Effective Date: 19th April, 2008 Privacy Policy Introduction This is the privacy policy of Shining Ashes Inc. Limited and any companies within our group. It applies to all of our websites / services on which it appears. We are committed to protecting your privacy and take special measures to ensure the confidentiality of personally identifiable information collected from or about you. This privacy policy explains how we collect, store and use such personally identifiable information. ("Personally identifiable information" is information that identifies you and can be used to contact or locate you in real life, such as your real full name, e-mail address, mobile number, postal address or credit card information.) Please read this policy carefully. Your accepting it in full is a condition of your use of our products (whether or not you are a subscriber). If you don't agree with this policy, or any part, please don't use our products. Your using any of our products is treated as an acceptance of the version of this policy in effect at the time of your use. We may change this policy at any time. Please check it whenever you return to the site. We will treat your continued use of our products as acceptance of these changes from their effective date as shown above. If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please contact us by emailing and do not use our products until you are satisfied and can accept this policy in its entirety. In this privacy policy, "Shining Ashes Inc. Products" is used as shorthand for all versions of any online or console games released by Shining Ashes Inc. from time to time including all Shining Ashes Inc. websites used to play those games or to represent them. References to "Terminating" an account include all or any of: locking / suspending, temporarily banning or permanently banning the account. What personally identifiable information do we collect and store? No personally identifiable information is collected when you merely access the public areas of our websites or when you play our single player games. We collect and store information which you voluntarily provide via forms or otherwise on our websites, electronic or other communications with us, communications between users on our websites, or information provided to our billing partners websites. You may opt-out of providing any such information by simply choosing not to complete the form requesting the information, and hence choosing not to use that particular service. For example: * To use many of the features of Shining Ashes Inc. you will need to open an account by choosing a username and password. * To start a subscription for any Shining Ashes Inc. you will also need to provide contact information including: your name, a valid email address, gender, home address, phone/fax number, zip/postal code, and country, together with payment details (where you'll be redirected to a paypal server to submit this information). * To make use of our customer support service you will need to access the customer support section you will need to access the forum with the username and password you supplied at registration. * To enable us to provide a better customer support service we may also ask you provide contact information including: your name, email, (Further information may need to be emailed to us for further help). (Note that the questions and the answers you provide are up to you. You may opt-out of providing some of this information but it will limit the availability or effectiveness of our support service if you do.) What other information is collected and stored? We use cookies, collect and store IP-addresses, alphanumeric IDs and other unique identifiers in order to identify specific computers that access our websites. We generate and store logs indicating usage of our websites such as activity in our games and public and private chat communications. This includes monitoring play patterns and anti-tamper checks which verify the correct internal operation of our software and are designed to spot abusive or inappropriate activities. We may track your use of certain features and areas of our websites to help us improve these. If our client software held on your computer fails, it sends an automatic error report to our server to help us fix it. This error report only includes information about the internal state of our own client software. It does not include data from elsewhere on your system and so does not reveal personally identifiable information to us. We store 'save game' information to enable us to provide a better games service in which your activities and achievements are remembered in the game and conduct polls to find better ways of serving the needs of our users. What happens to the information provided/collected? The information we collect may be used: a) To process your payment for membership subscriptions or other goods or services ordered on our site or to fulfill such orders. b) To provide our customer support service, and to verify any claims or requests you make if you use our customer support service. c) To enforce our terms and conditions, and prevent or detect hacking activities, security breaches or safety risks in connection with our websites. d) To send service announcements and messages. (For example a reminder is sent to members' registered email if a subscription payment is due.) e) To aggregate information to generate anonymous statistics regarding use of our products. We may share this anonymous information with our partners and advertisers. This is not linked to any personal information that can identify any individual person. f) For our own internal marketing and demographic studies and to help us improve our products. g) In the event of an actual or proposed (including as part of negotiations for any) merger, or business combination or sale of substantially all of our assets or a business operation to which such information relates, or as provided under bankruptcy or applicable insolvency laws or by the enforcement of equitable rights. h) To disclose information to the extent required by law, court order, as requested by other government, regulatory or law enforcement authority, to protect or assist in protecting our users, systems or the public, or to otherwise enforce legal rights as determined in our sole and absolute discretion. We care about protecting your privacy, except as specified above we will not sell, transfer, rent, share or disclose your personally identifiable information to other companies. We will not use your email address to send you 'spam' or authorize others to do so. Cookies A cookie is a text-only string of information that a website transfers to the cookie file of the browser on your computer's hard disk so that the website can remember who you are. A cookie will typically contain the name of the domain from which the cookie has come, the "lifetime" of the cookie, and a value, usually a randomly generated unique number. Session cookies are temporary cookies that remain in the cookie file of your browser until you leave the site. We use session cookies to enable us to authenticate users during game sessions. Persistent cookies remain in the cookie file of your browser for a specific period. Cookies can help a website to arrange content to match your preferred interests more quickly. Most major websites use cookies. Cookies cannot be used by themselves to identify you. We use persistent cookies to track your country (to enable us to provide country-specific content) and to track whether you entered our websites from a link on site of one of our business partners. Persistent cookies also allow you to login when you return to the site, by storing your login information on your own computer. Additionally we may use persistent cookies to store information about which adverts from our site have been displayed to you to help avoid showing the same one repeatedly or to provide more that we hope will meet your needs or interests Our advertisers also use cookies and other proprietary technologies to better determine your advert-related interests and how to provide better services and features that meet your needs or interests. For more information about this, see under "Third Parties" below. If you wish to opt-out of the use of these cookies click here for clear instructions. Some features may not be available if you reject cookies. Third Parties We partner with outside third parties to provide specific services as follows. We use outside billing companies to process membership payments securely. We share your billing information with such companies insofar as necessary for the processing of your payment or to prevent or detect fraud. These companies have agreed not to retain, share, store or use your personally identifiable information for any secondary purposes. We may supply your personally identifiable information to outside third parties to enable them to fulfill orders placed for Shining Ashes Inc. Products or other merchandise. Please note that this privacy policy does not apply to websites or services of other companies or organizations to which we link or which link to us or which provide goods or services to our users from their websites (such as co-branded, white label or affiliate sites or sites selling Shining Ashes Inc. Product merchandise). We use outside companies to provide and serve the adverts on our websites. These companies may use information (not including personally identifiable information such as your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements on this site and other sites about goods and services that may be of interest to you. We may employ third parties who may collect personal information on our behalf. In such cases, we will instruct such third parties to comply with our privacy policy in effect at that time. Furthermore, information collected by third parties from our users providing goods or services (including adverts) at or via our products may be shared with us and stored by us for the purposes stated in this policy. Be very careful before making or posting any communications on our websites. Certain information is visible to other players of the game including: public and private chat communications, the appearance of your characters and your experience points. Players who include you on their friends list can see which in-game world you are playing on. Safeguarding your personally identifiable information We will only collect personally identifiable information to the extent we believe it reasonably necessary to serve our legitimate business purposes, and will protect it using the same level of safeguards we use to ensure the security, integrity and privacy of our own equivalent proprietary information. In addition, we will take reasonable steps to ensure that third parties to whom we transfer any personally identifiable information in accordance with this policy will agree to provide sufficient protection. We may store or transfer personal information outside the European Economic Area for the purposes stated in this policy. Note that while we strive to protect all our personally identifiable information, we have all heard of data breaches in well-respected financial and governmental institutions and we cannot ever fully guarantee that such breaches will not happen. We will tell you of any material data breaches which we discover that compromise your personally identifiable information. Review, correction and deletion of information from our records If for data protection purposes you are concerned that the personally identifiable information which we hold about you is not accurate, or should you wish to have your personal information removed from our records, please see our Data Protection Policy (Its terms are incorporated into this document by reference.)
