Any information you provide about yourself to Touch fm or our associated companies will only be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy Statement, detailed below. Please note, the Privacy Policy Statement does not apply to websites operated by third parties.

We collect information from you for a number of reasons, for example,

• To provide personalised services for our individual users.
• To enable us to send out editorial content that you’ve requested.
• To enable us to send out promotions in which we think you will be interested.
• To help us to improve the services we offer.
• To use anonymous, aggregated details about our users to sell appropriate advertising space on our websites and other properties (for example, we may need to tell advertisers what proportion of the visitors to our websites are female) and does not mean sharing an individual's details with an advertiser.

Our Aims

1. We are fully committed to protecting your privacy and will respect your email privacy.

2. Touch fm will not collect personally identifying information except with your specific knowledge and consent.

3. We will work with our suppliers to ensure that your data is protected with high quality, reliable and secure technology. Our technology partners invest in high-quality security and work hard to protect user privacy.

4. We have set strict security procedures set out in respect of the storage and disclosure of information given by you via our websites.

Use of Information

1. We may offer to send you information or updates from Touch fm via e-mail or otherwise: obviously, signing up will put you on a special mailing list. You should be aware that any information you post in our public areas may be seen, collected and used by others, and may result in unsolicited messages from other users or parties. Alas, we can't control this; you post at your own risk.

2. We will mail you occasionally with information about your registration and/or your club membership if you have joined one and requested updates.

3. Sometimes you will provide us with data that doesn't reveal your personal identity. We will use this sort of information only for editorial marketing and promotion purposes and occasionally for other purposes but we don't connect it to any name, address or other identifying information.

4. Any research carried out via our websites is for the exclusive use of Touch fm unless specifically stated at the time of completion. However, please note that "pooled" responses to questions may be shared with our partner organisations but you will not be individually identified.

Collection of Information

1. We collect information on our users in two ways: through registration, and through cookies.

Registration

1. The minimum information we need to register a user includes an email address, a password, age and gender, although additional information may also be requested. We may ask further questions for different services, including competitions. Unless stated, all registration questions are compulsory. We may also ask some further, voluntary questions so we can gain a clearer understanding of our users. Your responses help us to sell appropriate advertising space to improve the offering we can make to users. They also enable us to personalise services for our users, for example through family membership. We do not share this information with third parties unless you have specifically consented to this.

2. You may update your personal information at any time via the "My Details" page. You can get to this page from most pages on the website.

"Cookies"

1. You may have read about "cookies", small pieces of information that are stored by your browser on your computer's hard drive. Touch fm uses cookies to identify registered users without needing to ask for registration details every time you access one of our sites. The cookies control the display of ads, to ensure that you don't see the same ad too many times in a single session, for example, and to track usage patterns on our Sites.
2. Our cookies do not contain any personally identifying information. While using the Sites, you may notice that our advertisers occasionally serve you cookies, either directly or when you link to their sites. We cannot directly control what our advertisers or these cookies do, but it's our policy that advertisers on the Sites should use cookies the same way we do.

3. Occasionally, we may use cookies to track registered or unregistered users as they travel through the site - for instance, we might use cookies to count the total number of unique users who are accessing the site over a particular period of time. This information will never be shared with a third party, and is only used to make our systems more efficient.

4. If you are very concerned about cookies, they can be turned off in your browser. Please note that if you choose to do this some areas of the site may not work as they were intended to.

"Safe Harbour"

1. For purely technical and operational reasons, your user data may from time to time be stored on our behalf on servers based overseas. All contractors operating such storage on our behalf will be identifiable as "Safe Harbour" compliant.

Advertisers, Sponsors and Associates

1. Where we collect registration information from you, we will only contact you ourselves.

2. We will not sell or trade on your individual user details (including your email address) unless we have your prior consent. With your permission we will only share the information with carefully chosen, reputable and trustworthy third parties.

3. We will never share your personally identifying information with a third party, including an advertiser, without your explicit permission. Similarly, you will receive unsolicited mail only from Touch fm and associated companies only if you have agreed to this.

4. A few special cases are worth noting: From time to time we may run competitions or request material we can publish; to participate, you must usually supply us with your identity which you agree to have publicly associated with your submission. The exact rules vary from case to case, and will be noted clearly on the relevant pages. Your participation will always be voluntary and knowing.

5. Otherwise, we will only share anonymous aggregate statistics about our users, sales and traffic patterns with our advertisers. Whilst your individual information is protected as outlined above, we reserve the right to use aggregated, anonymous data about our users as a group. For example, we might report to potential advertisers that a certain percentage of our users are interested in its products, based on information requests.

6. We reserve the right to access and disclose individually identifiable information to comply with applicable laws and lawful government requests, to operate our systems properly and to protect both ourselves and our users.

7. We may provide aggregate statistics about our customers; sales, traffic patterns and related site information to reputable third-party vendors, but these statistics will include no personally identifying information.

8. Touch fm and our associated companies use all reasonable precautions to ensure only responsible third parties see the information; however we are not responsible for any breach of security or any actions of any third parties who receive the information.

We reserve the right to change our privacy policy and all changes will be posted here. Where the changes are significant, we may also choose to email all our registered users with the new details.