Commitment to Privacy

Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy we provide this privacy policy notice explaining our data collection practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used.

Personal Security

Many ARRSE users have concerns about their personal security above and beyond most internet users. To fully address security concerns, there is a detailed article about security and privacy here in our wiki.

Cookies

When you visit www.arrse.co.uk, we send one or more cookies to your web browser. A cookie is a small, harmless piece of information that is stored in your browser. Only the domain which set that cookie can access the information from it. (ie, other domains can't access cookies set by us and we can't access cookies set by others)

The table below explains the cookies we use and why.

Third party advertising cookies

Most of the advertisements you see on the website are generated by third parties.

Some of these third parties generate their own cookies (or web beacons) to track how many people have seen a particular advertisement (or use the services of third parties to do this), and to track how many people have seen it more than once. These cookies cannot be used to identify an individual; they can only be used for statistical purposes, for example, in providing you with advertisements that are more relevant to your interests. Some of the information gleaned from third party cookies will be aggregated with other anonymous information for statistical purposes. The third party companies that generate these cookies have their own, very strict, privacy policies but we don't have access to these cookies; other than allowing them to be served, we have no role to play in these cookies at all (although we may use statistical information arising from these third party cookies and provided to us by third parties, to improve the targeting of advertisements to users of the website).

If you would like to disable "third party" cookies generated by advertisers or providers of targeted advertising services, you can turn them off by going to the third party's website and getting them to generate a one-time "no thanks" cookie that will stop any further cookies being written to your machine. Here are links to the two main third party advertising platforms we use, each of which haveinstructions on how to do this:

Google Doubleclick Advertising Privacy

http://www.rubiconproject.com/privacy-policy/

You can also visit the trade body representing advertising companies for more information on how to opt out of these cookies

Finally you can directly control cookies in your browser by following this guide.

Other Partners

We sometimes work in partnership with VisualDNA, part of Imagini Holdings Ltd; a provider of anonymous demographic and behavioural information to UK advertising networks. 'Tracking pixels' and cookies are used on behalf of VisualDNA to collect anonymous behavioural data. For more information about Visual DNA please visit VisualDNA.com and read their privacy policy.

Information we Collect

Server Logs

Whenever your access a file from our website, the server logs the following data: (i) Requested File name, (ii) Your IP address, (iii) Date & Time of request, (iv) Your user agent, (v) Referring webpage (if any), and (vi) Size of the requested document.

Forum Account

In the process of creating an account on the Army Rumour Service, we ask for your EMail address. This is done to verify your identity & that you are a real human being; and not some unscrupulous bot submitting web forms across the internet. Also, each thread, post, message you create on the Forum is associated with your Forum account & stamped with your I.P. address.

Visitor Patterns

We use a visitor tracking and analysis service (Google Analytics) to see how our website, website sections and webpages are performing. (e.g. Unique Visitors, Page Views, Total Visitors, etc.). No personally identifiable information is collected in this process.

Outbound Clicks

We track outbound clicks from our webpages too. Again, No personally identifiable information is collected in the process. Only pure statistical information like the URI of clicked link and URI of the page from which the click was done, is stored.

Further info and the ability to opt-out from VisualDNA cookies can be found here and selecting 'ad choices'.

How we Use It

E-Mail Addresses

EMail addresses you entered while registering on the Forum and/or while commenting on Blog posts are used to provide you updates of any content which you have subscribed to. Occasionally (once in a month or two), we send out newsletters and/or important announcements regarding the changes in website, ongoing contests, maintenance downtimes, etc. You Email addresses are safe with us. We won't sell it to anyone! Our newsletters may contain advertising as secondary content, but will never be just advertising mail shots.

Other Voluntary Profile Information

We make no use at all of voluntary profile information that you may add to your user account (eg. location, website).

Passwords

The password which you use to login to the Forum account is salted and then encrypted before being saved in our database. It's NEVER stored in a plaintext format. This way even we can't see what your password is. And that's why in case you forget your login password, we can't retrieve it for you; we are only able to change it to something else.

Visitor Statistics

Visitor statistics and data logged by the server and Google Analytics are used to improve our site. We can quickly see which pages are performing well and which of them are not. Some statistics like Total Visitors, Unique Visitors, Aggregate PageViews per month are released to public. But no personal information is ever revealed.

Cookies

Cookies are used to store your personal preferences for a short time. They are used to customise the content that is served to you on the Forum (primarily) and/or other site's sections. Cookies are also used to store your site login credentials. (So you may or may not face difficulties accessing member-only functions, if you login with cookies disabled in your browser)

Data Security

Appropriate measures (user authentication, authorization, data encryption) are taken to ensure that the data we collect is safeguarded and secure from unauthorized access. Regarding the data submitted in Forum: private profile fields can only be accessed by site administrators, and I.P. addresses attached to the threads/posts can only be accessed by site administrators and moderators.

Use by children

Protecting very young children's privacy is quite important. For that very reason we currently don't allow account registrations by children under 13 years of age, on our Forum.

Accessing your Info

Wherever possible and feasible, we provide a way for you to edit and update your personal information. In the case of Forums, you can edit your personal information and site preferences via the Settings section (link in top right of page when logged in). There are various areas within settings to add and edit data. These are the most relevant to your privacy:

Settings » Edit Profile

Edit your personal information like birth date, birth date visibility preference, website URI, instant messaging (IM) contacts, your Location, Occupation, Hobbies / Topics of Interest, Biography, etc. All of these fields are optional and you can clear them out anytime you want.

Settings » Profile Privacy

You can select the user types who can access your user profile. Data which you can restrict is: Contact info, Profile picture, Visitor messages, Albums, Biography, Friends list, Recent profile visitor list and Group membership list. You can set the access level to: Everyone (Guests included), Registered Members, Users on your Contact list, Your Friends.

Settings » General Settings

Various options are available to customise your Forum experience. The settings groups include: Login settings, Visitor and Profile Messaging, Thread Display Options, Date / Time / Timezone selection and some Miscellaneous options like the Forum's color scheme / layout (if multiple selections are available).

Any doubts or questions ?

Got any doubts or questions regarding the privacy policy and how we implement it ? Feel free to contact us via any of the options listed on this page : Contact Us.

Tips and many general questions are answered in our wiki, the ARRSEPedia. You may find the following pages of use. Please note though that we upgraded the site softwar ein July 10 to a completely new system and it will take a while for the pages below to catch up. The last in particular refers mostly to the old software. Sorry for any confusion.

• ARRSE Overview
• The Ten Basics (tips and guidelines that everyone should know)
• (Almost obsolete) Common problems and solutions

Ownership

ARRSE is owned by Olive Net Ltd, an Exeter based web development company that was formed from the original Army Rumour Service Limited (in turn formed from just plain old back-of-a-fag-packet ARRSE in 2003)

Site Design

Olive Net designs and develops its own software and websites (see our portfolio), although ARRSE is currently running a modified version of the commercial software system that runs it; vBulletin.

Advertising

Detailed information for advertisers is given on the Olive Net website.

The MoD

Olive Net Ltd and the Army Rumour Service are in no way linked to the Ministry of Defence. Any complaint to the MoD about site content will at best only be forwarded to us.

General Policy

The Army Rumour Service administrators and moderators do monitor and control site content while attempting to apply the minimum possible censorship. The target audience for the site is adult and accustomed to rough language and behaviour, and some content does and indeed should reflect that.

Restrictions are placed on the nature of the content in different sections of the site according to this policy, and warnings are posted in the more controversial areas.

Responsibility for Post Content

Users 'own' and are responsible for the content of their own posts, as defined in the membership agreement accepted on creation of an account: "...you acknowledge that all posts made to this website express the views and opinions of the author and not the administrators, moderators or webmaster.....".

Practicalities of Editorial Control

Because of sheer traffic volume it is not possible to monitor all content published by users on the site and much of the responsibility for monitoring behaviour and content is shared by all site users. The site is a live medium, and we can only exercise editorial powers after content has been posted and if the offending material is seen or brought to our attention .

The vast majority of editorial activity on the site is by the 'moderators'. A team of trusted long-term users with the power to edit and delete posts. Also the site owners / administrators (usernames: Good CO and Bad CO) can edit content, although try not to where possible. This is to avoid 'treading on the toes' of the moderators.

Site Audience

The site is aimed squarely at adult military users, and the language and content should and does reflect that of military society. The type of social behaviour and conversation acceptable to a military audience sometimes differs from that of civilian society, although often no offence is meant by the more robust site content. Please view site content in this context.

Complaints Procedure

General complaints by registered site members regarding abuse of the forum guidelines above should be directed to the moderator of the forum section concerned (username listed under the description of each board in the header of the board itself, above the list of topics).

The moderators may be contacted by the site personal message system.

**Note** Moderators may be away at times, so please check that messages have gone from your messaging outbox within a few days of writing. If not then contact another moderator or the site admin (email below).

Non-members are requested to register on the site (here) then use the personal message system.

For very serious and urgent complaints, or complaints about site moderators please email the site administrators using the form available here.

Complaint Response

Complaints to the site admin will normally be answered within 24 hours, although there are only two part-time admin staff, so please be patient

Please include in any complaint a link to the offending content (copy and paste from the address bar in your web browser) or a good description of the its location (forum name, thread name, thread page number etc). This will make the task of dealing quickly with your complaint much easier.

Finally, the link to the complaints form again and if you feel you must use it then we apologise in advance and look forward to addressing the issue.

The Facebook connect function allows you to link your Facebook account to create an ARRSE user and login to ARRSE, or link an existing ARRSE user account to a Facebook account.

The pros: your ARRSE posts and activity can be linked to your Facebook wall, and you can easily log in to ARRSE using your existing Facebook account. Other ARRSE users can see your Facebook profile.

The cons: your ARRSE user is publicly linked to your Facebook one. Therefore if you value anonymity on ARRSE but have a revealing Facebook account then this is not for you!