Privacy Policy

Your Privacy

Many users have legitimate concerns about their privacy, and the confidentiality and security of any information they provide. Lighterra believes strongly in respecting and honoring the privacy of all web visitors and software users.

In brief, Lighterra will...

  • never collect information about you without your knowledge and consent,
  • only use information for the purpose for which it was supplied, and
  • never give or on-sell that information to other parties (unless required to by law).

Lighterra's official privacy policy is succinctly enshrined in its company constitution as follows...

2.6 (c) - Be trustworthy, respect people's privacy. Treat private customer and supplier information with care and sensitivity. Never access or disclose private information without reasonable need or grounds. Only use private information for the reason it was given to the company. Only share private information on a need-to-know basis, and with the owner's permission. Employ all reasonable methods to protect private information from unauthorized access. Do not store private customer or supplier information without need. Make it possible for people to trust the company.

Web Sites

In general, Lighterra's web sites never know who you are. Lighterra does not use cookies or other technologies to track individual web visitors for the vast majority of its web content.

When you visit Lighterra's web sites, the only information collected and stored is anonymous information gathered for statistical purposes, such as...

  • the pages accessed and files downloaded
  • the date and time of each download of a page or file
  • the previous, referring page used to reach each page or file
  • the Internet IP address of the computer accessing the web site
  • the type and version of the web browser and operating system used

This data is then aggregated and used to produce statistics which help identify general traffic patterns, such as which pages are popular, how people reach the web sites, which countries they are coming from, and which browsers they are using (for compatibility testing). No attempt is made to identify your individual personal details or usage, except in the event of an investigation by a law-enforcement agency, which may exercise a warrant to inspect the log files.

There are two exceptions to the above general policy, where Lighterra's web sites do temporarily record information about your visit...

  1. Pages containing video content may use a cookie to temporarily store the detected speed of your Internet connection, for the purpose of selecting the most suitable video quality to display. This cookie is only stored temporarily on your system, and is erased after a short period. Lighterra does not store this information on its systems at any time. You may choose to disable cookies within your web browser and this functionality will automatically fall back to re-detecting your connection speed for every video you view.
  2. The transaction processing services used on Lighterra's web sites may use username/password authentication and/or cookies for normal business processes such as payment processing or other "login account" access. Any use of session-based state is kept to a minimum, and data such as credit-card information is disposed of immediately after completing the transaction. As a matter of policy, Lighterra will never permanently store your credit-card information, nor any other information which there is no legitimate need to keep. If you are concerned about the use of cookies and session-based state for transaction processing, you are welcome to email webmaster@lighterra.com before commencing an online transaction to ask any questions you may have.

Email

If you have chosen to give your email address to Lighterra for the purpose of joining a mailing list, Lighterra may, from time to time, send you messages to inform you of product announcements, software updates, upcoming events, or changes in terms & conditions. Every mailing-list message sent includes instructions on how to unsubscribe, should you wish to do so.

Email messages sent to Lighterra are treated as correspondence, and as such, the privacy of the sender will be respected. Lighterra will not add any details from your email to a mailing list without your permission, and will not disclose those details to third parties without your consent (unless required to by law).

As part of normal system administration, email traffic is monitored for statistical purposes and system maintenance, including occasionally inspecting email messages for spam, viruses or other issues. Strict guidelines are in place to never open or view the contents of an email message without reasonable cause.

Although Lighterra respects the privacy of your email, many other ISPs do not, and unencrypted email should generally be considered insecure. The most common method of securing email transmission is the PGP system, which Lighterra fully supports. If you wish to send secure email to Lighterra, or verify signed email from Lighterra, please use these PGP keys.

Software

While most Lighterra software does not involve private data, some pieces of Lighterra software do, by their very nature, deal with personal, private information. Such information may include personal contact databases, private financial information, and location information, among other things.

For those software packages which do deal with private information, all reasonable measures are taken to ensure the privacy and security of your information at all times. In particular, wherever practical...

  • network transmissions containing private information are encrypted,
  • private data stored remotely is stored in encrypted form, and
  • passwords are stored securely using the relevant features of the underlying operating system (eg: the Keychain on OS X, CryptProtectData() on Microsoft Windows).

Lighterra software will never intentionally transmit personal, private information over the Internet without your knowledge and permission. Any network transmissions for "phone home" features such as update checking or bug reporting contain only the essential information required for that task, anonymized as much as possible.

If you have any concerns about privacy issues related to Lighterra software, please email support@lighterra.com.

Private Information Storage

Lighterra takes precautions including technical, administrative and physical measures to safeguard the private information stored about you against unauthorized access, modification or deletion. While no computer system can be guaranteed to be perfectly secure, considerable effort is expended to ensure the security of your private information as much as possible.

To that end, your private information...

  • is stored on physically secure systems,
  • is protected by firewalls and other network security technology,
  • has access restricted by operating-system access controls and file permissions, and
  • is stored in encrypted form where appropriate to mitigate any risk of equipment theft or unauthorized physical access to the underlying hard disks and other storage devices.

Updating Your Information

Lighterra generally stores very little information about the users of its software, and we want any information stored about you to be accurate and up to date. It's in both Lighterra's interest and yours that any information held about you remains correct and current, and an effort is made to update your records whenever you supply new information, either directly or indirectly.

At any time, you're welcome to email info@lighterra.com and request to have any records of your private information updated, changed or deleted. You may also request to simply have Lighterra list any and all information currently stored about you. Naturally, your identity will need to be verified before providing such information or making any changes.