Privacy notice

Who is responsible

The Scottish Science Society is responsible for the personal information described here. Questions, and any request concerning your information, may be sent to richard@scottishsciencesociety.org.

Reading the site

You may read every public page without giving your name. The Society places no advertising on this site, runs no advertising or analytics trackers, and sets no tracking cookies. The typefaces are served from the Society’s own pages.

The site is hosted by Netlify, which, like any host, receives the internet address of each visitor’s device and keeps technical logs in order to deliver the pages and protect the service.

The members’ area

The particulars you enter when you apply for membership, and everything you keep in the members’ area (your profile, notes, references, tasks, forum contributions and your progress in the question bank), are held in the storage of your own browser on your own device. They are not copied to the Society. If you clear your browser’s data, they are erased.

One thing does leave your device. To confirm that an address is yours, the site sends that electronic mail address to the Society’s mail provider, which despatches a six-digit code to it. The code is not stored.

Subscriptions and donations

Card payments are taken on the pages of Stripe. Your card number is entered there and is never seen, held or stored by the Society. Stripe receives your name and address for the receipt, and tells the Society whether the payment succeeded.

Payments by Pix are made through your own bank. Where the Society uses Mercado Pago to issue the charge, Mercado Pago receives your name and electronic mail address, and your CPF if you supply it.

Orders from the Press

To send you a book the Press needs your name, your delivery address, a telephone number for the carrier and an electronic mail address. For parcels to Brazil, Chile and Mexico the customs authorities also require a tax number. This information is used to take payment, to print and deliver the order, and to answer you about it. The till also remembers, in your own browser and nowhere else, the country and the currency you last chose.

It is shared with those who carry out the order and with no one else: Stripe or Mercado Pago, which take the payment; Lulu, which prints the book and hands it to the carrier; and the Society’s mail provider, which carries the confirmation to you and the order to the Press.

Electronic editions are sold by Amazon, under Amazon’s own terms and privacy notice.

Writing to the Society

When you use the contact form or send a manuscript, your name, your address and what you write are sent to the Society by electronic mail and are used to answer you and, in the case of a manuscript, to review and publish it. The names of authors are published with their articles.

Collections served by others

Some collections are displayed within this site but are served from elsewhere: the Human Pathology Bank, the Mortality Web and Cellular Evolution. When you open one of them, the service that hosts it receives your device’s internet address, as any website does. Links to YouTube and to Amazon take you to those companies’ own sites.

How long information is kept

Correspondence is kept for as long as it is needed to deal with the matter. Records of payments and orders are kept for as long as the law requires for the purposes of accounts and tax. The payment and printing services named above keep their own records under their own notices.

Your rights

You may ask the Society for a copy of the information it holds about you, ask for it to be corrected or erased, and object to its use. Write to the address above. If you are not satisfied with the answer, you may complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office in the United Kingdom, or to the data-protection authority of your own country.

Changes to this notice

If the Society changes what it collects, this notice will be revised and the date at its head altered.