Legal privacy policy
We have strong views on privacy as a company and respect your basic human right to privacy. All staff are required to respect your privacy, by contract, legislation and company policy. What you do on the internet is not our concern.
Accountability
Privacy does not mean that you can carry out criminal activities. We will co-operate with police where required and provide information we have. We have no choice in this.
It is also important to realise that, as part of your contract with us, your contact details are published in internet registries for IP addressing and domain names unless you ask us not to. This is part of the way the internet works and provides some accountability for people's actions on the internet. You can ask us to provide reduced or alternative contact details. These registries are careful to make it difficult for anyone to make databases of contact details from this data whilst still allowing individual lookups when tracing problems with the operation of the internet.
Snooping
As with any internet connection it is technically possible for our staff to see information as it flows through the internet via our routers and see emails and other information flowing through our servers. This is only available to relevant technical staff and such monitoring or investigation is only carried out for operational reasons or at your request. Staff will not act on or disclose the information they encounter. Naturally our staff cannot read encrypted traffic, and neither can anyone else but you and the other party to the communication. We recommend routine use of encryption wherever possible as the internet itself is not intended to be a secure medium.
Our service does have a facility to obtain a 10 second packet header dump for your DSL lines from the control pages. This specifically only includes packet headers and not any content.
Black boxes
We have no equipment designed to provide any routine snooping or monitoring. There are no so called black boxes monitoring and passing any communications data or information to third parties or the government. There are no transparent proxies monitoring your internet activity. The director is happy to confirm this remains the case on the IRC channel at any time, and it is up to you what you infer if he refuses to do so at any point in the future. Note that we can only say this about our network and you should generally assume the internet is not a secure medium.
Statistics and graphs
Naturally there are several statistics that are collected at various points in the network. These are packet and byte counts and stats on ports in the network as well as specific per session stats for DSL and Ethernet lines. We make most of these statistics available to you for your line. We don't provide any line specific statistics to anyone else without your permission. Statistics are not generally personal or private in any way. The most detailed stats are the usage graphs which aggregate data to 100 second samples. We may provide general stats per IP address for your use at some point.
We do allow BT or carriers to see graphs and statistics for lines to assist them in diagnosing faults.
Logging
We have various logs of the use of our servers in addition to basic statistics as shown above. These include dates and times and operational data such as server names, etc. They also include some data that may be considered personal information as below. Note that there are no logs if you do not use the relevant servers. e.g. If you send email directly using MX records, or receive mail directly via SMTP then we will have no logs of your email at all. We do not carry our any deep packet inspection to derive logs or your activities from your IP packets.
- Web sites you visit: We do not log web sites you visit. The web site owner will have logs of your IP and requested URL, etc. Web sites you operate on our web server have logs which you can control. These log other people's access to the server with IP, and requesting URL.
- Email you send: We log emails sent with sender and recipient and size and subject line. Only if sent via our mail servers. The content is not logged.
- Email you receive: We log emails received with sender and recipient and size and subject line. Only if received via our email servers. The content is not logged. Emails left on server and held in IMAP mailboxes are held until you delete them. The police could request copies of emails in your mailbox if investigating a crime.
- Telephone calls: Calls you make and receive are logged with calling and called number and duration and if the call worked, etc, as shown on your bill.
- Call recordings: If you request a call recording we do not keep a copy of this ourselves but email it to you immediately (see above re emails in mailboxes). Other than such call recordings made at the request of the customer we do not monitor or record your calls in any way. Remember, when making or receiving any call the other party could be recording the call.
- Text: Texts you send and receive are logged with sending and recipient numbers and content. When sending texts via the API you can request the content is encrypted in the logs. These are included on your bill in the XML data.
- RADIUS: RADIUS logs show when lines connected and disconnected and basic usage stats. Your logs are available to you on the control pages and deleted after a few months. We also hold PPP negotiation logs for all lines for debug purposes and these are also held for a few months.
- Bills: Bills are all kept indefinitely including attached call logs and attachments as you may request a copy of a bill at any time.
There may be occasions where we have additional debug/logging on a server for operational reasons as a temporary measure. Customers volunteering for test systems and beta tests agree to us temporarily logging much more data for debugging the systems under test.
We have not been notified that we are subject to the Data Retention Directive, and consider that it provides for very little useful logging in any case. The police can demand access to logs if investigating a crime. We generally keep logs for several months before they are deleted.
Data protection
Personal data we hold on you is made available to you in various ways via web interfaces and as such there is no reason for anyone to make a data subject access request. Should you wish to send one we will supply most data by reference to control pages, bills, etc, which hold data.
We hold your contact and bank details for billing purposes.
We hold contact details for service installations such as DSL or Ethernet. We hold these indefinitely in case we have to dispute anything with carriers and suppliers.
Access to personal information, such as billing details and bank details, is via secure web server access with authorised users from restricted IP address ranges to maintain security. Backups of accounting data are to an encrypted file server via encrypted communications.
