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Privacy notice

Spiked Ltd is strongly committed to protecting your privacy.

This Privacy Notice tells you how we collect, use and store personal information when you visit spiked on all digital platforms and use our services.

We collect personal information from:

  • visitors to our websites;
  • people who subscribe to our e-newsletters;
  • people who contact us via social media;
  • people who share our content via social media;
  • people who donate;
  • people who become a spiked supporter;
  • people who buy spiked’s merchandise;
  • people who attend our events;
  • people who email;
  • people who write for spiked;
  • current and former staff.

Collection of information

The information we gather falls into two categories:

1. Information anonymously and automatically tracked that is gathered as visitors navigate through our site and/or use our e-newsletters, share our content on social media and donate to spiked. This information is collected by third-party service providers on our behalf. Third parties featured on or linked to by our Website are Google Analytics, MailChimp, Stripe and PayPal. These third parties may be gathering information through processes we don’t control and their Privacy Policies are linked to below.

2. Information voluntarily supplied by visitors to our Website when they register, sign up to receive our e-newsletters, post comments on our public posting areas on our site, respond to user surveys, participate in interactive activities such as polls, get tickets for our events or donate to spiked.

We have third-party agents, subsidiaries, affiliates and partners that perform functions on our behalf, including, but not limited to, hosting, content syndication, content-management tools, social-media integration, marketing, analytics, billing and customer service. These entities may have access to personally identifiable information if needed to perform their functions. If such access is required, the third parties will be obligated to maintain the confidentiality and security of that personally identifiable information. They are restricted from using, selling, distributing or altering this data in any way other than to provide the requested services to our Website.

We use a third-party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not allow Google to find out the identities of visitors to our Website. Read Google’s privacy policy.

We also use cookies on our Website

A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from a web server and stored on your computer’s hard drive. We use cookies in a limited way to make interactive parts of the site (such as forms) more convenient to use, to identify unique browsers that visit us, and to track usage throughout our site.

To find out more about cookies, including how to manage and delete them, visit here or here.

Advertising on spiked

We partner with third-party ad-serving companies and other unaffiliated advertisers to display advertisements on our site. These third-party advertisers and ad-serving companies may use cookies alone or in conjunction with web beacons or other tracking technologies to collect information about you when you use our Website. As part of their service, they may place a separate cookie on your computer, device, or browser, or utilise other data-collection and tracking technologies, to collect information such as your IP address, browser type, the server your computer, device or browser is logged on to, the area code and zip code associated with your server, and whether you responded to a particular advertisement. They may collect information about your online activities over time, across different computers, devices and browsers, and across different websites and other online services. They may use this information to provide interest-based advertising or other targeted content.

We will not provide these online-advertising partners or ad-serving companies with access to your name, address, email address, telephone number or other personally identifiable information, without your consent. They may, however, use persistent identifiers to anonymously track your Internet usage across other websites in their networks beyond our Website. While we restrict any attempts to re-identify this information, such third parties may, with sufficient data from other sources, be able to personally identify you, unknown to us. Third-party advertisers may also already possess personally identifiable information about you, obtained from other sources, and may combine such information with information they collect about you when you use our Website.

Many of our visitors use Adblock to stop any adverts online.

If we want to collect personally identifiable information through our website, we will tell you directly, explain what we intend to do with it and you will have a clear way of opting in or out.

E-newsletters

We use a third-party provider, MailChimp, to deliver our e-newsletters. spiked can access the name you provide, your email and your geolocations as well as statistics around email opening and clicks using industry-standard technologies. For more information, please see MailChimp’s privacy notice.

Social media

spiked uses Facebook and Twitter. For more information, please see Twitter’s privacy policy and Facebook’s privacy policy.

spiked supporters and donations

Spiked Ltd uses PayPal, Stripe and GoCardless to process donations.

For more information about these third parties, please see PayPal’s, Stripe’s and GoCardless’s privacy policies.

Spiked Ltd can view each donator’s name, email address, and the amount/s in donations he or she has given. In some cases, we will also be able to view a donator’s location and address, but only if the donator agrees to provide that information via the third parties.

Spiked Ltd will store donators’ names, email addresses, donation amounts, and the duration of regular donations, internally for our financial records, to thank people for their donations, and to communicate with those donators who opt in to receive information and offers.

Shop

Spiked Ltd uses Printful to print and ship our shop garments and accessories. Spiked Ltd processes payments and Printful ships most of the products. Occasionally, Spiked Ltd ships products, such as books, that are not fulfilled by Printful. Printful and Spiked Ltd keeps your personal information to ship and manage your orders. We will not share your information with anyone else. If you choose to shop as a guest, we will keep your information to ship and manage your order. We will not share your information with anyone else.

For more information about our third parties, please see Printful‘s Privacy Policy.

Spiked Ltd can view each shoppers name, email address, and the amount/s he or she has paid and the shopper’s address.

Spiked Ltd will store shoppers’ names, email addresses, amounts paid and addresses internally for our financial records and to communicate with those shoppers who opt in to receive information and offers.

Contact viv.regan@spiked-online.com if you want copies of your personal information, or want it your information to be deleted.

Attending events

spiked uses a third-party, Eventbrite, for events ticketing. Eventbrite stores and processes the name and email addresses of people who get tickets to spiked events. We process this information for a guest list and for registration purposes only, and we only contact those attending via an Eventbrite email that we write. In the email, we may also ask if you would like to subscribe to one of our e-newsletters. But we will not export data from Eventbrite for any other purpose, and we do not share names and emails with anyone.

For more information, please see Eventbrite’s privacy policy.

Emailing the team directly

We use Googlemail, which uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt and protect email traffic by default. If your email service does not support TLS, you should be aware that any emails we send or receive may not be protected in transit.

We also receive unsolicited emails from readers with questions or submissions, which we try our best to respond to. We do not export names and emails, but we may keep these emails in our inbox.

We will also monitor any emails sent to us, including file attachments, for viruses or malicious software. Please be aware that you have a responsibility to ensure that any email you send is within the bounds of the law.

Writers

We keep writers emails and contact details and any other information writers provide in our inboxes and internal databases.

Current and former staff

For staff, we store name, email, address, and financial information for payment purposes.

Links to other websites

This Privacy Notice does not cover the links within this site linking to other websites. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on the other websites you visit.

Complaints

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact Viv Regan – viv.regan@spiked-online.com

Changes to this Privacy Notice

We keep our Privacy Notice under regular review. This Privacy notice was last updated on May 2023. We are currently reviewing our Privacy Notice.

How to contact us

If you want to request information about our Privacy Notice, you can contact Viv Regan, managing editor, on viv.regan@spiked-online.com.