Terms of use & privacy/GDPR policy

Introduction & overview

The privacy of our website visitors is extremely important to us, and we are committed to taking all necessart steps to safeguard it. This policy explains what we will do with your personal information.
This policy also outlines our copyright policy, to which users agree when using and interacting with our website.
When you consent to our use of cookies in accordance with the terms of this policy when you first visit our website, this permits us to use cookies every time you visit our website.

Copyright & site ownership

This website and its contents are the property of Media & Editorial Projects Limited (MEP Publishers), and are protected, without limitation, by Trinidad & Tobago and international copyright laws. Images on the website, however — unless credited to MEP in whole or in part — are the sole intellectual property of the photographer or entity credited.

All users are expected to adhere to any and all copyright, trademark and other proprietary notices. No intellectual property or other rights in and to this site or its content is transferred to site visitors. Users may not copy, modify, reproduce, distribute, republish, commercially exploit, or download any of the material on this site for anything other than private, personal use without the express prior permission of MEP, and/or the individual copyright holders of text, images, illustrations et al as applicable. Excerpting of text material is permitted, once there is full attribution (ie crediting of the author and MEP as the publisher, including a link to the original article/post). For additional permissions, publishers must contact us directly.

Collecting personal information

We may collect, store, and use the following types of personal information when you visit or interact with our website, none of it personally identifiable (non-PII) unless you explicitly provide it:

information about your computer including your IP address, geographical location, browser type and version, and operating system;
information about your visits to and use of this website including the referral source, length of visit, page views, and website navigation paths;
information that is generated while using our website, including when, how often, and under what circumstances you use it;
information, such as your name and email address, that you explicitly enter in order to set up subscriptions to our emails and/or newsletters;
information relating to anything you purchase, services you use, or transactions you make through our website (and processed by PayPal or 2Checkout.com), which may include your name, address, telephone number, email address, and credit card details;
information that you post to our website, for example comments on posts that you intentionally publish, and which may include your username, profile picture, and/or the content of your posts;
information contained in any communications that you send to us by email or through our website (eg through our contact form), including its communication content and metadata;
any other personal information that you send to us.

Before you disclose to us the personal information of another person, you must obtain that person’s consent to both the disclosure and the processing of that personal information in accordance with this policy.

Using your personal information

We may use your personal information for:

administering our website and business;
sending you goods purchased through our website;
sending statements, invoices, and payment reminders to you, and collecting payments from you;
sending you non-marketing commercial communications (for example, responding to queries you make through our contact form);
sending you email notifications that you have specifically requested;
sending you our email newsletter, if you have requested it (you can unsubscribe or inform us at any time if you no longer require the newsletter);
where you have specifically requested or consented to it, sending you email marketing communications relating to our business or the businesses of carefully-selected third parties which we think may be of interest to you (you can unsubscribe or inform us at any time if you no longer require marketing communications);
providing third parties with statistical information about our users (but those third parties will not be able to identify any individual user from that information);
dealing with inquiries and complaints made by or about you relating to our website;
keeping our website secure and preventing fraud.

We will not, under any circumstances, supply your personal information to any third party for their or any other third party’s direct marketing.

Cookies

Our website uses cookies. A cookie is a file containing an identifier (a string of letters and numbers) that is sent by a web server to a web browser and is stored by the browser. The identifier is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. Cookies may be either “persistent” cookies or “session” cookies: a persistent cookie will be stored by a web browser and will remain valid until its set expiry date, unless deleted by the user before the expiry date; a session cookie, on the other hand, will expire at the end of the user session, when the web browser is closed. Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies. We use both session and persistent cookies on our website.

The names of the cookies that we use on our website, and the purposes for which they are used, are set out below:
1. we use Google Analytics and AdSense on our website to recognise a computer when a user visits the website; to track users as they navigate the website; improve the website’s usability; analyse the use of the website; administer the website; prevent fraud and improve the security of the website; and target advertisements which may be of particular interest to specific users.
Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies, or delete existing cookies—for example:
1. in Internet Explorer (version 10) you can block cookies using the cookie handling override settings available by clicking “Tools,” “Internet Options,” “Privacy,” and then “Advanced”;
2. in Firefox (version 24) you can block all cookies by clicking “Tools,” “Options,” “Privacy,” selecting “Use custom settings for history” from the drop-down menu, and unticking “Accept cookies from sites”; and
3. in Chrome (version 29), you can block all cookies by accessing the “Customise and control” menu, and clicking “Settings,” “Show advanced settings,” and “Content settings,” and then selecting “Block sites from setting any data” under the “Cookies” heading.

Blocking all cookies will have a negative impact upon the usability of many websites. If you block cookies, you will not be able to use all the features on our website. Deleting cookies will have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.

Service providers & third party websites

We may employ third party companies and individuals to provide necessary services for our website (including hosting, maintaining, securing, analysing, and updating it). These third parties have access to your personal data only to perform these tasks on our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for any other purpose.
Our website includes hyperlinks to, and details of, third party websites. We also have affiliate marketing arrangements with services like Amazon Associates, HotelsCombined.com, and Booking.com, for which we earn a commission on qualifying purchases. We have no control over, and are not responsible for, the privacy policies and practices of third parties.

International data transfers

Information that we collect may be stored, processed in, and transferred between any of the countries in which we or our service providers operate in order to enable us to use the information in accordance with this policy.
Personal information that you publish on our website or submit for publication on our website may be available, via the internet, around the world. We cannot prevent the use or misuse of such information by others.
You expressly agree to the transfers of personal information described in this section.

Retaining personal information

Personal information that we process for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes. If you fill out one of our contact forms, your information will be stored in our WordPress website database indefinitely, and on our mail servers until such time as that email is deleted. It may also be stored in website backups. If you sign up for our mailing list (via MailChimp.com), your data will also be stored there indefinitely, or until such time as we make purges to unsubscribed members of our email list. Your non-PII may also be stored through cookies used by third party service providers.
We will retain documents (including electronic documents) containing personal data:
1. to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
2. if we believe that the documents may be relevant to any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings; and
3. in order to establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk).

Security of your personal information

We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent the loss, misuse, or alteration of your personal information.
We will store all the personal information you provide on our secure (password- and firewall-protected) servers.
All electronic financial transactions entered into through our website will be protected by encryption technology.
You acknowledge that the transmission of information over the internet is inherently insecure, and we cannot guarantee the security of data sent over the internet.

Your rights

Where required by applicable law, you may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you; provision of such information will be subject to your supplying appropriate evidence of your identity (usually two forms of government-issued photo identification).
We may withhold personal information that you request to the extent permitted by law.
You may instruct us at any time not to process your personal information for marketing purposes.
You will usually either expressly agree in advance to our use of your personal information for marketing purposes, or we will provide you with an opportunity to opt out of the use of your personal information for marketing purposes.

Disclosing personal information

We may disclose your personal information to any of our employees, officers, insurers, professional advisers, agents, suppliers, subcontractors, or to any member of our group of companies (this means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and all its subsidiaries) only as reasonably necessary for the purposes set out in this policy.

We may disclose your personal information:

to the extent that we are required to do so by law;
in connection with any ongoing or prospective legal proceedings;
in order to establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights (including providing information to others for the purposes of fraud prevention and reducing credit risk);
to the purchaser (or prospective purchaser) of any business or asset that we are (or are contemplating) selling; and
to any person who we reasonably believe may apply to a court or other competent authority for disclosure of that personal information where, in our reasonable opinion, such court or authority would be reasonably likely to order disclosure of that personal information.

Except as provided in this policy, we will not provide your personal information to third parties.

Amendments

We may update this policy from time to time by publishing a new version on our website. You should check this page occasionally to ensure you understand any changes to this policy. We may notify you of changes to this policy by email or through the private messaging system on our website.

Contacting us

If you have any questions or concerns about any of the above, please contact us.