Your privacy is important to us, we have established this privacy policy to explain to you how your information is protected, collected and used.

Dark-Media will not give, sell, trade or rent your private information to others under any circumstance. We do not supply your private information to others except where Dark-Media:

• may be required to do so under Australian law (eg. by Court Order or by law enforcement agencies under statutory or other powers);
• is trying to prevent abuse of Dark-Media or our systems (eg. because we are being DOSed, DDOSed, or where a user is abusing or threatening users or moderators);
• is of the reasonable view that there may be an actual or potential breach of the law (eg. where DM is being used for the furtherance of crimes against persons or property).

Extreme care is taken to ensure security of your private information both offline and online. The term "Information" includes your registration details (such as a live email address), as well as statistics and preferential settings. It is our policy to allow our users to provide as much - or as little - personal information to us as they feel comfortable doing.

It is however important to be aware that when you voluntarily provide personal information in an article reply or in the forums, that information will not be protected by this privacy policy (reasonable requests for deletion will usually be honoured however). For this reason, we strongly discourage the offering of personal details in any post you make.

What information do we gather?

If you are comfortable providing us with information about yourself, enhanced services, like the display customisation available on your account, become available to you. It is not possible for us to offer them to anonymous users.

All the information we gather is stored by Dark-Media in a secure production environment, protected by firewalls and never shared with anyone, except where it might be required by Australian law (by Court Order or Police Warrant), or to prevent abuse of Dark-Media or our systems.

We use a feature of your browser called a "cookie" to assign a "User ID." Cookies, by themselves, cannot be used to find out your identity or the identities of any of our users. It only identifies your computer to our servers when you visit our site. The most noticeable benefit of this is not having to "log in" every time you visit.

What information do we store on our servers?

All forum posts, personal messages, web logs and personal information provided by you are stored in our database, even after "deletion," they may be archived elsewhere. Members can access and update their account information through the My Controls page if they feel they want to remove personal information from there account.

Although we make good faith efforts to store the information in a secure operating environment that is not available to the public, we cannot guarantee complete security.

Why do we gather the Information?

Dark-Media Networks aims to provide you with better services and more compelling reasons to come back and visit our sites. The information you provide us with personalise your experience, and provide just the information you are interested in receiving. We analyse what our users and customers like and don't like about the content, so that we can constantly improve them for your use.

Who can see information about me?

Only Dark-Media Management can see information such as IP addresses and email address. Information you have provided in your profile can be viewed by other community members such as but not limiting; birthday, full name, msn contact address, location.

Do search engine's cache Dark-Media?

Yes

Will Dark-Media ever send me unsolicited email?

No.

The only times that Dark-Media will ever sends email is when a user is requested to do so during account validation (such as new account creation, or when a user requests their password be re-sent to them), when the option under "My Controls" Send me any updates sent by the board administrator is ticked we may send out information relating to Dark-Media.

A user has insulted or otherwise upset me. Can I have their real contact address?

No.

However, public contact details for each user are listed on the user's info page, if they have chosen to supply them. They can be viewed simply by clicking on a user's name in the forums.

I suspect a user is posting from multiple accounts. How can I check?

If you suspect that a user is using multiple accounts to try and win an argument, or to spam the forums, please contact a moderator immediately. The moderator will then check for duplicate or ghost accounts, and help clear the air.

Please note that a moderator will never reveal details (such as IP addresses, email addresses, etc) of a user's account to anyone - so don't even bother asking.

Can you tell me if another user has been penalised?

No. With the exception of being "Banned", all moderation actions will be discussed only with the user that is the subject of those actions.