Who we are

Athea & District News (“Athea News”) operates the website found at www.athea.ie & We are the online edition of the locally distributed newsprint edition of the Athea and District News, County Limerick, Ireland.

It is Athea News’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our website. Your privacy is very important to us. At Athea & District News we have a few fundamental principles that we follow:

  • We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We don’t like services that ask you for things like your gender or income level for no apparent reason.)
  • We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, secure our website, or protect our rights.
  • We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of our site.
  • We are a neighborhood newsletter and in general seek only to publish stories, announcements, adverts or images submitted by our readership. If you find fault with or do not wish for any item to feature on our website, please contact us immediately and we will be happy to work with you to remove data or images which you do not wish to remain publicly available.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Athea News collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Athea News’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Athea News’s visitors use its website, or in order to improve performance or security of our website. From time to time, Athea News may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Athea News also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for all users and for any users leaving comments on our blog. Athea News only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where a comment was left or in order to maintain the security of our website.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Athea News’s websites choose to interact with Athea News in ways that require Athea News to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Athea News gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who comment on our blog to provide a username and email address. Those who wish to receive Athea & District News updates via email, we collect their emails. In each case, Athea News collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfil the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Athea News. Athea News does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Athea News may collect aggregate or personally identifiable data and statistics about the behaviour of any visitors to its websites. For instance, Athea News may monitor the way visitors use or interact with our website in order to determine if their activity is malicious, improper or related to Spamming. To screen and manage our website for this type of activity we use specialist partner companies to securely and professionally analyse the security fingerprints of all visitors to our website. We use the Cloudflare or Shield Security networks to help identify spam or malicious activities. Athea News may display this information publicly or provide it to others only insofar as to interact with our Security service providers, and only in order to ensure the safe, secure and reliable operation of the Athea News website.

Aggregated Statistics

Athea News may collect statistics about the behaviour of visitors to its websites. For instance, Athea News may monitor the most popular pages on the website using the Google Analytics service or use spam or security fingerprints screened by the either the Cloudflare or Shield Security services to help identify spam or malicious activities. Athea News may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Athea News does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Athea News discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Athea News’s behalf or to provide services available at Athea News’s website, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others (iii) in order to provide security services for the safe and proper operation of our website. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Athea News’s website, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Athea News will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, Athea News discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only in response to a subpoena, court order or other governmental request, or when Athea News believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Athea News, third parties or the public at large. Affiliated organisations used by Athea news include Cloudflare, & Shield Security services used to protect our website from malicious activities, to prevent Spam and ensure reliable delivery of our website to all its users, admins or visitors. If you are a registered user of an Athea News website and have supplied your email address, Athea News may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Athea News and our services. We primarily use our website to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Athea News takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Athea News uses cookies to help Athea News identify and track visitors, their usage of Athea News website, and their website access preferences. Athea News also use the cookies set by the Shareaholic social media sharing platform, in order to make it easier for users to share stories of interest. You can read the Shareaholic privacy statement here: https://www.shareaholic.com/privacy 

Athea News visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Athea News’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Athea News’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Business Transfers

If Athea News, or substantially all of its assets were acquired, or in the unlikely event that Athea News goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of Athea News may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.

Ads

We reserve the right to begin to have Ads on the Athea News website. Ads appearing on any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies. These cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows ad networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by Athea News and does not cover the use of cookies by any advertisers.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Comments

Comments and other content submitted to the Shield anti-spam service are not saved on our servers unless they were marked as false positives, in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the service to avoid future false positives.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Athea News may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Athea News’s sole discretion. Athea News encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

Addendum

Links to our Service provider’s Privacy policies:

Web Hosting

https://www.blacknight.com/legal/privacy/

Social Media Sharing

https://www.shareaholic.com/privacy

Google Analytics

https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en

Cloudflare CDN and Security

https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/

Shield Security Plugin

https://www.fernleafsystems.com/wordpress-plugins/policy-addendum-shield-security-plugin/