Silkway.News is strongly committed to protecting and respecting your privacy and shares your concern about the security of data and information in our care.

Our privacy policy (the “Privacy Policy”), which forms part of our Terms of Use, explains the information we collect, how we use and protect it, how to access and update your information, and how to manage your privacy settings when using the Services or the Site.  Please read it carefully.

We’ll review this policy from time to time to make sure it’s up-to-date. If we make changes, we’ll post the latest version here. When we make significant changes, we’ll let you know when you next access our services, or by other communications.

This statement is readily available at the bottom of every web page on this website.

Scope of Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy applies to your access and use of Silkway.News resources and products and services (together, the “Site”, :Tools”, “Services” and “Products”), and does not apply to third party websites that are hyperlinked from or to this Site. We encourage you to carefully read the privacy policies of such third party websites which have their own privacy policies and are also likely to use cookies, and we, therefore, urge you to review them.

This published document, which forms part of our Terms of Use, describes the information that we may collect from you, our possible extent of use and disclosure, and the steps we take to safeguard your information. By using our Services, you consent to the privacy practices outlined in this policy. We do not bear responsibility or liability for the privacy practices of any such third party websites and you use such websites at your own risk.

Information we collect or you provide to us

Everyone who uses our services usually have bits and pieces of information about them collected, logged, stored and processed when you interact with us, the “Site”, “Tools”, “Services” and “Products” or any other means provided via this website. However, we don’t collect more information than we need.

We collect information about the usage of the “Site”, “Tools”, “Services” and “Products” and the preferences you have in the journey.

In order to provide you with useful information and experience, tools and other services we may collect and retain Personal Information that may identify you or contribute to identifying you.

You may also provide us with “Personal Information”, either by filling in forms on our Site, registering for different purposes, or by other means. The Personal Information that you provide may include your name, address, email address and phone number and about the business/organization you represent. We don’t collect more information than we need for the purpose of providing “Tools”, “Services” and “Products” and where possible you’ll be able to use our services anonymously. Where you provide us with personal information about someone else you must have their consent to provide their personal information to us based on this Privacy Policy.

From time to time, certain personal information is provided by you to create an account, become a subscriber, become an advertiser, post comments, receive a newsletter or interact with our Tolls, Services and Products. Where appropriate, visitors can submit questions or comments and provide different contact information that may identify them. We collect this kind of personal information so that we can respond to these inquiries, comments, and questions. Some information via social media feeds may also be posted on this website.

As with most other websites, we may collect and use the data contained in log files for troubleshooting, service improvement or development purposes (“system collected”). The information in the log files may include your IP (internet protocol) address, your ISP, the browser and device you used to visit our site (such as Google Chrome), the date and time you visited our site and which pages you visited throughout our site, website from which you come to our site. Our server logs will not be shared with any third party. We may however elect to publish aggregate statistics on visitor activity from time to time based on log information. We will never publish any personally identifiable information.

Information of this type is not used for identification and is regularly removed by the server.

We may use other technologies including web beacons to collect information, track, monitor your interaction with the “Tools”, “Services” and “Products”. Your use of third-party sign-on integrated services such as Facebook account or the use of our API or other available services by a third party who you make use of may pass on your Personal Information or other data to us. Information from or via other sources can also be collected or retained.

If we combine or associate information/data originating from other sources with Personal Information/Data that we receive directly, we will treat the combined information collection as Personal Information/Data in accordance with this Policy.

The legal bases for collection, use processing of personal data are primarily that it is necessary for providing the “Tools”, “Services” and “Products” in accordance with our Terms of Service. We may also process/calculate/access/transmit data upon your consent or at your request.

Use of your information

All information including personal data is collected, processed and stored securely, for no longer than required to for legal reasons or is needed in light of the reason(s)/purpose(s) for which it was first collected.

We will use your information in the following ways or purposes:
improving and measuring the use/performance of “Tools”, “Services” and “Products”;

communicating with you;

administering our services;

notifying you of the services and and any special offers that may be of interest;

confirming your identity;

answering your queries on related matters;

responding to feedback, comments, or any other contact;

carrying out marketing, training or promotional activities;

carrying out research;

referring you to product providers;

personalizing services for your needs;

managing your account;

providing comparative data;

showing advertising;

Personal data  excludes:

• information that has been made anonymous so that it does not identify a specific person;
• permanently de-identified information that does not relate or cannot be traced back to you specifically;
• non-personal statistical information collected and compiled by us; and
• information that you have provided voluntarily in an open, public environment or forum including any blog, chat room, community, classifieds, or discussion board (because the information has been disclosed in a public forum, it is no longer confidential and does not constitute personal data subject to protection under this policy).

Our Site or resources like any other publicly available website might partially use/load/reference services provided by other companies such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, other Google services, Cloudflare, network operators, internet service providers, hosting companies etc. where certain user metadata could be retained mostly outside our control although the data transmission is encrypted.

We only keep your data for as long as we need it, or are required to for legal reasons. We’ll then either delete it or anonymise it so it doesn’t identify you. We treat data differently depending on what it’s used for, but you can ask us to delete your personal data in our care at any time.

You do not need to disclose any personal information to us in order to submit a comment, make an enquiry  or complaint with us. Where possible you may have the option of interacting with us anonymously or using a pseudonym. However, we may be unable to respond or take appropriate action if your information is incomplete or not sufficient for proceeding on the matter concerned.

By using our “Tools”, “Services” and “Products”, you hereby consent to us collecting, retaining, processing and using your personal information as outlined in this Policy.

If you provide us with your contact details, we may use this information to alert you to product upgrades, special offers, updated information, and new services.

By using our website and submitting our online forms you are deemed to have accepted our privacy policy.

Information disclosure

No information about your membership, subscriptions, nor any personally identifiable information we collect is shared outside the company, with the exception of what you choose to display on your public profile. Under normal circumstances, we won’t disclose your personal information in our care without your express permission and consent unless:

• we are required to do so by the law, including by search warrant, subpoena, or court order of the Commonwealth of Australia or under international law;
• it’s necessary to lessen or prevent a serious and imminent threat to a person’s health, life or safety, or to public health or public safety;
• it’s required to facilitate a corporate transaction, such as a payment, authorization, divestiture, merger, consolidation, or asset sale, or in the unlikely event of bankruptcy;

Certain information about you, including IP address(es), device and browser data, user interaction details, network activity footprints, and other information can be tracked, stored or viewed mostly outside our control due to the fundamental architecture of the Internet while you are using our website, for example Google and its services including Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google Tag Manager, Google Mail (Gmail), reverse-proxy or DDoS protection providers such as Cloudflare, server and service providers (we only use reputable service providers based/regulated in the US, Australia or European Union), your or our Internet Service Providers (ISP), Australian and overseas government authorities who has legal control over the Internet network infrastructure in their respective territory even though the transmission of data is encrypted.

Such entities with which your information might be shared for service delivery purposes may also include third-party providers (who provide services or functions on our behalf, including business analytics, customer service, marketing, distribution of surveys, and fraud prevention), advertising partners (while marketing of our services or delivery of notifications and other information via third parties to ensure that relevant advertisements are shown to the right audience and reliably). Where possible, we strive to only share email addresses in hashed form to enable the matching of your email address with an existing customer database so that your email address cannot be used for other purposes.

However, by using the services of reputable companies and organizations we are strongly committed to mitigating/avoiding the potential unintended information disclosure. In this regard, many of the companies we use like Microsoft Azure, Cloudflare and AWS are certified by the Privacy Shield framework, which ensures an adequate level of protection for your personal information and respect for your rights. By submitting your personal information to us, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing.

Privacy of children

We do not knowingly collect or retain information from children under 15 years of age. If you identify or suspect that we have acted contrary to this Policy, please alert us using our Contact Us page and ask for that information to either be deleted or secured. Third parties including Police and law enforcement agencies’ publications may contain such information within their authority and they always can control, remove, correct such information in accordance with their policies and applicable laws.

Information storage and safety

Data security is very important to us, and we have taken suitable measures to safeguard and secure data.   We use industry-standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology (https://) to encrypt the transmission of your information from your device’s browser. When your personal information is transferred we take steps to ensure that it is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and appropriate legal and regulatory requirements. We make sure the any personal information are not sent outside of the countries with strict data protection regulations, including Australia, the EU, and the US.

Of course no information sent over the Internet can be guaranteed to be totally secure due to the nature of the Internet. Although we will take reasonable steps to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee the security of any personal information that you send to our Site and it is sent at your own risk.

The information we collect is entered into our site by you, imported on your instruction and transmitted across the internet to our servers. By using our service, you are consenting to this process. The service providers who host our servers are not permitted to access your personal information except for the purposes of storing it.

In a limited number of circumstances, we may use third-party providers to facilitate surveys or mail outs on our behalf. Should this occur, we will only do so where the Service Provider:

• is committed to securing your personal information in a manner consistent with our policy; or
• neither holds, accesses, uses or retains the personal information other than as we have engaged them.

We further restrict the number of our staff that have access to any personal information and we have secure backup systems to ensure that any personal information cannot be lost or deleted.

Your information access and correction rights

This document sets out our approach to the management of personal information and we make this available to anyone who asks for it. If you need to know more, we are more than happy to explain to you what sort of personal information we hold, for what purposes, and how we collect, use and disclose that information.

If you need additional information about the Australian Privacy Principles, the Privacy Law or our obligations you can also access the website of The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (https://www.oaic.gov.au/).

You have the right to request access to the personal information we hold about you (where such data is held) and to have any inaccuracies corrected. We will not restrict your access to the information unless such access violates our Privacy Policy, other laws and regulations, including common corporate confidentiality acts and documents applicable in the Commonwealth of Australia, or any other reasons allowed or required under such laws and regulations.

If we can’t provide you with access to the information because of one or more of these valid reasons, we will confirm details in writing and will consider reasonable alternatives that may satisfy all parties. You’ll generally be able to access your personal information without cost but, if we think a charge is reasonable it will not be excessive and will not apply to lodging a request for access. Such access will require identification as per applicable laws to make sure it doesn’t violate other rights, obligations policies and laws.

In addition, you can always request the communication preferences to be changed or you can change where possible using the provided secure user panels.

We will only send you emails or marketing communications if you have agreed to this but you can ask us to stop at any time. All group marketing emails have a clear unsubscribe link as per the relevant industry practices. Clicking this link will automatically unsubscribe you from our mailing list and you will not receive any further marketing emails, unless you resubscribe.

If you no longer wish to be contacted by us, then you can let us know by emailing us or submitting a request by using our Contact Us page.

Please note that if you do not provide us with your personal information or object to us using it, or you withdraw your previous consent, this may prevent us from fulfilling certain requests or accuracy of services tailored for your needs.

Cookie Policy

What is a cookie?

A cookie (HTTP cookie, web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small digital file, often containing a unique identifier, that is written by the server or website to your web browser which stores it in the device’s allocated storage device such as hard-drive. It is basically a piece of information that provides evidence that you as a user visited a website and what happened. Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) or to record the user’s browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited in the past). They can also be used to remember arbitrary pieces of information that the user previously entered into form fields A cookie can also store some of the steps you took on the website and store the things that you searched for. On this Site, we use cookies to try and be more helpful to you. Cookies can be deleted, updated or renewed. “Temporary cookies”, “session cookies”, or “transient cookies” are cookies that are deleted after users leave the website and close their browsers. However, other cookies are referred to as “permanent” or “persistent” and remain stored even after the browser is closed. For example, users’ login status can be stored for future use when they revisit a website after several days. Likewise, permanent cookies can measure the “range radius” of a website (where the users are geographically located) or information on the users’ interests. This information may be used for marketing purposes. “Third-party cookies” are cookies that are offered by the original providers (who operate the online store or website) to other parties. (If the original provider is the one using the cookies, they are often called “first-party cookies”).

Why and how we use cookies

Cookies are an essential part of many web services. At this Site, we don’t collect personal information in cookies and everything is anonymous. However, some sites may do this. You can learn more at www.aboutcookies.org and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie.

From the most basic features of searching on our Site, our system uses cookies to work effectively and to present you the right information. We also use cookies to try to understand real users from fake users.

By allowing us to know more about our customers and the pages they use, we can then link this information with the decisions that occur with particular data segments.

Cookies give us the information we need to track events like referral, redirection and even the conversions. We provide services, tools and other solutions, therefore understanding the logical flow and user interactions is important to the success of the business.

We use cookies and third party services that use cookies on our Site for personalisation, tracking and performance evaluation & monitoring, stateful services and retention of consistent interaction during the navigation.

Cookies placed on your device

Cookies placed on your browser/device may include not only our direct cookies but also from third party providers such as Google and its services and products, Cloudflare, analytics tools, social media plugins such as Facebook and Twitter, advertising and advertising delivery and monitoring services.

You may also notice some cookies that are not related to us. For example, when you visit a page on our Site with content embedded (in iframe), you may be presented with cookies from those websites. Our Site does not control the use of those cookies. We recommend that you visit those sites for more information on the cookies they use and how they use them. We are committed not to allow any third-party or other cookies that would be used illegally or outside of the applicable laws and regulations in the Commonwealth of Australia.

Opting out of cookies and (Do Not Track) settings

While continued use of the Site assumes compliance with our current cookie policy, you can change your privacy settings at any time.

DNT (Do Not Track) is a feature offered by some browsers, which, when enabled, sends a sends a signal to websites to request that your browsing is not tracked, such as by third-party ad providers, social networks and analytics companies. This website does not currently respond to DNT requests because of the technical difficulty of being able to deliver the services in a meaningful manner.

You can still use the browser/device settings to clear or deny cookie storage. Blocking or turning them off depends on the web browser that you are currently using.

Most web browsers automatically accept cookies but you can alter your browser settings to prevent automatic acceptance or you can manually delete your cookie history whenever you wish.

Below is a list of popular web browsers and how you can adjust the cookie settings together with links for additional information:

• Mozilla Firefox (how to opt out of cookies /delete cookies)
• Google Chrome (how to opt out of cookies /delete cookies)
• Safari 5.0 (how to opt out of cookies /delete cookies
• Internet Explorer (how to opt out of cookies /delete cookies)

There exist some privacy-driven browsers that can give more control to you in this respect, although we can’t verify their credibility.

Google Analytics and Cookies

Our Site uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses cookies to help us analyse how users use the Site. The information generated by the cookies about your use of the Site (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information to evaluate your use of the Site, to produce reports for us on Site activities, and to provide additional services associated with the use of the Internet and our Site. Google may also pass on this information to third parties where required to do so by law or where third parties process this data on Google’s behalf. Under no circumstances will Google associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.

In addition, this Site utilises Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting which allows us to use aggregated user data (such as age, gender and interests) to better understand our audience and provide more relevant and targeted communications and content.

We also utilise Google Analytics Remarketing Audiences functionality. If you are signed into your Google account this allows us to identify the type of device through which you access the Site (e.g., smartphone, PC, etc.) and track you across multiple devices to show more relevant ads. This functionality does not incorporate any personally identifiable data.

You can change your Google account settings at: https://myaccount.google.com/intro/privacy#

You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser as more fully explained above. Furthermore, you can opt-out of Google Analytics for display advertising andcustomise Google Display Network ads and you can prevent Google Analytics collecting IP addresses and using other cookies by downloading and installing the Google browser plug-in.

You can also read about how Google and its services use cookies here: https://policies.google.com/technologies/cookies

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may, from time to time, review and update this Privacy Policy to take account of new laws, technologies and changes to our operations. All personal information held by us will be governed by our most recent Privacy Policy which will always be available on our websites.

Contact Us

If you have any questions regarding this Privacy Policy, complaints regarding how we handle your personal information or would like to make an access request, please contact us by writing to: privacy at silkway.news.

All complaints received will be assessed by the relevant Privacy Officer and all reasonable steps (if any) will be taken to remedy the complaint. We will endeavour to respond to your complaint within 30 days of receipt of the complaint by our Privacy Officer. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Other Policies

Please also check out out other policies readily available at the footer.