This Privacy Policy is written in plain English and talks about how The PhD Proofreaders uses your personal information, payment details and any documents you send in to us. We adhere to the Data Protection regulation in the UK, where we are registered, and GDPR regulation.

We currently collect and process the following information:

Personal identifiers, contacts and characteristics (for example, name and contact details)

Documents (chapter drafts etc), for those working with coaches or proofreaders

Website user statistics

How we get the personal information and why we have it:

Most of the personal information we process is provided to us directly by you for one of the following reasons

Submitting a contact form on our website

Emailing us to inquire about our services

Phoning us to inquire about our services

We use the information that you have given us in order to:

Provide you with services

Provide you with information and news related to our services

We may share this information with contractors working on our behalf to provide services (e.g. coaches or proofreaders). 

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are: (a) Your consent. You are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by contacting support@thephdproofreaders.com (b) We have a contractual obligation.

The Information We Collect

When you order with us, we ask you for some personal information (including your name, address and email address). We do this to help identify you and store this information only for our own internal purposes. We never sell or otherwise pass on your personal information. When you pay on our website, you will be asked to include your credit card details. These are processed securely by PayPal, so you can be sure that they are treated confidentially. We are never able to see your credit card information – only PayPal can. We also collect written documents from you. These are never sold or otherwise passed on to anyone else or any other organization, including essay banks or essay mills. 

This information is used for internal processes only, typically to manage orders and send out confirmations. The financial information is used by PayPal, Stripe or Eventbrite to process your payment and is never seen by us. Any communication between us (by email) is kept on a secure e-mail server. By using the site and placing your order with us, you are consenting to the collection and use of your personal information by us. You should note that we may use the information we have collected about you to contact you and deliver information to you about our services generally. If you do not want us to contact you, you may choose to ‘unsubscribe’ from these communications (see below for details).

Cookies

We use data collection devices such as ‘cookies’ on certain pages of our site (thephdproofreaders.com) These are small files placed on your hard drive which help us to provide more relevant services to you. Certain features of the site are only available where cookies are used. Most cookies are ‘session cookies’ and they are automatically deleted from your hard drive when you leave the site. You may be able to set your browser up to refuse our cookies, but this may mean you can’t use some features of the site.

Third Parties

We never disclose your information, payment details or data to third parties. There are two exceptions to this statement. We may disclose your information if we are required to do so by any government or judicial authority if we, in our sole discretion, believe that doing so is necessary or appropriate because it is related to legal proceedings or because of any investigation into unlawful activity. 

Accessing, Reviewing & Changing Your Personal Information

You can review and change the information which you have submitted to us, including your name and email address, by writing an email to us asking us to do so. If we receive such a request, we will remove your information from our database.

Security

We use various security techniques to protect your data from unauthorised access from within and outside our organisation, but the nature of the internet is such that we cannot absolutely guarantee complete security.

Document Policy

We delete all traces of your document from our system within seven years of sending the document back to you. We guarantee to never sell or distribute your document to any third party, essay mill or essay bank.

Confidentiality

When you upload a document to our website, we treat it with care. All documents are dealt with confidentially. 

Changes to This Policy

We reserve the right to change or add to this policy at any time. If we decide to make any changes, we will detail those changes on this page. However, if you do not use or have not used The PhD Proofreaders for some time, we recommend that you check the current policy carefully, to ensure that you are aware of any changes to the type of information we collect, how we use it, and the circumstances under which we would disclose it to third parties.