The Free Software Store - Privacy Policy and Disclaimer

You can find a full, formal statement of the policies we operate The Free Software Store under at left.

But here's what they boil down to in a nutshell:

We adhere to the Australian Government's Information Privacy Principles, which means that we don't spy on our visitors and respect your right to anonymity
We also abide by the Australian Spam Act 2003, which means we don't spam and we don't do business with anyone who does
Companies who serve ads on our site may track users using cookies or web beacons, but this is only to help serve targeted ads that may be of interest to you. In general, our ad-serving partners have the same attitude to privacy and spam that we do. And you can read their own privacy and anti-spam policies on their own web sites
We try to be as fair, impartial and accurate as we can with our software reviews. But if you believe we have something wrong (eg: a feature, a link etc) you're most welcome to email us about it at any time. We'll happily amend anything which is in error.

This statement sets out The Free Software Store's policies relating to the privacy of your personal information:

Briefly, The Free Software Store's web site is operated in compliance with the Australian Government's Information Privacy Principles which are outlined at http://www.privacy.gov.au

Our web site collects the following information from users:

A record of each visit that logs the following information for statistical purposes: a visitor's IP address, the date and time of their visit, pages accessed and/or documents downloaded and the type of browser used. No attempt is or will be made to identify users or their browsing activities except in the unlikely event of an investigation where a law enforcement agency may exercise a warrant to inspect our service provider's logs. The information collected by our web server is analysed at the end of each month purely to determine our web site's usage statistics.
The Free Software Store retains the e-mail addresses of people who send emails to us through our web site for the purpose of sending them a response. These email addresses are stored in a secure area of our internal network (ie not on our website) and will not be used for any other purpose nor disclosed to any third party without consent.
People who submit email addresses, web sites or other information for registration on our web site are agreeing to have them published on our web site by doing so. We will, however, remove or modify any submitted email address, web site URL or other supplied information on request.

Please note that The Free Software Store's site contains links to a number of other web sites that are included on the basis of containing content related to the Free Software Store's operations and/or as a service to our online visitors. When a visitor clicks on a link to another site, they leave our own web site and are no longer protected by our Privacy Policy.

This privacy statement is periodically reviewed in line with the ongoing development of our web site and/or changes to Australian privacy laws.

We use third-party advertising companies - primarily Google Adsense - to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you.

If you'd like more information about this practice and would like to know your options in relation to·not having this information used by these companies, click here.

This statement sets out The Free Software Store's policies relating to spam (ie unsolicited commercial email):

The Free Software Store's web site is operated in compliance with the Australian Spam Act 2003, which may be viewed online at a variety of locations (just search Google for the Act's name).

In a nutshell, we don't send out any spam emails. Nor do we do business with any individual or company which does. And we'd encourage all our visitors to do likewise.

The Free Software Store also uses anti-spam filtering on our emails and we report any Australian who spams us to the proper authorities on receipt of their spam.

Again, we encourage our visitors to do likewise in countries which have equivalent legislation to Australia; or to request that legislators enact similar legislation to Australia's in countries which don't yet have anti-spam laws, or to toughen existing laws up to Australian anti-spam standards where existing anti-spam laws are weak.

The information presented in The Free Software Store is the result of personal, original research carried out by us and is - to the best of our knowledge - fair and true at the time of original publication.

In addition, any comments or other observations we might make about individual items of software that are reviewed on our site are our own personal observations and are made for the purpose of fair criticism as part of the overall critique process that we apply to all the software and/or software-related resources listed on our site.

Nonetheless, we recognise that the Internet and software development are dynamic mediums and that what may be true, fair and accurate one day may not be so at a future time. This might be due to the evolution of particular product; to an oversight or error on our part; or to any other number of factors.

This being so, if you feel that we've listed any software product inaccurately and/or unfairly or that our link(s) to that product are wrong or broken, we invite you to email us to discuss the matter. We're always happy to amend any listing where we're appraised that some or all of the information we carry about it may be incorrect.

All editorial content on our site is re-reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that it remains as up to date and accurate as possible. The date when these review updates were last carried out is shown on each page's footer (see immediately below).

This page last updated: 19-Aug-2008