Indian Commoner Privacy Policy 

This Privacy Policy of Indian Commoner Website (the “Indian Commoner”, “we” “us” or “our”) outlines how your personally identifiable information and other personal data will be collected, used, and shared in connection with your access to and/or use of [insert website link] (the “Website”) and any content, features, services, or other offerings that the Website may provide in connection therewith. This Privacy Policy also describes your choices and rights regarding the use, access and correction or deletion of your user information. 

This Privacy Statement does not apply to information collected by any third party, including through any application or content (including advertising) that may link to or be accessible from or on the Website.

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully to understand our policies and practices regarding your Information (as defined below) and how we will treat it. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, your choice is not to use the Website. By accessing or using the Website, you agree and consent to the use of your Information (as defined below) in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you are located in the EU, you will also be asked to provide clear and unequivocal affirmative consent to the collection, processing, and sharing of your user information via cookies and similar technologies. 

Notice to EU Individuals: This Privacy Policy and its enumerated policies are intended to comply with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 (“GDPR”) and provide appropriate protection and care with respect to the treatment of your Information (as defined below) in accordance with the GDPR. 

Information We Collect About You

  1. Personal Information – This includes information through which you may be personally identified, such as name, email address and contact details collected via our Website (“Personal Information”)
  2. Non-Personal Information – This includes information that alone cannot be used to identify or contact you. Such Non-Personal Information may include but is not limited to, browser information and details, operating system information, mobile device information, pages accessed, times of visit and referring websites, applications or services including relevant search queries that led you to our services (“Non-Personal Information”)

Collectively, Personal Information and Non-Personal Information shall be referred to as “Information”. 

Indian Commoner is committed to your privacy and will not share any Information with any third party without your consent, except as outlined in this Privacy Policy or as permitted by law. If you have any requests, comments, or questions about this Privacy Policy or your user information, please contact us in the manner provided below.

Purpose

The Website is promoted and jointly maintained by Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) and Centre for Social Ecology (CenSE) to provide a web platform to enable individuals and organizations from various communities to interact and exchange their ideas and views from different walks of life. 

The legal basis for collecting and processing your Information is for the purpose of meeting our legitimate interests. The Personal Information is used for us to create an account with us to enable members to exchange ideas and contribute by way of publishing posts/ articles or upload any texts, images, photographs, videos/podcasts, audio files, links or shares his/her comments, views and opinions on the Website.

FES and CenSE are not-for-profit charitable organizations and therefore, any Information that is collected and processed by us is for non-commercial purposes.

What this Privacy Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies only to individuals who have provided us any Information in order to create an account with the Indian Commoner. 

As a general reminder, please think carefully before you decide to put anything on the internet. For example, if you voluntarily disclose any Personal Information in the comments sections, that information could be seen and used by others, and may result in unsolicited messages from others. We are not responsible for any Information you may choose to submit in these public forums. To request removal of your Personal Information from the Website, please contact us as provided below. In some cases, we may not be able to remove Personal Information voluntarily disclosed by you in such forums for legal retention purposes or technical limitations (e.g., the data may not be searchable), in which case, we will notify you if we are unable to do so. 

 Cookies

A cookie is a small data file that is written to your computer’s hard drive by your web browser. A cookie file can contain and/or automatically collect information, such as a user identification code or IP address that a website will use to track the pages and number of times you have visited. The data read from these cookies may be linked to personally identifying (PII) and non-personally identifying (non-PII) information.

Cookies fall into the subcategories below.

Essential Cookies: Certain cookies are used for specific purposes that are essential to your secure use and navigation of the Website. Without them, Indian Commoner may not be able to provide core Website functions and features to you, and the Website would not operate as well as you or we would like. These cookies collect and use information such as your server preferences, single-session data and corresponding identifier, web beacons and log files (detailed below), and other credential-related information. For EU individuals, essential cookies also help inform the users whether you require, or have already been served, an affirmative consent request in connection with the GDPR. Essential cookies include analytics cookies, which provide us data that allows us to better understand its users and improve the Website based on what we have learned from that data.

Preference Cookies: Preference cookies include social media cookies, which collect information about your social media usage and other data you may have provided in connection with such usage (if you access the Website through a social media website or mobile application, you may have social media cookies). If you wish to modify or change your social media cookies, please visit and review the settings on your applicable social media account(s).

Third Party Cookies: We use cookies from third party companies to provide us with insights about our Website, help us run targeting advertising campaigns, measure effectiveness of our advertising campaigns and to make the advertisements more relevant to you. These companies use cookies to collect information about your browsing activities on our Website, such as the pages you visit, the links you click, assets you download and how long you are on our Website. Based on your browsing of our Website you may see our advertisements while browsing through our advertisement partner websites and/or their network websites. 

If you would like to manage your cookie preferences or learn more information about this practice and your right to decline (or opt-out of) cookies placed by some or all of these companies, please click here.

We encourage you to consider keeping your cookies enabled, as if you choose to disable the receipt of cookies from our Website, you may not be able to use or benefit from certain features of the Website, particularly the features that are designed to personalize your experience. To learn more about the use of cookies in online advertising including how to manage or delete them click here.

Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but generally allow users to modify their browser settings to display a warning before accepting a cookie, to accept cookies only from certain websites, and/or to refuse all cookies.

Log Files

The Website’s web and ad servers log information about a user’s IP address, browser type and the current URL the user is requesting. This information is always provided by a user’s browser and automatically logged by most websites. These log files are stored in a secure location and used in our internal analysis of traffic patterns within our Website.

Use of Your Information

We use your Information for the following purposes:

  • to analyse users of the Website and the membership patterns
  • to provide better usability, troubleshooting and Website maintenance;
  • to understand which parts of the Website are visited and how frequently;
  • to create your username and password;
  • to identify you once you register on our Website;
  • to contact you and respond to your questions or requests; 
  • to provide access to desirable content based on your preferences.
  • to provide services to you, including mailing our newsletters to you. Please visit the Website to know more about our services.

Disclosure of your Information

We may disclose Personal Information that we collect or you provide as described below in this policy:

  • To our service providers, who provide services for us including but not limited to sending emails on our behalf, providing analytics services and helping us provide services as requested by users. Our service providers are bound by law or contract to protect Personal Information and are only allowed to use Personal Information in accordance with the terms of our service agreements with them. We do NOT share, sell, rent or trade Personal Information with third parties for their own promotional purposes and we will only share Personal Information as outlined herein or with your consent.

  • We may disclose your Personal Information if required to do so by law such as to comply with a subpoena or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to conform to the edicts of the law, protect your safety or the safety of others, investigate fraud or comply with a judicial proceeding, court order or legal process served on us or to protect and defend the rights or property of the Indian Commoner.

Access, correction, objection of your Information:

You have the right to access, correct, delete or transfer your Personal Information that we hold, including your profile and preferences. You also have the right to object to certain processing and, where we have asked for your consent to process your Personal Information, to withdraw this consent. Where we process your Personal Information because we have a legitimate interest in doing so (as explained above), you also have a right to object to this. These rights may be limited in some situations – for example, where we can demonstrate that we have a legal requirement to process your Personal Information.

You can assert your rights in the corresponding sections where such Personal Information was provided or by contacting us at [email id] 

Notice to EU Individuals: As outlined in this Privacy Policy, Indian Commoner will not process your Personal Information without a lawful basis to do so, as such bases are defined in Article 6 of the GDPR. In general, Indian Commoner will process your Personal Information on the legal bases of consent, contract (if you have entered into an agreement with us and such processing is a necessary part thereof), or legal obligation (as noted above). Indian Commoner may also process certain Personal Information on the basis of the following legitimate interests, provided that such interests are not overridden by your privacy rights and interests: delivering and continuing to develop and improve the Website, learning from your behavior on the Website (e.g., analyzing traffic) to better serve you and other site users, helping us modify or enhance the Website and its content, receiving insight as to what users do (and don’t) like about our Website or aspects thereof, and providing a stable, consistent, and secure user experience in connection with the Website.

Security

We care about the protection of your Personal Information and use industry standard safeguards to do so. Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that no data transmission on the Internet is guaranteed to be 100% secure.

Your Information is stored on Indian Commoner servers located in _______. We have implemented reasonable administrative, technical, physical, electronic, and organizational safeguards to protect your Personal Information against loss or theft as well as unauthorized access and disclosure to protect your privacy. We treat data as an asset that must be protected against loss and unauthorized access. We employ many different security techniques to protect such data from unauthorized access by users inside and outside Indian Commoner. However, “perfect security” does not exist on the Internet. If you are concerned that your privacy may have been breached, please contact us as provided below. 

Privacy of Children

We presume that if you are providing Information on this Website, you are of legal contracting age based on the law that applies to you. 

Please do not send any Personal Information if you are below the legal contracting age. We do not knowingly collect (nor do we wish to collect) any personally identifiable information or other user information from persons who are below the legal contracting age. In the event that we learn we have collected any Personal Information from a user who is below the legal contracting age, we will delete such information from our database and terminate the corresponding account, if any. We encourage you to discuss this with your parent or guardian.

Grievance Officer

If you have any questions/concerns regarding this Privacy Policy or how to remove or modify your user information or related consents, please feel free to contact the designated Grievance Officer, the details of which are provided below: 

Name:
Email:
Address:
Phone No.:

How Will I Know if the Privacy Policy Is Changed?

If we make any material changes we will notify you by email (sent to the e-mail address specified in your account) or by means of a notice on this Website prior to the change becoming effective. We encourage you to periodically review this page for the latest information on our privacy practices.