Privacy and Cookies Policy

YOUR INFORMATION

1. What Information Does ALLi Collect?

Member Registration:

When you register with the Alliance of Independent Authors on our website: allianceindependentauthors.org; we collect data from you such as your name, your company name, author pseudonym, FaceBook name and contact email addresses for the orderly management of your membership record and providing membership benefits such as your ALLi newsletter and members only forum.

Membership Payment:

To maximise the security of membership payments which are paid by either a credit or debit card or a PayPal account, payment transactions takes place in a secure hosted payment gateway environment, currently provided by PayPal's Payflow Payment Gateway. No aspect of the payment is carried out in the Alliance of Independent Authors environment. We neither store nor have access to your credit or debit card details. PayPal's Payflow Payment Gateway processes the transaction and returns the payment data to ALLi’s database for membership management and tracking purposes. A record of payment dates and amounts are securely kept by ALLi for administration and query management purposes.

Member Profile (Optional):

In addition we provide you with the option to upload a personal and or a business profile which you can voluntarily make public for the purposes of promoting yourself and your books and/or your publishing services. The personal data you fill in will be stored on our secure systems in order to maintain these services.

We keep the information we collect from members and website visitors to the absolute minimum, just the necessary details to provide our services (see below). We make it clear at all times what information you are being asked for.

Cookies

Like almost all websites, we use cookies to track your membership and engagement with us (see below) and third-party analytics tracking systems and social media pixels may track use of our websites. The team at ALLi uses this for internal information about member and visitor preferences, in order to improve our services, not for demographic or marketing purposes.

Our marketing is done by permission-based emails, and opt-in social media advertising.

You can also be assured that your personal information will never be sold, exchanged, transferred, or given to any other company or individual for any reason whatsoever.

2. What does ALLi Use Your Information For?

Your information is used by us only as necessary, in one of the following ways:

to process your membership transaction or books purchase
to communicate with you when you have questions about registration, transactions or membership
to send you your member newsletters, publications (quarterly magazine, books, reports and white papers), blog broadcasts, and other information emails at your request (you can unsubscribe from our publications at any time)
to improve our services (we are constantly striving to improve our website and other offerings in response to feedback and information gleaned from web analytics)
to provide our affiliate program and pay you affiliate fees
to place your free entry in our Approved Partner Directory (partner members only)

3. How Does ALLi Protect Data?

We make it a priority to maintain the privacy of your personal information and take all appropriate technical and organizational precautions to secure your personal data and to prevent its loss, misuse, or alteration.

We store all your personal data on secure servers.
We have a variety of security measures in place and use only trusted partners.
We do not store your credit or debit card numbers.
Data relating to your enquiries and financial transactions sent from your web browser to our web server, or from our web server to your web browser, is protected using encryption technology.

Please Note: You acknowledge that the transmission of unencrypted data over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee its security. You should ensure that your password is not susceptible to being guessed, whether by a person or a computer program. You are responsible for keeping the password you use for accessing our website confidential and we will not ask you for your password (except when you log in to our website).

4. What If ALLi Has Wrong Information About You?

Please let us know if any personal data we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated.

5. What Are Cookies and What Does ALLi Do With Them?

A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.

Cookies may be either “persistent” or “session” cookies.

A persistent cookie is stored by a web browser and remains valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted before then by the user.
A session cookie expires at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed.

Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies and to delete them.

Our cookies do not contain any information that personally identifies a user. Data that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies. Services such as Google Analytics use cookies that also may be stored on your computer when you visit our website.

We use cookies to help us analyze the use and performance of our website and services, to identify you when you visit our website, and to determine if you are logged in.

Please Note: If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features of your membership or all the features on our other websites.

6. Does ALLi disclose information to outside parties?

Financial transactions relating to membership and services are handled by our payment services provider, PayPal Pro. We share transaction data with them only to the extent necessary for the purposes of processing your payments, refunds, and dealing with queries.

Personal data that we process will not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose. One year after your membership expires we will delete your membership information.

We do not store your financial details (credit or debit card numbers).

We work with trusted third parties to operate our website, conduct business and provide our services and only those who agree to keep information confidential.

Please Note: In a situation where a release of information is necessary to comply with the law, or to protect your, our or other’s legal rights, property or safety, we may release the necessary information to the authorities. In the unlikely event of such, all members would be immediately informed.

7. What about non-personally identifiable information?

No. We do not release non-personally identifiable information either.

8. What About Sites ALLi Links to?

ALLi regularly recommends good services, tools and advisors to our members and followers and link to such third-party products and services on our websites. Though we do at all times make full effort to protect the integrity of all linked services and partnerships, ALLi cannot accept responsibility or liability for the content or activities of linked sites.

These individuals or companies have their own independent privacy and cookies policies, which you need to check separately.

We actively invite member and follower feedback on all third-party alliances.

II. YOUR RIGHTS AND CONSENT

9. Your Rights

We would like you to know your principal rights under EU data protection law:

The right to access: You have the right to confirm the personal data we hold about you and we will be please to provide access if you request it.

The right to rectification: You have the right to have any inaccurate personal data about you corrected and to have any incomplete personal data about you completed.

The right to erasure: This is also known as the “right to be forgotten.” You have the right to the erasure of your personal data without undue delay for any reason. There are a few exceptions to this right, required to comply with certain legal obligations, or provide defence against a legal claim. Again, all interested parties will be informed fully.

The right to restrict processing: In certain circumstances, you have the right to restrict the processing of your personal data. e.g. if you contest the accuracy of the data; or we no longer need the data, but you would like it retained for legal reasons.

The right to object to processing: If you make such an objection, we will cease to process your personal information, unless we have compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests. Again, in the unlikely event of this happening, we would be in discussion about such and you can be assured of complete transparency and disclosure.

The right to data portability: You have the right to object to our processing of your personal data for direct marketing purposes (including profiling for direct marketing purposes). We do not use your data for such, beyond the provision of books, reports, and other member services. If you make such an objection, we will cease to process your personal data for this purpose.

The right to complain to a supervisory authority: If you consider that our processing of your personal information infringes any data protection laws, you have a legal right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority responsible for data protection.

The right to withdraw consent: You have the right to withdraw your consent to provision of your data at any time.

10. Your Age

Our website and services are targeted at people over the age of 16. If we have reason to believe that we hold personal data of a person under that age in our databases, we will delete it.

11. Your Consent

By using any of our websites, you consent to our privacy policy. if we make any changes to our privacy policy, these will be posted on this page. This policy was last modified on May 19, 2018.

12. Further Questions

If you have any questions or concerns about our handling of data, please e-mail us using the contact form.

Our privacy and cookie policy complies with the General Data Protection Regulations of the European Union (GDPR), widely recognized as the most comprehensive data protection law.

General questions about handling of data privacy are answered by this EU guide to the individual’s right to general data protection: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/