Privacy Policy
The Independent Ghana hereafter referred to as (TIG) upholds a privacy policy compliant to General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR 2016/679.
I. The Information We Collect
We receive both information that is directly provided to us, such as personal information you provide when you visit the Services, and information that is passively or automatically collected from you, such as anonymous information collected from your browser or device. In this Privacy Policy, we refer to all of this as the “Information”.
1. Information You Provide To Us
At some Services, you can register, order products, express an opinion, subscribe to one of our services such as our online newsletters or text message alerts, or participate in one of our online forums or communities. In the course of these various offerings, we often seek to collect from you, various forms of information, such as: name, address, e-mail address, telephone number.
2. Information That is Passively or Automatically Collected
We, and our “Partners” third party service providers, advertisers, advertising networks and platforms, agencies, and distribution or other partners may use automated means to collect various types of Information about you, your computer or other device used to access, or in connection with, our Services. A representative, non-exhaustive list of the types of automatically collected information may include: network or Internet protocol address and type of browser you are using (e.g., Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer), the type of operating system you are using, (e.g., Microsoft Windows or Mac OS), the name of your Internet service provider and domains used by such providers, mobile network, device identifiers (such as an Apple IDFA or an Android Advertising ID), device settings, device attributes, browser settings, the web pages of the Services you have visited, Services visited before and after you visit a Service, the type of handheld or mobile device used to view the Service (e.g., iOS, Android), location information, and the content and advertisements you have accessed, seen, forwarded and/or clicked on. Please see our Section titled Cookies, and Other User and Ad-Targeting Technologies for more information about how the foregoing Information may be collected and used.
3. Information Collected By and From Social Media Services and Other Third Party Platforms
You also can engage with our content, such as video, applications, and other offerings, on or through social media services or other third party platforms, such as Facebook, or other third-party social media plug-ins, integrations and applications. When you engage with our content on or through social media services or other third party platforms, plug-ins, integrations or applications, you may allow us to have access to certain Information in your profile. This may include your name, e-mail address, photo, gender, birthday, location, an ID associated with the applicable third party platform or social media account user files, like photos and videos, your list of friends or connections, people you follow and/or who follow you, or your posts or “likes.” For a description on how social media services and other third party platforms, plug-ins, integrations or applications handle your information, please refer to their respective privacy policies and terms of use, which may permit you to modify your privacy settings.
When we interact with you through our content on third party websites, applications, integrations or platforms, we may obtain any information regarding your interaction with that content, such as content you have viewed and information about advertisements within the content you have been shown or may have clicked on.
II. How We Use the Information
We, along with our Partners, may use the Information to:
1. provide and communicate with you about the Services or your account with us,
2. fulfil your requests regarding the Services, including without limitation requests for newsletters and notifications,
3. communicate with you about other products, programs or services that we believe may be of interest to you,
4. enforce the legal terms (including without limitation our policies and terms of service) that govern your use of our Services, and/or for the purposes for which you provided the Information,
5. provide technical support for the Services,
6. prevent fraud or potentially illegal activities (including, without limitation, copyright infringement) on or through the Services,
7. protect the safety of our Users,
8. customize or personalize ads, offers and content made available to you based on your visits to and/or usage of the Services or other online or mobile websites, applications, platforms or services, and analyse the performance of those ads, offers and content, as well as your interaction with them,
9. perform analysis regarding how you use the Services or any part thereof,
When you provide information from your social media account, it can help enable us to do things like (1) give you exclusive content, (2) personalize your online experience with us within and outside our Services, (3) contact you through the social media service or directly by sending you the latest news, special offerings, and rewards, and (4) enable you to share your experience and content via social media services. When you provide information about yourself to us through an application, through our Services, or on social media services or other third party platforms, it may be publicly viewed by other members of these services and we cannot prevent further use of the information by third parties.
We or a Partner may use “cookies” or similar technologies to associate certain of the Information with a unique identifier that then associates the Information with your device or browser.
Sometimes, we may associate cookies with the Information, including de-identified, “hashed,” or anonymous versions of Information you have provided (such as during registration), in order to send or help our Partners send ads and offers based on your presumed interests or demographic information.
We may combine any of the Information we collect, for any of the above purposes, and may sometimes enhance the Information with other information that we obtain from third party sources. Please also be aware that if you choose to submit Information or content for publication (e.g., a letter to our editors, a posting to a blog or a discussion board, or a video), we may publish that Information and content, along with other Information about you (such as your name, screen name or location). Likewise, if you register and create a profile with our Service, the screen name you select as well as other content you submit to your profile (e.g., photos, comments, video, reviews) will be displayed publicly on the Service, is searchable, can be found by third parties and may be reused and redistributed by us in our sole discretion.
III. Information Sharing and Disclosure
We may disclose the Information as follows:
1. To service providers or Partners that we have engaged to perform business-related functions on our behalf. This may include service providers that: (a) conduct research and analytics; (b) create content; (c) provide customer, technical or operational support; (d) conduct or support marketing (such as email or advertising platforms); (e) fulfil orders and user requests; (f) host our services and forums; (g) maintain databases; (h) send or support online or mobile advertising; and (i) otherwise support our Services.
2. In response to legal process, for example, in response to a court order or a subpoena, a law enforcement or government agency’s request or similar request.
3. With third parties in order to investigate, prevent, or take action (in our sole discretion) regarding potentially illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to any person, us, or the Services, or violations of our policies, the law to verify or enforce compliance with the policies governing our Services.
4. We may transfer some or all of your Information if we, or one of our business units, undergoes a business transition, like a merger, acquisition by another company, or sale of all or part of our assets, or if a substantial portion of our or of a business unit’s assets is sold or merged in this way.
5. We may share the Information with unaffiliated Partners and third parties (e.g., our third party service providers, advertisers, advertising networks and platforms, agencies, other marketers, magazine publishers, retailers, participatory databases, and non-profit organizations) that wish to market products or services to you.
Please note that the Services covered by this Privacy Policy may offer content (e.g., contests, sweepstakes, promotions, applications, or social network integrations) that is sponsored by or co-branded with identified third parties. By virtue of these relationships, the third parties may obtain information from their visitors. We have no control over these third parties’ use of this information, which is subject to their own privacy policies.
IV. Cookies and Other User and Ad-Targeting Technologies.
We use cookies and other technologies both to provide our Services to you and to advertise to you. We also may work with Partners to help them advertise to you when you visit other websites or mobile applications, and to help them perform user analytics. These technologies may also be used to analyse how our Users interact with advertising on our Services and elsewhere, and more generally, to learn more about our Users and what services or offers you might prefer to receive. We describe some of these technologies below.
1. Cookies.
To enhance your online experience, we and our Partners use “cookies” or other tracking technologies. Cookies are text files placed in your computer’s browser to store your preferences. We use cookies or other tracking technologies to understand Service and Internet usage and to improve or customize the products, content, offerings, services or advertisements on our Services. For example, we may use cookies to personalize your experience at our Services (e.g., to recognize you by name when you return to a Service), save your password in password-protected areas, and enable you to use shopping carts on our Services. We or a third party platform with whom we work may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser to enable you to receive customized content, offers, services or advertisements on our Services or other sites. These cookies contain no information intended to identify you personally. The cookies may be associated with de-identified demographic or other data linked to or derived from data you voluntarily have submitted to us (e.g., your email address) that we may share with a service provider solely in hashed, non-human readable form.
We, our third party service providers, advertisers, advertising networks and platforms, agencies, or our Partners also may use cookies or other tracking technologies to manage and measure the performance of advertisements displayed on or delivered by or through other networks or Services. This also helps us, our service providers and Partners provide more relevant advertising.
2. Syncing Cookies and Identifiers.
We may work with our Partners (for instance, third party ad platforms) to synchronize unique, anonymous identifiers (such as those associated with cookies) in order to match our Partners’ uniquely coded user identifiers to our own. We may do this, for instance, to enhance data points about a particular unique browser or device, and thus enable us or others to send ads that are more relevant, match Users to their likely product interests, or better synchronize, cap, or optimize advertising.
3. Disabling Cookies
Most web browsers are set up to accept cookies. You may be able to set your browser to warn you before accepting certain cookies or to refuse certain cookies. However, if you disable the use of cookies in your web browser, some features of the Services may be difficult to use or inoperable.
We may work with certain third-party companies that use techniques other than HTTP cookies to recognize your computer or device and/or to collect and record information about your web surfing activity, including those integrated with our Services. Please keep in mind that your web browser may not permit you to block the use of these techniques, and those browser settings that block conventional cookies may have no effect on such techniques.
4. Mobile Device Identifiers and SDKs.
We also sometimes use, or partner with publishers, publisher-facing, or app developer platforms that use mobile Software Development Kits (“SDKs”), or use an SDK with a mobile app that we offer, to collect Information, such as mobile identifiers (e.g., IDFAs and Android Advertising IDs), and Information connected to how mobile devices interact with our Services and those using our Services. The SDK is a bit of computer code that app developers can include in their apps to enable ads to be shown, data to be collected, and related services or analytics to be performed. We may use this technology to deliver or help our Partners deliver certain advertising through mobile applications and browsers based on information associated with your mobile device. If you’d like to opt-out from having ads tailored to you in this way on your mobile device, please follow the instructions in the “Your Ad Choices” section below.
By visiting the Service, whether as a registered user or otherwise, you acknowledge, and agree that you are giving us your consent to track your activities and your use of the Service through the technologies described above, as well as similar technologies developed in the future, and that we may use such tracking technologies in the emails we send to you.
Our unaffiliated Partners and third parties may themselves set and access their own tracking technologies when you visit our Services and they may have access to information about you and your online activities over time and across different websites or applications when you use the Service. Their use of such tracking technologies is not in our control and is subject to their own privacy policies.
V. Your Ad Choices
Advertising enables us to provide the rich content for which Services and to provide much of this content free of cost to our Users. Thus, we strive to provide you with ads that are relevant to you and for products you may want.
However, we also offer you choices with regard to interest-based ads.
When using a mobile application you may receive tailored in-application advertisements. Depending on your device, you may be able to reset your mobile device’s advertising identifier at any time by accessing the privacy settings on your mobile device. In addition, each operating system, iOS for Apple phones, Android for Android devices and Windows for Microsoft devices, provides its own instructions on how to prevent the delivery of tailored in-application advertisements. You may review the support materials and/or the privacy settings for the respective operating systems in order to opt-out of tailored in-application advertisements. For any other devices and/or operating systems, please visit the privacy settings for the applicable device or contact (or review the applicable privacy web page of) the applicable platform operator.
VI. Other Important Information About Your Privacy
1. Linked Services
Some of the Services contain links to or integrations with other services such as Facebook, Twitter and other media services and platforms whose information practices may be different than ours. Visitors should consult these other services’ privacy notices as we have no control over information that is submitted to, or collected by, these third parties.
2. Data Security
We have put in place physical, electronic, and managerial procedures designed to help prevent unauthorized access, to maintain data security, and to use correctly the Information we collect online. These safeguards vary based on the sensitivity of the Information that we collect and store.
Although we take appropriate measures to safeguard against unauthorized disclosures of Information, we cannot assure you that Information will never be disclosed, altered or destroyed in a manner that is inconsistent with this Privacy Policy.
3. How You Can Access or Correct Information
Access to certain personal Information that is collected from our Services and that we maintain may be available to you. For example, if you created a password-protected account within our Service, you can access that account to review the Information you provided. You may also send an e-mail or letter to the following e-mail or street address requesting access to or correction of your personal Information.
4. How to Contact Us/Opting Out of Marketing Communications
If you have any questions or concerns about the online Privacy Policy for this Service or its implementation, or if you would like to opt out from our sharing of your personal Information with unaffiliated third parties for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes you may contact our Privacy Policy Coordinator at the above address and request that we opt you out of such sharing. We may ask you to provide additional information for identity verification purposes, or to verify that you are in possession of an applicable email account.
If you have signed up to receive our e-mails and prefer not to receive marketing information from this Service, follow the “unsubscribe” instructions provided on any marketing e-mail you receive from this Service. If you have signed up to receive text messages from us and no longer wish to receive such messages, you may follow the instructions to stop the delivery of such messages, which may include by replying “STOP” to the received text message.
VII. Updates & Effective Date
From time to time, we may update this Privacy Policy. We will notify you about material changes by either sending an email message to the email address you most recently provided to us or by prominently posting a notice on our Service. We encourage you to periodically check back and review this policy so that you always will know what information we collect, how we use it, and with whom we share it.