Privacy Policy

Last updated 13th January 2019

Who we are

The Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games is a registered charity in the UK, registration number 1180483. You can contact us through our website, https://www.sssmg.org/.

The privacy of our website visitors and our members is important to us. This notice explains how we will treat personal information that we might collect from the website or other practices.

(1) Information collection

The WordPress software we use for our website does not collect any personal data about visitors, other than the core data shown on the User Profile screen from registered users. However, we also utilize a number of third-party plugins to provide the needed functionality for the membership. The following kinds of personal information may be collected, stored and processed:

  1. information about your computer and about your visits to and use of this website (including your IP address, geographical location, browser, operating system, referral source, length of visit, page views, website navigation);
  2. information relating to any transactions carried out between you and us on or in relation to this website;
  3. information that you provide to us as part of the registration process;
  4. information that you provide to us for subscribing to our website services, email notifications and/or newsletters;
  5. information that you provide through present or future membership, whether accessed electronically or via manual processes;
  6. any other information that you choose to share on the website or send to us directly.

(2) Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

(3) Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

(4) Contact forms

We do keep contact form submissions for a certain period for member service purposes, but do not use the information for marketing purposes.

(5) Cookies

A cookie consists of a piece of text sent by a web server to a web browser, and stored by the browser. The information is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. This enables the web server to identify and track the visitor’s session, and to retain other settings for the visitor.

We may use both “session” cookies and “persistent” cookies on the website. We will use the session cookies to keep track of you whilst you navigate the website and we will use the persistent cookies to enable our website to recognise you when you visit.

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.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also 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.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect
  • Save you having to login every time you visit the site
  • Remember your settings during and between visits
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Personalise our site to you to help you get what you need faster
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do).

We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
  • Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
  • Pass data to advertising networks
  • Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
  • Pay sales commissions.

Session cookies will be deleted from your computer when you close your browser. Persistent cookies will remain stored on your computer until deleted, or until they reach a specified expiry date.

We use Google Analytics to analyse the use of this website. Google Analytics generates statistical and other information about website use by means of cookies, which are stored on users’ computers.  The information generated relating to our website is used to create reports about the use of the website. Google will store this information. More information is available from Google’s privacy policy, viewable here: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/.

We do not currently permit third-party advertisers or utilize third-party payment service providers. However, any future advertisers/payment services providers may also send you cookies.

Granting us permission to use cookies

Most browsers allow you to reject all cookies, whilst some browsers allow you to reject just third-party cookies. Blocking all cookies will, however, have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites, including this one.

If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies, we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this.

Website Function Cookies

Our own cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • Determining if you are logged in or not
  • Remembering your search settings
  • Showing you which pages you have recently visited
  • Allowing you to add comments to our site
  • Tailoring content to your needs
  • Remembering your preferences such as colours, text size and layout.

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third party functions

Our site, like most modern websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. A common example is an embedded YouTube video. Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties.

Articles 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 if the visitor has visited the other website. 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.

BuddyPress Membership Software

Sites powered by BuddyPress rely heavily on user-provided data. When you register for the site, you may be asked to provide certain personal data for display on your profile. The “Name” field is required as well as public, and user profiles are visible to any site visitor. Other profile information may be required or optional, as configured by the site administrator.

User information provided during account registration can be modified or removed on the Profile > Edit panel. In most cases, users also have control over who is able to view a particular piece of profile content, limiting visibility on a field-by-field basis to friends, logged-in users, or administrators only. Site administrators can read and edit all profile data for all users.

This site records certain user actions, in the form of “activity” data. Activity includes updates and comments posted directly to activity streams, as well as descriptions of other actions performed while using the site, such as new friendships, newly joined groups, and profile updates.

The content of activity items obey the same privacy rules as the contexts in which the activity items are created. For example, activity updates created in a user’s profile is publicly visible, while activity items generated in a private group are visible only to members of that group. Site administrators can view all activity items, regardless of context.

Activity items may be deleted at any time by users who created them. Site administrators can edit all activity items.

We use a cookie to show success and failure messages to logged-in users, in response to certain actions, like joining a group. These cookies contain no personal data, and are deleted immediately after the next page load.

We use cookies on group, member, and activity directories to keep track of a user’s browsing preferences. These preferences include the last-selected values of the sort and filter dropdowns, as well as pagination information. These cookies contain no personal data, and are deleted after 24 hours.

When a logged-in user creates a new group, we use a number of cookies to keep track of the group creation process. These cookies contain no personal data, and are deleted either upon the successful creation of the group or after 24 hours.

Jetpack

The Jetpack plugin also records activities of a site’s registered users. To deliver this functionality and record activities around site management, the following information is captured: user email address, user role, user login, user display name, WordPress.com and local user IDs, the activity to be recorded, the WordPress.com-connected site ID of the site on which the activity takes place, the site’s Jetpack version, and the timestamp of the activity. Some activities may also include the actor’s IP address (login attempts, for example) and user agent.

Activity Tracked: Login attempts/actions, post and page update and publish actions, comment/pingback submission and management actions, plugin and theme management actions, widget updates, user management actions, and the modification of other various site settings and options. Retention duration of activity data depends on the site’s plan and activity type. See the complete list of currently-recorded activities (along with retention information).

Data Synced: Successful and failed login attempts, which will include the actor’s IP address and user agent.

We also utilize the Jetpack Contact Form. Akismet is enabled on the site so the contact form submission data — IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message — is submitted to the Akismet service (also owned by Automattic) for the sole purpose of spam checking. The actual submission data is stored in the database of the site on which it was submitted and is emailed directly to SSSMG. This email will include the submitter’s IP address, timestamp, name, email address, website, and message.

Data Synced: Post and post meta data associated with a user’s contact form submission. The IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.

We utilize Jetpack’s Infinite Scroll feature. In order to record page views via WordPress.com Stats (which must be enabled for page view tracking here to work) with additional loads, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: Page views will be tracked with each additional load (i.e. when you scroll down to the bottom of the page and a new set of posts loads automatically). If the site owner has enabled Google Analytics to work with this feature, a page view event will also be sent to the appropriate Google Analytics account with each additional load.

Finally, we use Jetpack’s Sharing feature. When sharing content via email, the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if the user is logged in, this information will be pulled directly from their account), IP address (for spam checking), user agent (for spam checking), and email body/content. This content will be sent to Akismet (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed.

Social Website Cookies

So you can easily “Like” or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site. The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what pages they look at on our site, etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These “analytics” programs also tell us if, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before.

More information about cookies, please consult http://www.allaboutcookies.org/.

(6) Using your personal information

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Personal information submitted to us will be used for the purposes specified in this privacy policy or in relevant parts of the website(s) and other Society services.

We may use your personal information to:

  1. administer the website;
  2. improve your browsing experience by personalising the website;
  3. enable your use of the services available on the website;
  4. send you general communications;
  5. send you email notifications which you have specifically requested;
  6. send to you our newsletter and other communications relating to The Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games, or to carefully-selected third parties which we think may be of interest to you by email or similar technology. You can inform us at any time if you no longer require these communications;
  7. provide third parties with anonymised statistical information about our users – but this information will not be used to identify any individual user;
  8. deal with enquiries and complaints made by or about you;
  9. maintain and display Society membership directories and registers in restricted areas of the website, where Society member users have consented or subscribed in advance;
  10. administer and support members of the Society as required from time to time.

Where you submit personal information for publication on our website or any other Society managed media, it will be clear what information will be displayed to other website users.

We will not, without your express consent, provide your personal information to any third parties.

We use Google services to generate maps and provide autocompletion when searching for events by location, which may collect data via your browser in accordance to Google’s privacy policy.

We collect and store information you submit to us when making a booking, for the purpose of reserving your requested spaces at our event and maintaining a record of attendance.

We collect and store information you submit to us about events (and corresponding locations) you would like to publish on our site.

We may use cookies to temporarily store information about a booking in progress as well as any error/confirmation messages whilst submitting or managing your events and locations.

(7)  Disclosures

We may disclose information about you to any of our employees, officers, agents, suppliers or subcontractors insofar as reasonably necessary for the purposes as set out in this privacy policy.

In addition, we may disclose your personal information:

  1. to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
  2. in connection with any legal proceedings or prospective legal proceedings;
  3. in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk).

Except as provided in this privacy policy, we will not provide your information to third parties.

(8) Security of your personal information

We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information. We will store all the personal information you provide on secure servers. All electronic transactions containing personal details that you make to or receive from us will be encrypted. Data transmission over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet. However, we use an SSL certificate and force use of the https protocol to ensure all communications between you and our server are securely encrypted. In addition, we utilize the WordFence Firewall and website security scanner.

You are responsible for keeping your password and user details confidential. We will not ask you for your password (except when you log in to the website or any other Society-owned online service).

European data protection law requires data about European residents which is transferred outside the European Union to be safeguarded to the same standards as if the data was in Europe. Our data is stored on a server owned by a commercial web-hosting company based in the UK. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. We regularly review the plugins we use for such services to ensure they are up-to-date and conform to best practice.

(9) Policy amendments

We may update this privacy policy from time-to-time by posting a new version on our website.  You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are happy with any changes.

(10) Your rights

You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you. Provision of such information will be subject to the supply of proof of your identity. For more information on this process, please email us. We may withhold such personal information to the extent permitted by law.

You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

(11) Third party websites

The website contains links to other websites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies or practices of third party websites.

(12) Updating information

Please let us know if the personal information which we hold about you needs to be corrected or updated. You can update most of your profile details yourself.

(13) Termination of membership

If you no longer wish to be a member of the Society, please inform us by email, and we will delete any personal information stored by us.

(14) International access

This website may be accessed internationally, which means that the information you choose to share in the members’ directory will be visible outside your own country. All data, public or private, is held on a secure server owned and administered by a third-party commercial website hosting firm, currently in the UK.

(15) Data control and ‘Best Practice’

The data controller responsible in respect of information collected by all Society services (electronic or manual) is The Society for the Study of Sound and Music in Games.

As a not-for-profit organization which uses data only for administration and membership, we are exempt from Data Protection registration and ICO data protection fees. However, we nevertheless adhere to the principles of the Data Protection Act, and follow best practice guidelines, including but not limited to,

  1. Excepting data you have agreed to be shared, restrict data access to the smallest necessary number of individuals, and on a need-to-know basis;
  2. Not retain excessive information on users and members;
  3. In the unlikely event of a data breach, inform affected members promptly and clearly;
  4. Regularly review data handling policies;
  5. Update security protocols as and when needed;
  6. Treat misuse of data by Society staff or members as a serious disciplinary matter;
  7. Uphold other principles of the Information Commissioner’s Office’s Personal Information Promise (https://ico.org.uk/media/1042726/pip-final.pdf)

(16) Copyright and liability

Should you choose to make available open access scholarship through the Society’s repository, it is your responsibility to ensure that it is compliant with any applicable copyright law. The Society:

  1. will restrict access to the repository to registered members of the Society;
  2. accepts no responsibility for the content of repository items;
  3. will remove held repository items upon request from the authors or other verified copyright holders;
  4. makes no guarantee for the permanence, accuracy or availability of the repository or its contents.

(17)  Contact

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or our treatment of your personal information, write to us by email at privacy@sssmg.org.