The Madras Courier (www.madrascourier.com) is an online magazine published by Vipra Holdings Limited, a company registered in the UK, company number 10269770. We provide premium news, insight and analysis to a growing audience of global decision-makers, thinkers, scholars, researchers and professionals.
Our stories are exclusive, and we want to give you a personalised experience. To do so, we ask for your email address to give you updates about our daily stories. Further, we might require your information occasionally. We list down a range of possible occasions where we might have to collect specific information from you to provide a better experience by the Madras Courier (www.madrascourier.com).
Please review this policy carefully, where we outline our policy about privacy by visiting our website. By submitting information to us, it is deemed that you consent to the collection and processing of your information as described in this privacy policy.
This Privacy Policy applies to all websites and web applications which link to this policy and are published by Madras Courier “sites.”
If you have any queries about how we use your personal information, please contact us by writing to [email protected] or [email protected]
Information We Collect
In this section, we detail the information we may collect about you. We explain why, and how, we use it in later sections.
Account Information
If you decide to create an account or enquire about one of our products and services, we’ll ask you to provide us with some specific information. Primarily, your email address is the passport to access our stories. When you subscribe, a whole new world of stories awaits you. We might require basic demographic information from you. For instance:
- Personal details such as name, title, date of birth, gender;
- Personal contact details such as email address, home address, delivery address, home phone number, mobile phone number and social media accounts
- Work details such as job title, department, company name, company address, work emails address and office phone number;
- Log in details such as username and password
- Payment details such as your bank account and payment card information
- Technical information about your computer, location, Internet Protocol (IP) address, mobile service provider, social media platforms and other such connections as you continue to use our services.
Additional Information
At times, we will also ask you to provide additional information, for instance – opinion on products and services; preferences (including newsletters and Madras Courier topics); career details and Curriculum Vitae if you use our platform or other recruitment pages; information such as dietary preferences, location details, accessibility requirements when attending a Madras Courier live event, which may be considered special categories of personal data.
Information from Partners and Public Sources
In some circumstances, we collect information about you from our partners or from publicly available websites to help us better understand our audience and enhance the relevance of our content. For instance, in some cases, we obtain the contact details of potential partners, speakers and writers for the Madras Courier from public websites.
Information we obtain through cookies and similar tools
We use cookies (and similar technologies) and analytics tools across our Sites to collect information about you. This information can be used to improve the performance of the site, make advertising more relevant and enhance your user experience. We provide details information about cookies and similar technologies within our cookie policy.
In doing so, we use cookies to display the version of the site that is most relevant to your location. For example, if you log in to www.madrascourier.com from India, you will be shown an India vision of the site.
We also use cookies to understand how our customers use our sites and interact with our communications and journalism. For example, we use technology on our sites, which records user movements, including page scrolling, clicks, and text entered. (It does not record payment details.) This helps us to identify usability issues and improve the assistance we can provide to users and is also used for aggregated and statistical reporting purposes.
We also use cookies to understand what type of device you are using, the web browser you are using and the social media networks you are using to show you the best version of the site.
We use cookies to understand what advertisements you engage with – what advertisements you have been shown, or clicked on, to bill our advertising partners, and to present you with advertisements that are more relevant to you.
A lawful basis for processing
We only process personal information where we have a lawful basis for doing so. We only process your information where you have given us consent to process personal information for a given purpose. For example, if you submit your email to receive our newsletter, or use our general enquiry forms. You have the right to withdraw this consent at any time. You can manage your preferences within your account or by contacting customer services.
We also process personal information where we have a legitimate interest, as a business, to process personal information. For example, where we are aware of copyright infringements on our sites, it is in our legitimate interests as a business to identify those responsible. We take due care to balance our interest against your right to privacy.
We also process personal information when there is a contractual necessity or to meet our contractual obligations. For example, if you are a subscriber, we would need to process your delivery to fulfil your subscription.
We also process personal information in order to comply with the law. For example, we process and retain customer invoice information to comply with financial regulations.
How we use your personal information
We collect personal information for the following reasons:
- To provide our service: We require some of your personal information so our services work as you would expect, for example, providing access to our digital content, notifying you of changes to our services and dealing with customer service queries. We record customer calls for monitoring and training purposes.
- To improve and maintain performance: We process personal information in order to provide you with the best possible user experience and value; to make sure that our products and services work as they should. Using personal information helps us understand how our readers experience our sites and services, so we can make improvements. This includes contacting customers with market research surveys or for telephone or social media interviews, hosting subscriber focus groups and analysing once data to test new and existing events, products and developments for the Madras Courier.
- To bill our customers: We, along with our authorised payments processors, securely process your payment information to take payments, to detect and prevent fraudulent
- To monitor compliance with our policies and terms: We monitor for breaches of our terms and conditions and copyright policies. For example, we reserve the right to inform the subscription holder if, through use of a group subscription, you are using our content in breach of the terms and conditions or copyright policies of our sites. We also monitor activity on our sites to detect and prevent invalid or fraudulent traffic.
- To personalise our products and services: We improve your experience of our products and services by personalising parts of our sites and apps with the information you give us and what we learn about you. This includes showing you articles you may be interested in and recommending emails you may wish to sign up. Where our sites have such functionality, you can manage elements of personalisation in your account.
- To communicate product changes and offers – We want you to get the most out of our products and services, including showcasing our latest content and newsletters. We will contact you with carefully-curated offers and promotions from the Madras Courier, exclusive event invitations and feature announcements. For example, if there are no updates on topics you follow in the Madras Courier, we will send you articles on other topics that we think you might be interested in. You are able to change your preferences at any time through your account or by contacting us. We also personalise our communications for strategic purposes. For example, we might offer group subscriptions to managers.
- For the purpose of advertising: We rely on advertising revenue in part to support our award-winning journalism. We need to process your information to understand the effectiveness of the advertising we serve to you and others, and to deliver relevant, personalised advertising. We use this information you give us and the information we collect about you to serve you with the most appropriate advertisements. You can manage your advertising settings for the sites that carry out this activity in your account. If you do decide to turn off personalised advertisements or advertisements tailored to you, you will see the same number of advertisements but they may be less relevant to you. You may continue to see advertisements that are targeted to you based on other non-personal information, for example, the article you are reading.
- Recruitment: If you apply for a role via our site, we will process your information in order to facilitate the application process
- To build directories: Our sites processes personal information to create databases and directories. These directories provide key business insights and profiles to those that have licensed access. Where we make an individual’s contact details accessible on our site, we inform the individual and provide instructions on how to have their contact details removed.
- To administer prize draws and competitions: If you enter a prize draw or competition, we will process your information in order to run the competition or administer the prize draw. For example, we will process your address information if you are a winner and we need to send your prize by post. We may be required to publish or otherwise make available your name and/or region if you are selected as a winner in a competition or prize draw.
Who we share your personal information with
We disclose personal information to facilitate the running of our business to provide specific services you have requested. Commonly, we will disclose information to:
Service providers: We engage service providers who help to support our business and improve our products. These service providers include, for example, fulfilment providers for delivery of our digital content and marketing; customer service agencies; hosts, organisers and sponsors of our events; organisations that host our sites or databases; and providers of online surveys. We also work with a number of distribution partners to deliver subscriptions.
Advertisers: We and our advertising partners use cookies to collect personal information and serve you with advertisements that we believe are relevant to you and your interests.
Institutional customers: If your subscription is provided under a group subscription or trial, we will provide our client with information about your activity on our site for the purposes of billing. This information is provided at a high level and our client cannot track exactly what articles you have read. We may also provide current or prospective clients with activity information about individual subscribers who registered using that entity’s email address. We will always contact individual subscribers before doing so and will respect any requests not to share this information.
Recruiters: When you apply for jobs, your application is forwarded to the recruiters. Recruiters include agencies who may pass your information to companies that are recruiting in the employment field(s) relevant to your interests. Applications that are made through recruiters sites, or other external websites, will be subject to their privacy policies.
Social Media Providers: Information will be shared with social media platforms where you log in to our sites via a social media account, or use components of our sites provided by social media platforms (e.g., the “Facebook Recommend” function). We also share the information of our subscribers with social media partners for the following reasons:
- To prevent existing subscribers from being targeted with subscription offerings on social media platforms;
- To create lookalike audiences for the purposes of targeted advertising on social media platforms
- To encourage users to get the most out of their subscription
Other users: Our sites are publicly accessible and anyone around the world who accesses our site will be able to see anything you post, such as comments about an article. We encourage you to use a pseudonym when commenting on our sites if you do not wish to be identifiable to other readers
Madras Courier – We share your information within the Madras Courier (Vipra Holdings group to provide our services and to better understand the relationship between our products. More information about the Madras Courier is on our “About us” page on our website. For example, the Madras Courier may send exclusive invitations to its subscribers if an event may be of particular interest to that individual.
Legal processes and successors in title: We may also disclose your information to comply with applicable laws, court orders or other valid legal processes, and to enforce or apply our terms of use, any subscription agreement, or any of our other rights. We may transfer or disclose your personal information to any entity which takes over or acquires the relevant Madras Courier business. We also share aggregated, non-identifiable information with third parties. For example, we regularly release information about the size and growth of our audiences.
We retain the majority of your personal information for as long as your account is active and therefore open; this allows you to continue accessing our content, products and services.
If you become inactive and are not a subscriber, we may delete some elements of the information associated with your account. We will normally warn you if your access is going to be withdrawn and give you the opportunity to retain your account.
Where we don’t need to keep all of your information in full, we will obfuscate or aggregate it, for example, web activity logs and survey responses. This is to ensure that we do not retain your information for any longer than necessary.
It is sometimes necessary for us to keep your personal information for longer periods of time, for example, if there is a statutory requirement to retain it; if we require the information for legal reasons or there is a legitimate business need for us to retain it; to ensure we do not contact you if you have asked us not to.
While we take these steps to protect your personal information as much as we reasonably can, no system or transmission of data over the Internet or any other public network, or any storage of data, can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.
In the event of a change in ownership or control of the Company, the information may also be transferred to provide continuity of services. In such conditions, this privacy policy will be binding and applicable on all entities who may acquire your personal information as part of the change in guard.
Your rights
Under data protection laws, you have rights as an individual in relation to the personal data we hold about you. These rights include:
- The right to object to direct marketing – your preferences, including in relation to direct marketing, can be found in your account;
- The right to access the personal data that we process about you;
- The right to request the deletion of your personal data;
- The right to request the rectification of your personal data – you can manage some of this information in your account.
Where this Privacy Policy applies
Personal information is collected by The Madras Courier and its trading entities. Our sites are not intended for children under 16 years of age. We do not intentionally collect or use any information from children. Our sites contain links to third party websites which are not subject to this privacy policy. We are not responsible for their content, use of personal information or security practices.
Changes to this Privacy policy
This policy is effective from 12 October 2016. We evaluate this privacy policy periodically in light of changing business practices, technology and legal requirements. As a result, it is updated from time to time. Any such changes will be posted on this page. Any changes we make to this privacy policy will be posted on this page. For any specific query or concerns, you may reach out to us as at [email protected] or [email protected]