Privacy...

Pre-amble

'Forgive us this day, our'... reaction caused by the necessity to cover such material, for without it your browser is likely to keep popping up prompts for your explicit permission to proceed.

Genesis-Internet IS particular about integrity: Our own, that of our associates and our customers where it's relevant and affects us or others. In order to operate effectively we need you to know and be confident that we can be trusted to do what we promise, both in general and in how we handle any information that we have as a consequence of your visit/s and/or your being an associate or customer. 

It's regretable that abuse by mass marketers, spammers, demographic profilers and 'authorities' has lead to the need for you to be concerned about privacy generally, and the advent of identity theft gives us all a valid reason to object to personal information being included in any database, but, for most practical purposes - anonimity isn't an option.

So, here is our statement of what we do and don't do with data and how you can check, correct or delete it where relevant.

1. General Policy
The publicly accessible pages on our website do not and cannot automatically collect any personally identifiable data such as your name, physical location or email address. However, our server/s do record IP numbers, any hyperlink source, browser type identifiers, pages visited and time spent on the site which helps us to evaluate how many different visitors we get, as opposed to re-visits; where they've come from (e.g a search engine or advert on another site), which pages are most popular and what browser/s we need to optimise for.
This data is NOT correlated with client side information, nor any enquiry forms (unless specifically and clearly noted on such forms).
We do use 'cookies' on timed offer pages enabling re-visit identification (from the same machine) and expiry period. The cookies do not store personal information and you can view their contents using a text processor such as Microsoft Wordpad or similar.
Under MS Windows, the cookies are normally found under 'C:\Documents and Settings\username\cookies' and/or 'C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files'.  

Thus, visitors who have not gone on to order from our store or requested further information etc. are and remain anonymous.

2. Referrals, Associates / Affiliates
It is necessary for the system/s to link enquiries, sales - including 'Free' transactions to Customer & Referrer Usernames. No identifiable references are held in the publicly accessible areas.

3. Customers / Store
There are four separately identifiable Customer areas all accessible via user controlled Username/s and Password/s.

Email identities and passwords are set up under your control panel and are accessible using either a pop3 email application like Outlook Express or Webmail.  Whilst your email is inherently received by, stored on and transmitted by the system, and you have the option to add spam filtering and server-side anti-virus, we do not process or analyse the contents in any way.   

Account Administration inherently stores your Account and Contact Information along with a history of your purchases, who (if anyone) referred you to us - in relation to our referrals commissions & affiliates scheme, and - optionally - extra details about you and your situation that you're comfortable about us knowing.
'Session cookies' are used in this section.
Insofar as contact details are concerned, you will have chosen your own Username and are in control of your own record via the client / store login including your password. As such it is relevant to ensure that you don't use an easily guessed, common word or simple character sequence.
If the secrecy of your password has been compromised, contact us using the ticket system and on suitable verification of your identity, we'll issue a new one and clarify whether there have been any unauthorised changes.

Thus, Customer details are stored, can be openly viewed only by the relevant person/s, and updated accordingly. 

Our on-line servers do not store any card or payment process information.  That is, financial accounts are off-line and any on-line payments are handled by PayPal, Worldpay or other independent transaction processing organisation with our systems only being informed of the success or failure accordingly.

Control Panel (Site Management) & Domain Name Management areas do rely on having cookies enabled to avoid repetitive authorisation in each sub-section.

4. Opt-in / Opt-out Lists
Rather than a blanket Do or Don't contact me option and reflecting that Genesis-Internet works interactively with its' customers for your and our business development, the various areas of interest and your preferences are dynamic and you can opt-in or opt-out of each as it becomes relevant.
These are accessed via your account management area and individually control contact from ourselves and/or our associates depending on the subject matter.

Summary
As far as practical we have put the data the systems hold about you under your own control.
Viewing the publicly accessible areas of the site is effectively anonymous.
Cookies are used where relevant.
Non essential Personal information can be updated or deleted.
Basic contact from ourselves is as necessary and includes a modest amount of news about us to keep you, as a customer, informed.
Extra contact from ourselves, our associates or third parties is under your own dynamic control.

We hope that this has answered any privacy related questions you may have. If not, please contact us either by forwarding an enquiry ticket from your account administration area or by emailing us at privacy@genesis-internet.org.

Notes on cookies, P3P & P3P enabled browsers.
Cookies are simple text files. Identifiers that a web site or page can send to, or cause to be created by your browser for storing on your computer. They facilitate such things as session tags so you don't have to keep verifying who you are as you move around the site, and can be used for such things as confirming your eligibilty for an offer price over a period etc. Your browser will have a 'security' level settings option which can deny all cookies, allow short or longer lasting cookies from the immediate site and/or from linked sites according to machine readable privacy statements, how they match-up with your settings option or whether you have elected to be warned each time a cookie request is encountered.
Setting your security level to high - denying all cookie requests will block much of the interactive content and can stop pages and downloads working at all.  Low - open to all cookies is risky with the 'malware' currently rife on the Internet.  The intermediate settings allow you choose a level that suits your activity ranging from automatically accepting cookies that are judged as safe to being constantly interupted by confirmation windows. 

P3P - the 'Platform for Privacy Preferences' is a protocol project to enable websites to declare what information its pages collect and how that information may be used enabling some degree of automatic matching to user preferences.  Developed by, and Officially 'recommended' by W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium on April 16, 2002, it is applied to varying degrees in current Internet browser applications notably including MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Netscape Navigator - and others.

The relevance is that without a compliant, formal Privacy Statement and corresponding 'full' and 'compact' machine readable versions, a site with interactive content which uses cookies can be assessed by a browser as having numerous 'unsafe' areas and the visitor may get many security warning interuptions resulting in a less that ideal experience or elevated concerns.

Our privacy guidelines are as above, the machine readable versions are not as flexible as natural language where variations within a page or section depend on dynamic content.  However we hope to have achieved a reasonable compromise and that visitors will only get security notices in accordance and proportional to their intended settings level.