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Your privacy and creative rights

Your creative work and rights: Your work is not uploaded to the Qwyre server until you authorise it, and nothing will be saved on our servers unless you expressly decide to monetize your work via the app. You maintain complete control of the build process. You are not giving up any of your rights over your work, and Qwyre is not acting as an agent, publisher, or distributor on your behalf. This is a free service for writers, and respects your property.

Qwyre.com ("our site" or "this site") is owned and operated by Whythawk, a data science consultancy specialising in open data and open access research.

Whythawk works in the field of data transparency and accountability. We care very much about the privacy and security of our users, and believe that personal privacy is critical for trust between ourselves and those who use our services. We expect similar consideration from the users of our site.

Please read these site terms of use and privacy policy carefully before using our site. By using our site, you automatically agree to all of these terms. Whythawk may revise these terms from time to time. If you continue to use our site after we post changes to these terms, it will mean that you accept those changes.

We hope these terms cover everything you need to know, but if you still have any questions please feel free to contact us.

Your creative work

You, or the original licensors, retain ownership of any creative work uploaded to Qwyre.com as part of your use of this site. These creative materials may include, without limitation, text, photographs and other images or graphics, video and audio. Your use of this site in no way grants Whythawk, or Qwyre.com, the right to use or re-use your creative work except for the limited and specific purpose of supporting your conversion of your creative work into the EPUB e-book file format, or for streaming your work to readers for the purposes of monetizing it on your behalf. The EPUB format is defined and maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum.

You also declare that any and all creative work uploaded to this site are:

  • your own, or that you possess all necessary rights to upload these materials to this site,
  • do not, and will not, infringe, misappropriate, use or disclose without appropriate authorisation, or violate any intellectual property or proprietary right of any other party,
  • not unlawful, fraudulent, collusive, threatening, abusive, libellous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise unethical.

None of the creative work uploaded to this service, whether for conversion or streaming and monetization, will be subject to any requirement or duty of confidentiality, attribution or otherwise, by this site and we will not be liable for any use or disclosure of any of the creative materials.

Aside from conversion of your creative work into a standards compliant EPUB or streaming file formats, this site will not deliberately edit text or images, replace content, or alter or remove any material. Any such redactions are likely to be inadvertent and a consequence of standards compliance errors during the conversion process.

This site is not an online data storage service and, on completion of the conversion of your creative work into an EPUB, all references and data uploaded to our servers will be deleted. You are responsible for the secure storage and distribution of your creative work. This also holds where we maintain a copy of your work for streaming distribution.

Qwyre.com reserves the right to publicise your use of Qwyre.com to generate your EPUB on the colophon and title pages of your work should you choose to use our DOCX to EPUB conversion service.

Your email address

As with any other email, any and all email addresses sent to us as a result of correspondence, or saved as a consequence of you creating an account, results in us holding your email address and, if provided, your name, along with the content of your message.

Your email address will not be used or collected for the purposes of reselling to a third party and will not be added to a bulk emailing list.

Should you sign up to Qwyre.com - and you do not need to do so to access our services - we will only send you emails relating to an alert you have signed up for, or for other reasons that you specifically authorise.

Should you create an account on this site, you do not need to provide an email address. However, should you lose access to your account then recognise that there is no way for you to regain access to it if you have not provided an email address as well. Ordinarily, this would only be a problem if you have purchased a membership associated with that account.

Before you can act as an author or editor on this site, you will be required to provide an email address, and your control of this email address will be validated. This is to ensure good-faith interactions between parties.

We will never give or sell your email addresses to anyone else, unless we are obliged to by law, or you ask us to.

Your IP address

The IP address associated with your use of this site (which may or may not be sufficient to identify you, depending on circumstances), is recorded automatically to our logs. It will not normally be seen by anyone.

In addition to the information you may give us about yourself in order to use the site (such as your name and email address), we collect and log some additional information in order to analyse and fix problems with the site.

Our webserver logs maintain a history of page requests. This includes information about requests, including the client IP address, data submitted (which might include your email address when you log on to the site), request date and time, page requested, browser version and referrer. We routinely keep this information for 60 days. Note that in normal circumstances, this data is infrequently accessed by a human, and when it is, they are likely to be assessing it in bulk, in order to understand an issue with the site, rather than at a granular level of individual users.

We do not share IP addresses with anyone else unless required to by law (for example in the course of a police investigation for which a court order has been received).

We anonymise all IP addresses prior to saving any user activity logged for the express purpose of understanding and analysing your interaction with our content, and to share with stakeholders and potential advertisers.

By way of example, if your IP address were '69.63.191.207', we first assess the location for that IP at the country level. After identifying this geography, we immediately redact the last octet to '69.63.191.0' and hash the result, yielding a random 24 digit code, such as 'T2V1kPkdNLQS5L9Ha2jIzvL3'.

This hashed code is then used to track user activity. Note: this IP hashing approach applies also to logged-in users. Your individual activity is never tracked.

What we track

We track three things:

  • The country where your IP address is based,
  • The specific pages on this site which you visit,
  • The subject topics and search terms with which you may interact.

Our objective is to understand the type of work our users create, as well as the geographic distribution of our users.

We are subject to EU tax law, and are required to collect the country of origin for any payments so that we may pay appropriate Value Added Tax (VAT).

Cookies, Browser Storage, and Advertising

We do not present advertising on this site and all content is served directly by our servers and is not referred via any third-parties. For this reason, we only need to store a small number of cookies on your computer. Each cookie is really just a random string of characters, and none are required unless you choose to connect your Coil account to Qwyre to stream micropayments.

In that case, the cookies are there to protect your safety from fraudulent cross-site attacks (sometimes called 'man-in-the-middle' attacks). These cookies hold the token, and refresh token, required to transfer payments.

No other cookies are presented by this site, and we do not host third-party trackers or advertisers.

Your browser supports a database, called IndexedDB, which this site uses to store all the works in your library, including both EPUBs and streaming works. You can view this list by clicking on the library link in the menu bar. Should you delete a work there, it is automatically removed from the database as well. This is necessary to ensure that your work is available to read offline.

Your site membership

You are under no obligation to create an account or pay anything towards the upkeep and maintenance of this service. Should you choose to do so, and should you provide additional information about yourself, our access to that information will be subject to your ongoing consent.

You may withdraw your consent at any time and delete your account.

If you purchase any service or provide a financial contribution to this site then, as part of our company and fiduciary responsibilities, we will store details of your payment and indirectly associate this with your account. Such data will include your email address and actual IP address, as well as the works you are streaming, and the current extent of the works you have streamed.

If you choose to withdraw consent and delete your account, note that you are also ending your membership and forfeiting any fees paid and benefits of that membership.

Deleting your account is irreversible.

Payments

We use two third-party processors - Coil and Stripe to support payments on this site. The processing of payments will be subject to the terms, conditions and privacy policies of the payment processor in addition to our site terms.

We are not responsible for any error by the payment processor. By choosing to use paid services, you agree to pay us, through the payment processor, all charges at the prices then in effect for any use of our paid services in accordance with the applicable payment terms and you authorise us, through the payment processor, to charge your chosen payment provider.

You agree to make payment using that selected payment method. We reserve the right to correct any errors or mistakes that it makes even if it has already requested or received payment.

No card payment details are stored in our database. Our payment processor provides a one-time token which we use to process payment. On conclusion of the transaction, that token cannot be used again. Any repeated payments (such as for an annual membership) will require your direct authentication and authorisation each time.

In choosing to make use of this site, you are consenting to your data being processed as described on this page. The legal basis for processing your data, as a user of this site, is your consent as laid out in 6(1)(a) of the GDPR, in force from 25 May 2018.

Your rights

You have the right to delete your account at any time. Doing so will automatically delete everything we know about you.

You have the right to know what personal data we hold about you. If you have an account and are logged in, everything we know will always be presented on your profile and library pages. If you do not have an account, we do not know anything about you as an individual and hold no personal data on you.

You have the right to complain if you believe that we have mishandled your personal data. The relevant supervisory body is the Information Commissioner's Office. You can report a concern directly, but please contact us first, so that we may try and resolve your concern.

Use of materials on this site

Whythawk maintains this site for your personal information, education, and communication. Please feel free to browse our site. All materials on our site, including but not limited to artwork, photographs, graphics, data collections, methods of analysis, ratings, text and trademarks, are the property of Whythawk or its licensors. The exclusive rights to all materials on this site are protected by international laws of copyright, trademark and unfair competition.

You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, modify, display, prepare derivative works based on, republish, transmit, repost or otherwise use Whythawk or Qwyre trademarks or symbols without prior written authorization from Whythawk.

With that stated, all content presented on this site is made available to you under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. You are allowed to:

  • Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
  • Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially

In return, you must:

  • Provide attribution — You must give appropriate credit to us and our data sources, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests this site, or Whythawk, endorses you or your use of our content or this site.
  • Not add any restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything this license permits.

This is a summary of the full Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence and is not a substitute for it.

Limitations on Whythawk's liability

The materials on this site are provided solely for informational purposes and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any commercial services. Your use and browsing of this site is at your own risk.

While unlikely, the materials could include technical inaccuracies or other errors. They are provided to you "as is" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to, warranties of merchantability, non-infringement of intellectual property, and fitness for a particular purpose.

Whythawk does not warrant that the functions contained in this site's materials will be uninterrupted or error-free, that defects will be corrected, or that our site or the server that makes it available are free of viruses or other harmful components. Whythawk does not warrant or make any representations regarding the use or the results of the use of the materials on our site in terms of their correctness, accuracy, reliability, or otherwise. You (and not Whythawk) assume the entire cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.

Applicable law may not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so the above exclusion may not apply to you. Under no circumstances, including, but not limited to, negligence, shall Whythawk be liable for any damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of profits, business interruption, loss of information) arising out of or in connection with the use of, or inability to use, the materials on our site, even if Whythawk or a Whythawk-authorized representative has been advised of the possibility of such damages. Applicable law may not allow the limitation or exclusion of liability or incidental or consequential damages, so the above limitation may not apply to you. In no event shall Whythawk's total liability to you for all damages, losses, and causes of action, including but not limited to negligence, arising out of or in connection with your use of this site, exceed the amount paid by you, if any, for accessing this site.

Security

This site has security measures in place to protect against the loss, misuse and alteration of the information under our control. However, your confidential use of this site cannot be guaranteed by Whythawk. Whythawk shall not be responsible for any harm that you or any person may suffer as the result of a breach of confidentiality with respect to information you transmitted to the site.

Whythawk has not reviewed all of the sites linked to this site and is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of any off-site pages or any other sites linked to this site, whether or not they are affiliated with Whythawk. Such linked sites are for your convenience only and you access them at your own risk. Whythawk makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or functioning of any such link. That another web site is linked to our site does not constitute endorsement by Whythawk of the owner of the other site, the content of its site, or its products or services.

General provisions

The materials on Qwyre.com are presented solely for educational and promotional purposes. Whythawk may make changes to this site at any time without notice. Whythawk does not warrant or represent that materials on our site are appropriate or available for use outside England and Wales. If you choose to access our site from other locations, you do so at your own initiative and you are responsible for complying with local laws, if and to the extent local laws are applicable. Whythawk reserves the right to deny access to the site to anyone at any time. These terms shall be governed by and construed according to the laws of the UK, as they are applied to agreements entered into and to be performed entirely within the UK. Any claim or cause of action arising out of or relating to these terms shall be barred unless such claim or cause of action is brought within one year after it arises; any such claim or cause of action shall be brought only in courts in the UK, and you consent to jurisdiction of such courts for the purpose of litigating such actions. Whenever possible, each provision of these terms shall be interpreted in such manner as to be effective and valid under applicable law, but if any provision is deemed prohibited or invalid under applicable law, such provision shall be ineffective to the extent of such prohibition or invalidity without invalidating the remainder of such provisions or the remaining provisions of these terms.

This is the entire agreement between us relating to your use of this site. These terms may not be modified by you, in writing or otherwise, unless agreed to in a written document signed by Whythawk. You represent and warrant to Whythawk that you are at least eighteen (18) years old and that you possess the legal right and ability to enter into this agreement and to use the site in accordance with this agreement.

Acknowledgements and references

  • "Landing" page image courtesy of Pierre-Yves Beaudouin via Wikimedia Commons
  • "404" page image courtesy of George Brits via Unsplash
  • "Support us" page image courtesy of Aaron Burden via Unsplash