on our website (for example, contribute to a message board discussion, enter a competition, create a DVD wishlist, write a review, or use any other feature that needs to know who you are) you will require a British Comedy Guide user account. When you create a user account we ask for some personally identifiable information. The following details are manditory...
Email Address: The primary reason for asking for your email address is to ensure that you are a legitimate user and not here to cause trouble. We also ask for your email in case we need to contact you (for example, because you've won a competition) and so that some of our more advanced features (such as DVD email alerts) will work if you opt to make use of them.
Location: The country field is used to help us get a high-level understanding where our visitors are coming from. In some cases we may use this data to tailor our emails and website interface for you, so that you get information directly relevant to you (e.g. our shop section is tailored to show you products for your country first).
The registration form also has spaces for the collection of a forename and surname - however, these are not mandatory. Should you choose to fill them in, they will be used to personalise our contact with you (so we don't have to call you Mr or Mrs X).
When you interact with our systems we also store your IP address (computer ID). This is standard practice - we will only ever make use of an IP address in the case of abuse to our system.
Whilst using the various features available on our website you may choose to fill in some additional profile fields too, so as to reveal more about yourself to other visitors (for example, adding your date of birth, gender, and Windows Messenger ID). This is totally at your discretion - we will treat this extra personal information in the same sensitive way as the rest of your data, however bear in mind some of this information will be publicly viewable to all who look at your profile on our website. You'll find we provide more information about how we will use any extra data you choose to enter via the help tips on the relevant data entry pages.
Personal Information: Protection
Your details, including your email address, will be hidden from other visitors, unless you choose to make such information public. This can be controlled via the relevant options on the profile edit screen. Your chosen nickname is the name that appears next to any public contributions you opt to make... so if you don't want people to know your real name is "Bogart Bignose" you can always choose to use a nickname like "Mrs Hot Stuff"!
Here's the important part... no matter how much or little information you do enter, we promise we'll only ever use it to help facilitate the running of our website functionality. We will never share, sell or rent your personal information without first seeking your express permission (unless we are ordered to by a court of law). This agreement includes your email address - we will never disclose this to any third parties without first obtaining your consent.
One exception to the above is our competition entry data: occasionally we may provide a copy of our competition entry data to a PR firm, should they be running a competition on our behalf. Where this is the case, the PR company will use the data to randomly choose winners, send out prizes and verify we haven't been making up entries - nothing more. You will be clearly informed on the entry page if the entry data will be shared with a PR firm. In the majority of cases, the data is not shared.
Storage Of Data
Your data is stored online in a secure database on the comedy.co.uk server. Our mailing list database is stored on a separate server managed by EzineDirector - a reputable mailing list management company. You can unsubscribe from all our newsletters by clicking the unsubscribe link that is present at the bottom of every newsletter we sent, or by editing your BCG account settings.
We will hold your personal information on our system for as long as you require access to your website account. To terminate your account and thus delete all related information contained within our database please contact us. Please note: whilst all personal information will be deleted from our database if you request to terminate your account, your posts will remain on the message board. This is to ensure thread conversations don't lose context.
Personal email correspondence is stored offline (we use Microsoft Outlook). It is deleted once we have finished conversing with you. We do however keep a record of all our outgoing emails.
More information on Cookies
A cookie is a very small data file (which normally includes an anonymous unique identifier) which is sent to your browser by a web server and subsequently stored on your computer's hard drive. Almost every website with a login system, from Amazon through to ZDNet, uses cookies. For a more detailed explanation of what a cookie is please see Wikipedia
Like most websites, The British Comedy Guide uses a cookie to determine whether you are logged in and, if you are, 'remember you' so that you don't have to keep logging in as you move about the website. Our cookie contains no personal information about you.
If you opt for the website to 'remember you', our login cookie is set to expire one year after it was created. If you are using a shared/public computer we advise you do not use the "remember me" box on the sign in screen (so the next user of the computer can't get on your account) - the cookie will automatically delete itself when you close your browser. You can also instantly delete our login cookie at any time by signing out of the website (visit your account page to sign out).
The login cookie is the only cookie we set. Our advertising vendors (primarily Affiliate Window) may set one or more additional cookies linked to banner adverts whilst you are browsing our website. Rest assured their cookies contain no personal information and will not be used to track you - almost every website on the internet uses these types of cookies to help ensure that advertising impressions and leads are correctly reported.
More Information
If you require any additional information on our data usage or wish to clarify something above, we would welcome your email: please do get in touch.