Improving our privacy policy

Any time you use a website, it gathers info about you (it’s often also called ‘user data’). Sometimes quite a lot of info. So good web businesses have a public policy explaining what info they gather and how they use it. It’s usually called a privacy policy.

We published our privacy policy a year ago. We were still figuring out how best to do this, and over the last year we’ve talked and received feedback about our first version. We’re now making some changes to improve it, mainly to the parts that apply to publishers.

None of the changes mean that we gather more info or use it in new ways. The changes only clarify what we do in better terms, so that our publishing partners can rest assured that we’re being sensible with their info.

Below, I’ll explain each change we’re making. Additions are in bold, and deletions are struck through like this.

Paperight privacy policy

In offering an online service, Paperight collects information about you and your organisation. This policy describes what we do with that information. If you register with Paperight as an outlet or rightsholder, or even if you simply access and print a document at a Paperight outlet, you should know that you will be divulging potentially importantsharing information with the Paperight team.

With this in mind, we have drafted this privacy policy.This privacy policy governs Paperight’s use of the information that you share in the course of using the Paperight service.It’s completely open, with no tricks or catches, with two caveats being:

that tThis policy works in conjunction with, and is subordinate to, the terms of service for both outlets and rightsholders.; and that wWe are allowed toWe may amend this policy at any time, at the event of which you will be immediately notified if you are registered with Paperight as either a rightsholder or outlet.

Up to here, our changes are editorial; intended to improve wording for readability and simplicity.

What Paperight does and does not do with your information

First things first: no matter which way you use Paperight, we will never sell or otherwise give your personal information to unauthorised third-parties. We hate spam and scams as much as you do, so we’ll do our best to ensure that your information doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

When you visit the Paperight website, we will access and store information about your visit, potentially but not necessarily including:

• the technical specifications of the software and operating system you used to access the Paperight site;
• the IP address and location from which you accessed the Paperight site; and
• the links that may have directed you to the Paperight site.

This information is used by us to analyse the ways in which people access and use Paperight, and may be anonymised and used by us for marketing or communications with partners.

If you register with or use Paperight to upload, sell, access or print documents, Paperight reserves the right to share certain aspects of your information with other members of the Paperight ecosystem to ensure the legal and efficient operation of Paperight’s services. For specifics as to the kinds of information we would share, please see relevant sections below.

Since we provide more detail about this below, we decided this paragraph was redundant and unnecessary.

Rightsholders (publishers)

If you are a rightsholder registered with Paperight, your name and products will be publicly listed on the Paperight website and may be distributed to Paperight outlets in the form of newsletters, blog posts or other communications, so that they may be informed of your products available through the Paperight service.

Your name and products may also be used as part of Paperight’s communications and marketing, in order to attract certain customers to existing or new Paperight outlets. Your products’ metadata (including titles, author names, product subject matter, licence fees, image covers and product descriptions) may be used in and repurposed for Paperight’s external communications and marketing, in order to promote your products and the Paperight service. Paperight will not claim to own content belonging to a registered rightsholder.

Some of our partners asked us to make it explicit that we don’t claim to be the owners or publishers of the books we distribute, so we added this sentence.

Information about the number and value of rights sales of your products will be gathered, and may be shared in an anonymised aggregated format with Paperight outlets and in external Paperight communications, such as blog posts, press releases and advertisements. Sales rankings of your individual products may also be displayed publicly (like the bestseller lists you find in commercial bookstores or online retailers).

We will never give out your products’ content, for free or otherwise, to third-parties, unless it is legitimately acquired through the Paperight service or as part of a promotional giveaway that you have authorised.

We decided that this was covered in the publishers’ agreement already, so we removed it here. Note that recent changes to the publishers’ agreement allow us to provide free excerpts of books as testing and promotional samples to our registered outlets.

If you register with Paperight as a rightsholder, you may deactivate your account with Paperight at any time. However, deactivation of your account will not restrict our internal access to, or appropriate dissemination of, information pertaining to your products’ metadata or sales made while your account was active.Should your account be closed, data pertaining to past sales (such as invoices and statements) will remain accessible to the parties to those sales.

Here we made things simpler by getting to the crux of the matter: if a publisher leaves Paperight or removes their books from the system, we obviously need to keep a record of what was sold while their products were available. And outlets who bought their books need to be able to see a record of their licence purchases for those books.

There are no more changes to the policy after this point, but I’m including the full text here anyway, just to be thorough.

Outlets

If you are an outlet registered with Paperight, your outlet’s name, location and contact details may be publicly listed on the Paperight website, in order to help customers find your business. If you wish, you may ask us to remove your name, location and contact details from any public listing of Paperight outlets.

We reserve the right to give anonymised information about your outlet to potential and registered rightsholders so that they can know where their documents are or will be available at any given time. In addition to that, rightsholders are able to see which and how many of their documents your outlet sells and at what time they were sold, but not the details of the persons to whom you sold them. Paperight, however, reserves the right to access the name and mobile number, if given, of the persons to whom you sell documents at any time, but not to use that name and mobile number for marketing purposes. We may also use your location, name and contact details in our advertising campaigns, in order to promote our service to potential customers in your area.

If you register with Paperight as an outlet, you are allowed the right to deactivate your account at any time. Deactivation, however, will not restrict our internal access to, or use of as described above, information about the sales your outlet made, the persons to which your outlet made those sales, and your outlet’s name, location, contact details and users, while your registration with Paperight was active.

Outlet customers

If you are the customer of a Paperight outlet, both Paperight and the outlet from which you printed a document from Paperight will keep your name, which is printed on your Paperight document, on record. Paperight will never share your individual identity with any third-party other than the Paperight outlet through which you printed your document. Outlets who register with Paperight are also bound by our outlet terms-of-service not to share or sell your individual identity or information with third-parties.

We will also gather certain information about you should you visit a URL printed on any Paperight document, including (but not limited to):

• the date and time at which you access the URL;
• the location from which you access the URL;
• the device on which you access the URL;
• the metadata of the document on which the URL is printed; and
• the person and outlet who printed the document on which the URL is printed.

This information, but not your name or other details (such as your mobile phone number) that identify you personally, may be shared with rightsholders and outlets for statistical purposes.

We also reserve the right to supply this information, along with any other information we have gathered about customers, rightsholders and outlets, to relevant authorities should we be required to do so by a court of law. If you have any concerns or questions about this privacy policy, please contact us at team@paperight.com.

That’s it, there are no changes to the ‘Outlets’ or ‘Outlet customers’ sections. If you have any questions or input for us, please do let us know. With your help, we get better so much faster.