Beneficent Technology, Inc. (“Benetech,” “we,” “us,” “our”) is a nonprofit organization that develops technology for social good. Benetech is committed to transparency and to protecting the privacy of your information. This Privacy Policy is designed to let you know how we collect, use, and disclose information through the websites, mobile applications, and other online services and products (collectively, the “Services”) that link to this Policy.
Benetech is dedicated to helping the public by providing a number of diverse Services. Some of these Services require us to collect, use, and disclose more information than others, and are discussed in more detail below.
Information we collect
1. Information you provide directly
You may provide information directly to us in a number of ways. For example:
- when you register for our Services, we may ask you for information such as your name, e-mail address, postal address, post code, telephone number
- when you use our interactive online features (such forums, blogs, or other Services that allow you to post content), we receive whatever you post
- when you contact us for assistance with our Services, we receive the information you provide in that correspondence and any other information that you send to us.
2. Information we receive automatically when you use our Services
We may also automatically receive certain information about your device when you use our Services. For example, we may receive:
- Information about your interactions with our Services, such as the content you view, information collected by Google Analytics, and information in other cookies and similar technologies
- information about how you access our Services, including information about the type of device you’re using, your browser or operating system, the language in which you asked to view our Service, the referring website through which you accessed our Services, links that you click while using our Services, your Internet Protocol (“IP”) address, location information, and certain device identifiers that may be unique to your device.
Use of Information
We may use information that we collect through our Services for a variety of purposes supporting our mission, including to:
- provide you with the products, promotions, Services, newsletters, and information you request and respond to correspondence that we receive from you.
- contact you with surveys, legal notices, and other information that may be relevant to your use of the Services, such as account status, renewal, or any problems with your account
- customise and personalise your use of our Services, including the use of cookies to remember your login information and interface preferences
- inform you about important public policy issues that relate to our mission or that might affect our Services
- process payment information for donations or payment for Services
- maintain or administer our Services, perform business analyses, or for other internal purposes to improve the quality of our business, the Services, and other products and services we offer.
We may use information provided by you in other manners, as otherwise described to you at the point of collection or pursuant to your consent.
Sharing of information
We are committed to maintaining your trust, and we want you to understand when and with whom we may share the information we collect.
Other services
We may share your information with our other NCBI Services for a variety of purposes, including business, operational, and marketing purposes.
Other parties when required by law or as necessary to protect the services
We may disclose your information to third parties in order to:
- protect the legal rights, safety, and security of UK education collection and the users of our Services;
- enforce the terms of use of our Services;
- prevent fraud (or for risk management purposes);
- prevent copyright infringement; and
- comply with or respond to law enforcement or legal process or a request for cooperation by a government or other entity, whether or not legally required. If the Bookshare Ireland collection intends to disclose a member’s information to law enforcement or in response to a legal process, we will make reasonable efforts to promptly notify the Member where appropriate – and, if the Member is under 18, the Member’s parent or legal guardian – unless directed not to by a court of law.
De-identified and aggregate information
We may share de-identified or aggregate data with any entity, including for research and analysis purposes. De-identified data is data that is not linked or reasonably linkable to a particular person or device. Aggregate data is data we collect that has been combined with information from others so that the recipient of the data is not able to identify any particular person or device from the data. However, we will never share personally identifiable information with third party commercial entities for direct marketing purposes, unless you give us permission.
Other parties with your consent
We may share information about you with third parties when you consent to such sharing.
Data security
Protection of our users’ information is important to us, so we maintain security safeguards to help protect against loss, misuse, unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction of the information you provide to us. However, please note that no data transmission or storage can be guaranteed to be 100 per cent secure. As a result, while we strive to protect your information and privacy, we cannot guarantee the security of any information you disclose or transmit to us online and cannot be responsible for the theft, destruction, or inadvertent disclosure of your information.
Learner privacy
The privacy and protection of children is of great importance to us. We will not knowingly collect, use, or disclose personal information from children under the age of 18 without obtaining consent from a parent or legal guardian, except as otherwise permitted by law.
NCBI does not knowingly allow the Bookshare collection Members under the age of 18 to make personal information publicly available through our Services. If a member under the age of 18 (or their parent or legal guardian) wishes to review, modify, or delete, the minor member’s personal information and refuse to permit further collection or use, please contact us.
For UK education collection Members under the age of 18, we may disclose information about the minor’s usage of the Service to his or her parent or legal guardian. For a more complete description of how UK education collection collects and uses information.
Social networking services
We have worked with certain third-party social media providers to offer you their social networking services through our Services. For example, you can use third-party social networking services, including but not limited to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, to share information about your experience on our Services with your friends and followers on those social networking services. The third-party social networking services may be able to collect information about you, including your activity on our Services. The third-party social networking services also may notify your friends, both on our Services and on the social networking services themselves, that you are a user of our Services or about your use of our Services, in accordance with applicable law and their own privacy policies.
If you choose to access or make use of third-party social networking services, we may receive information about you that you have made available to those social networking services, including information about your contacts on those social networking services.
Privacy Policy updates
We may decide to change the Privacy Policy but, if we choose to do so, we will post the changes here. You will always have access to the Privacy Policy in order to determine:
- whether or not we gather personal information about you;
- whether or not we use information about you; and
- whether or not we disclose your information to anyone else.
- your continued use of the Services after any modification to the Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of the new terms and conditions.
Links to third party sites and services
Our Services may contain links to other websites or online services that are operated and maintained by third parties and that are not under our control or maintained by us. Such links do not constitute an endorsement by us of those other websites, the content displayed therein, or the persons or entities associated therewith. This Privacy Policy does not apply to this third-party content. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of these third-party websites or services.
Communications preferences
You may choose to receive promotional e-mails, newsletters, and similar communications from us. You may opt out of receiving these e-mails from us by clicking on the opt-out or “unsubscribe” link included in the e-mails you receive. Please note that opt-out requests may take up to 10 business days to be effective. Your opt-out request will not apply to messages that you request or that are not promotional in nature. For example, we may contact you concerning your account or any purchases or donations you have made with us, even if you opt out of receiving unsolicited promotional e-mail messages.
Contact us
If you have any questions about the Privacy Policy, or about any other aspect of operation of the Services, please contact us at:
NCBI Library
t: 01 8642266
Bookshare.ie is a nonprofit website dedicated to providing accessible books and other materials (“Items”) to people with print disabilities. We have also partnered with outside organisations and developers to provide our members with reading tools. In order to provide these services, UK education collection collects, uses, and shares certain information relating to its Members’ disability status, education and book-related information, as more fully described below. This information may be input by you directly, or may be input on your behalf by an Organisational Member such as a College or other organisation that provides services to people with print disabilities.
Information Bookshare.ie collects
1. Disability status
In order to comply with the Copyright laws that allow Bookshare.ie to provide copyrighted material to people with print disabilities, the new Member must enter their print-disability on their account.
Further, because the collection was built to serve Members with print disabilities, Bookshare.ie may collect other information that reflects the nature of its Member’s disabilities. For example, Bookshare.ie may collect information that a certain member prefers to read books in braille.
2. Educational information
Bookshare.ie collects information on Members’ school /college year and Key Stage.
3. Book-related information
Bookshare is dedicated to expanding access to books for members with qualifying print disabilities. To further this goal, Bookshare.ie maintains transaction logs of the Items downloaded by its users. These transaction logs contain information such as the title and author, the Member who downloaded the book, the date and time of the download, the format of the download, and the status of the download. Further, for each download of a copyrighted work, Bookshare.ie embeds a digital fingerprint in the book download. Bookshare stores this digital fingerprint in its transaction logs so that it can trace downloaded material back to the original downloader to determine the source of any unauthorised copies.
If a Member uses the Read Now option to launch a book using Web Reader, Bookshare.ie also records whether the book was opened by the Member and remembers the last read location to keep the Member’s place in the book.
Bookshare.ie also stores each reader’s preferred download format and preferred language.
As part of its efforts to build and improve the collection, we accept uploads of Items, accessibility improvements (such as image descriptions), and reviews of books and of particular versions of books from its qualified users and organisations. Bookshare.ie will maintain transaction logs of these activities.
Use of information
Bookshare.ie may use personal information:
- to verify that a potential member has a qualifying disability
- to flag usage that is potentially in violation of our terms of use or copyright law, and to investigate and support legal proceedings concerning alleged violations of domestic or international copyright laws
- in cases of suspected abuse where copyrighted Item has been made available to unqualified individuals, to trace copyrighted Content back to the user using the user-identifiable information embedded in downloaded Items
- to remember your last place in a given piece Item
- to provide suggested content based on the user’s past reading patterns
- in the case of minors, to limit access to Items coded as adult content
- to track the quality of uploads and reviews by users and organisations. In particular, we may identify the uploading person with the Item on the website, and may also publicize particularly high quality uploaders of Item or reviewers .
Sharing of information
Bookshare.ie may use personal information:
- To provide aggregate reports on collection usage to government, nonprofit, and for-profit partners such as publishers and developers of e-readers and other assistive technology tools. These reports may include aggregated information on the number of books downloaded by users in a given time frame, and this information may be broken down by demographic information such as location.. Further, these aggregate reports may be used by Bookshare.ie to advertise their products, to compete for grants, or for any other purpose. However, these reports will not include any personally identifiable information that can be associated with any individual Bookshare member.
- To provide usage information about individuals’ accounts to the school/ college that the student is enrolled in.
Cookies and related technologies
A “cookie” is a text-only piece of information that a website transfers to your computer’s hard disk so that the website can remember who you are. A cookie will normally contain the name of the internet domain from which the cookie has come, the “lifetime” of the cookie, and a value, usually a randomly generated unique number.
Bookshare.ie uses cookies and collects IP addresses (an IP address is a number that can uniquely identify a specific computer or other network device on the internet). We use analysis software to look at IP addresses and cookies for the purpose of enhancing your user experience.
You may block cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. However please note that if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of Bookshare.ie. To prevent the download of cookies, or otherwise control how cookies are used on your computer, please read the “Help” information supplied with your internet browser software or go to: www.allaboutcookies.org . By using Bookshare.ie you consent to the processing of data about you by Google and in the manner and for the purposes set out below.
Bookshare.ie use Google Analytics, a service provided by Google, Inc. (“Google”). Google Analytics uses cookies. The information associated with the cookie about your use of the Service (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States or other countries, and may be shared with NCBI in aggregated form. For more information about how Google uses the data it collects in connection with Google Analytics—and how you can control the information sent to Google—please select this link: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/.
Bookshare.ie may also use cookies for other purposes, including remembering your login information, analytics, and interface preferences.
Last updated: 13th September 2019