Privacy Policy
  1. Preamble

This Privacy Policy explains the collection, use, processing, transferring and disclosure of personal information by Open Technology Consultancy Limited, which runs opendigitaltax.net. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into and made part of Open Technology Master Terms of Use located at https://www.opendigitaltax.net/tandc. By accessing or using any of the Services, you are accepting and agreeing to the practices described in this Privacy Policy.

  1. Our Principles

Open Technology has designed this policy to be consistent with the following principles:

Privacy policies should be human readable and easy to find. Data collection, storage, and processing should be simplified as much as possible to enhance security, ensure consistency, and make the practices easy for users to understand. Data practices should always meet the reasonable expectations of users.

  1. Personal Information Open Technology Collects and How it is Used

As used in this policy, personal information means information that would allow someone to identify you, including your name, email address, IP address, or other information from which someone could deduce your identity.

Open Technology collects and uses personal information in the following ways:

Website and Fundraising Analytics: When you visit our Websites and use our Services, Open Technology collects some information about your activities through tools such as Google Analytics. The type of information that we collect focuses on general information such as country or city where you are located, pages visited, time spent on pages, heat-map of visitors activity on the site, information about the browser you are using, etc. Open Technology collects and uses this information pursuant to our legitimate interest in enhancing the security and utility of our Services. The information we gather and process is used in the aggregate to spot trends without deliberately identifying individuals, except in cases where you engage in a transaction with Open Technology by donating money, purchasing merchandise, or buying a ticket for an event or program. In those cases, Open Technology retains certain information about your visit to the Services, including information about the referral site that led you to our Services, pursuant to its legitimate interest in understanding its community of supporters for fundraising purposes, and this information is stored in connection with other personal information you provide to Open Technology.

Note that you can learn about Googles practices in connection with its analytics services and how to opt out of it by downloading the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, available at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. If you would like to opt out of Open Technologys fundraising analytics, please contact info@opentechnology.net with your request.

Information from Cookies: We and our service providers (for example, Google Analytics as described above) may collect information using cookies or similar technologies for the purposes described above and below. Cookies are pieces of information that are stored by your browser on the hard drive or memory of your computer or other Internet access device. Cookies may enable us to personalize your experience on the Services, maintain a persistent session, passively collect demographic information about your computer, and monitor advertisements and other activities. The Websites may use different kinds of cookies and other types of local storage (such as browser-based or plugin-based local storage).

Emails and Newsletters: When you sign up to receive updates from Open Technology or otherwise subscribe to one of our mailing lists, you will be asked to provide some personal information. Open Technology collects and uses this personal information pursuant to its legitimate interest in providing news and updates to, and collaborating with, its supporters and volunteers. You may unsubscribe from our mailing list at any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of each newsletter.

Email Analytics: When you receive communications from Open Technology after signing up for the Open Technology newsletter, campaign updates, or other ongoing email communications from Open Technology, we use analytics to track whether you open the mail, click on the links, and otherwise interact with what we send. You may opt out of this tracking by choosing to get plain-text emails from Open Technology. Open Technology collects and uses this personal information pursuant to its legitimate interest in understanding the interests of its community of supporters and volunteers in order to provide more relevant news and updates.

The majority of the personal information collected and used as explained in Section 3 above is aggregated and stored in a central database provided by a third party service provider. Open Technology aggregates this data pursuant to its legitimate interest in having information stored in a single location to minimize complexity, increase consistency in internal practices, better understand its community of supporters and volunteers, and enhance the security of the data.

Open Technology erases the web browser logs described above on a regular, rolling basis. We generally retain other personal information for the purposes for which it was collected. This may mean that we retain your personal information indefinitely in some cases.

  1. Access to Your Personal Information

You are generally entitled to access and transfer to a third party any personal information that Open Technology holds and to have inaccurate data corrected or removed to the extent Open Technology still maintains it. In certain circumstances, you also may have the right to object or restrict for legitimate reasons to the processing or transfer of personal information. If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please write to support@opentechnology.net explaining your request. You also have the right to go directly to the relevant supervisory or legal authority, but we encourage you to contact us so that we may resolve your concerns directly as best we can.

  1. Disclosure of Your Personal Information

Open Technology does not disclose personal information to third parties except as specified elsewhere in this policy and in the following instances:

Open Technology may share personal information with our contractors and service providers in order to undertake the activities described in Section 3.

We may disclose your personal information to third parties in a good faith belief that such disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) take action regarding suspected illegal activities; (b) enforce or apply our Master Terms and this Privacy Policy; (c) enforce our Charter, including the Code of Conduct and policies contained and incorporated therein, or (d) comply with legal process, such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order.

  1. Security of Your Personal Information

Open Technology has implemented reasonable physical, technical, and organizational security measures for personal information that Open Technology processes against accidental or unlawful destruction, or accidental loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure or access, in compliance with applicable law. However, no website can fully eliminate security risks. Third parties may circumvent our security measures to unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. If any data breach occurs, we will post a reasonably prominent notice to the Websites and comply with all other applicable data privacy requirements including, when required, personal notice to you if you have provided and we have maintained an email address for you.

The Open Technology account systems have security risks in addition to those described above. Among other things, they are vulnerable to DNS attacks, and using any Open Technology may increase the risk of phishing.

  1. Children

The Services are not directed at children under the age of 13. Consistent with the U.S. federal Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA), we will never knowingly request personal information from anyone under the age of 13 without requiring parental consent. Our Master Terms specifically prohibit anyone using our Services from submitting any personally identifiable information about persons under 13 years of age. Any person who provides their personal information to Open Technology through the Services represents that they are 13 years of age or older.

  1. Third Party Service Providers

Open Technology uses many third party service providers in connection with the Services, including website hosting services, database management, credit card processing, and many more. Some of these service providers may place session cookies on your computer, and they may collect and store your personal information on our behalf in accordance with the data practices and purposes explained above in Section 3.

  1. Third Party Sites

The Services may provide links to a wide variety of third party websites. You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party websites. This Privacy Policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other websites.

  1. Location of Services

If you are accessing or using the Services in regions with laws governing data collection, processing, transfer and use, please note that when we use and share your data as specified in this policy, we may transfer your information to recipients in countries other than the country in which the information was originally collected. Those countries may not have the same data protection laws as the country in which you initially provided the information.

The Services are currently hosted in the United States and the United Kingdom, which means your personal information may be located on servers in the United States and/or the United Kingdom. This may change from time to time. The majority of contractors that Open Technology is using as of the effective date of this Privacy Policy are located in the United States and in Canada, but this may change from time to time.

  1. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may occasionally update this Privacy Policy. When we do, we will provide you with notice of such update through (at a minimum) a reasonably prominent notice on the Websites and Services, and will revise the Effective Date below. We encourage you to periodically review this Privacy Policy to stay informed about how we are protecting, using, processing and transferring the personal information we collect.