1. Sign our petition calling on Cochrane to withdraw their review of Exercise Therapy for CFS here.
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Privacy Policy

We are Science for ME ("we", "our", "us"). We’re committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. If you have questions about your personal information please contact us.

What information we hold about you

The type of data that we collect and process includes:

  • Your name or username.
  • Your email address.
  • Your IP address.

Further data may be collected if you choose to share it, such as if you fill out fields on your profile. Including:

  • Date of Birth
  • Location
  • Occupation
  • Status
  • Profile information
  • Home Page
  • Any twitter, facebook, AIM, Skype, ICQ and Yahoo Messenger addresses

We collect some or all of this information in the following cases:

  • You register as a member on this site.
  • You fill out our contact form.
  • You browse this site. See "Cookie policy" below.
  • You fill out fields on your profile.

How your personal information is used

We may use your personal information in the following ways:

  • For the purposes of making you a registered member of our site, in order for you to contribute content to this site.
  • We may use your email address to inform you of activity on our site.
    • Emails to all members opting in to site wide emails
    • Informing you when you receive a personal message
    • Informing you when a thread you watch has new posts
    • Occasionally a moderator or admin may contact you via email if members are concerned about you.
  • Your IP address is recorded when you perform certain actions on our site. Your IP address is never publicly visible.

Emails and IP addresses will only be accessible to the administrators and moderation team. They will keep this information private.

Information shared with moderators will be kept to the private moderator sub-forum. Threads here will be archived every 6 months and then deleted after a further year from the time that the issue is resolved. This information will be kept private by moderators and administrators.

If you agree to share your date of birth then this information will be used to post a birthday thread on your birthday within the birthday sub-forum. This happens automatically and will stop if you choose not to share the month and date of birth.

Settings can be controlled on your profile page

Other ways we may use your personal information.

In addition to notifying you of activity on our site which may be relevant to you, from time to time we may wish to communicate with all members any important information such as newsletters or announcements by email. You can opt-in to or opt-out of such emails in your profile.

We may collect non-personally identifiable information about you in the course of your interaction with our site. This information may include technical information about the browser or type of device you're using. This information will be used purely for the purposes of analytics and tracking the number of visitors to our site.

Forum Posts

We consider information posted as published by your choice and therefore not private. In general, we will not delete posted messages. But if you or others post too much personal information that could lead to your identity being disclosed we will, at your request, remove or edit posts to remove this identifying information. In this case please contact a moderator with links to the information you are uncomfortable with. We will not search through posts to identify such information.

User Names

If you sign up with a username that identifies you or later a pseudonym is linked to your identity, we can change your user name. We consider this as something that will only be done in exceptional circumstances to protect an individual’s privacy. This will not remove references to you that others have made. If this is the case please contact a moderator or administrator.

Account Removal

Given the right to be forgotten specified within the GDPR we will, on request to a moderator, delete an account. This will involve removing the information within the account profile such as email addresses and IP addresses. As we do this we will rename the account to guest_. Prior to account deletion we will get you to confirm that you wish this to happen as we will have no way to reinstate the account. We cannot stop others reusing a user name.

Account removal does not involve the removal of content posted on threads. However, if there is specific personal information you are concerned about we can remove personal information that you identify to us. (See forum posts section above).

We can also suspend an account making it a guest account if you may wish to come back at some later point.

We reserve the right to maintain account information that has been collected with consent if it is necessary for the smooth running of the forum.

Different Forum Areas

Most areas of the forum are public and are indexed and searchable through Google, Bing and other search engines. They are visible to guests.

Members only sub-forums are marked as such and are not searchable by search engines but are accessible to all members. We would remind members that we do not vet new members. This means many people will have access to this information.

S4ME has some private sub-forums. These are only accessible to named members who the person controlling the sub-forum has invited. Depending on the particular sub-forum, moderators may or may not have access but reserve the right to access in case of a complaint.

S4ME allows for conversations (often referred to as PMs) between individual members or groups of members. These are private between those involved the conversation; moderators or others cannot view the content of the conversations unless they are invited to join. If a conversation contains inappropriate content and a member complains, the content may be shared with moderators or the member can invite a moderator into the conversation to deal with the issue.

There is an expectation that members will not make information that could be reasonably considered private, public. Members revealing the private information of another member with the intention to cause harm are likely to face sanctions. However, as we cannot prevent members from revealing private information gained from private forums and conversations, you should take this into account when considering the information you share.

Keeping your data secure

We are committed to ensuring that any information you provide to us is secure. In order to prevent unauthorized access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable measures and procedures to safeguard and secure the information that we collect.

Data is backed up by our server provider and a weekly encrypted backup is kept off-line. Off line backups will be kept for a month and then deleted.

Cookie policy

Cookies are small text files which are set by us on your computer which allow us to provide certain functionality on our site, such as being able to log in, or remembering certain preferences.

We have a detailed cookie policy and more information about the cookies that we set on this page.

Rights

You have a right to access the personal data we hold about you or obtain a copy of it. To do so please contact us. If you believe that the information we hold for you is incomplete or inaccurate, you may contact us to ask us to complete or correct that information.

You also have the right to request the erasure of your personal data. Please contact us if you would like us to remove your personal data.

Acceptance of this policy

Continued use of our site signifies your acceptance of this policy. If you do not accept the policy then please do not use this site. When registering we will further request your explicit acceptance of the privacy policy.

If you are already a user of the site and do not or no longer agree to the privacy policy please request that your account is deleted.

Changes to this policy

We may make changes to this policy at any time. You may be asked to review and re-accept the information in this policy if it changes in the future.