Privacy and security statement

Privacy

We treat all of our clients' private information as strictly confidential. Whether it's basic information passed during the transaction process or more private information contained in sensitive documents, your information will be stored securely, processed quickly and deleted after being returned.

NOTE: We will keep an encrypted back-up copy of your documents for around 10 days after they have been returned to you in case disaster strikes and you lose them. If we haven't heard anything from you after this time we'll assume everything is fine and delete the copy.

We will never pass your details on to any third party or sell your e-mail address or telephone number to direct marketing companies. We're simply proofreaders: that's all we do.

Security

Security involves two main issues:

1. The storage of private information on- and off-line

   We do not actually require much in the way of private information to offer our proofreading service. We basically need only a document to proofread and an e-mail address to return it to. Although we may be privy to more personal information than this, for example when you pay via PayPal, we do not store this information. We don't ask clients to create accounts and then store their details in a database nor do we keep records of previous clients as neither is necessary for this type of business.

2. The handling and storage of documents

   For user convenience we use a file upload system on this website. Whilst being convenient and efficient, it's also what poses the biggest security risk to websites that use such a system. The biggest security risk is to us!

   However, such a system can be made safe with proper security measures in place. We really do not want to leave our website open to attack so we've had a professional programmer write the code to upload documents into a safe area with no public access, in encrypted form and then we download them separately from the e-mail we receive informing us of your submission.

   Documents are stored off-line and once they have been returned to the client, they are encrypted again and stored off-line for a few days as a back up. Once the back up period expires, the documents are permanently deleted.

The stringent security measures we've employed to protect ourselves also means that your documents are protected to the same high level.

Cookies

We do not store any permanent cookies on your computer. There is some concern over the use of cookies whereby websites set them on your computer so that they can be used to track your browsing habits or history in order to target advertising to you. We do not do that.

Our website/server will probably write what are known as 'session cookies' on your computer but these are only temporary cookies that are used to aid your browsing of the site while you're on it - they will be automatically deleted when you close your browser.