Privacy and terms

Effective from May 22nd 2018.

In brief

I respect and value your privacy as much as you do. In practice, this means that when you share information with Clarity, I will only ever use it in ways that are positively helpful to you. (And only in ways that are consistent with your rights and my obligations under the law – which you might hope would go without saying…)

I will never share or sell any of your personal information without your permission.

Specifically:

• I will never share your email address
• I will never share your name or any other contact details
• I will never share any personally identifiable information you tell me during a reading

An I Ching reading can be intensely personal – it may reveal aspects of your life that you hardly knew yourself. I believe that this demands total confidentiality. I have a lot of respect for my clients’ courage and resolution, and I will always guard your confidences carefully. While I may sometimes discuss readings with my own close support network, anonymously and in confidence, nothing you tell me will ever ‘leak out’.

In full

This privacy policy runs through the details of all the data that Clarity might collect about you and how it’s used. By browsing and using the Clarity website, you are accepting this Privacy Policy.

Minimum age requirement

The Clarity website is only intended for people over the age of 16. By signing up or creating an account at this site, you warrant that you are aged over 16.

About Clarity

The website at onlineClarity.co.uk and onlineClarity.com is the online presence of Clarity, a one-woman business owned and run by me, Hilary Barrett.

You can contact me via this contact page or by

Phone (normally voicemail): +44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK); +1 (561) 459-4758 (US)

Post:

Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom

What information does the Clarity website collect?

There are basically two kinds of information you send to this (or any) website:

1. Information you send deliberately – for instance, entering your email address on a contact form, or name and email when you create an account.
2. Information your browser sends each time it communicates with a web page.

Information you send to Clarity yourself

What information you send

If you…

• contact me via email or the contact form
• sign up to receive emails from Clarity (eg ‘Friends’ Notes’)
• join Clarity, ie create an account at this website

…then you will probably enter your name and email address, and sometimes a password.

If you make a purchase, you might also enter some payment details – but in fact, no payment information is ever entered or stored at onlineClarity. Instead, you are sent to a payment provider’s website to enter your details, and the payment provider then communicates back to onlineClarity only that your payment is complete. Your credit card details or Paypal account details stay securely with the payment provider’s website; I only store information about what you purchased, how and when.

When you use the free online I Ching reading at Clarity, you might enter some personal information in the ‘question’ field. This is sent to the next web page so it can be displayed as part of your reading. But it is not stored by Clarity in any way. (This means that if you want to keep your reading, you need to make a note of it or download the pdf provided!)

When you post to the I Ching Community forum or to comment on a blog post here, you may choose to include personal information. If you post to the free forums, please never forget that these are public web pages, which means

• anyone with access to the internet can read what you post.
• your posts be cached, copied and made available anywhere online, and neither you nor I can prevent this.
• anyone who enters your username into Google can find all your posts.

Please choose your username accordingly, and consider carefully what information you include in your posts.

How and where Clarity stores your data

The information you enter on the Clarity website is securely stored on its web hosting server. Clarity is hosted with a US-based company that takes security extremely seriously, and is certified with the US-EU Privacy Shield. The website itself is ‘hardened’ with numerous security measures.

In addition, I use Aweber email marketing services to send some emails you may sign up for here, including the free newsletter. Aweber are also US-EU Privacy Shield certified.

As mentioned above, you don’t enter any payment information at this website, but only at the payment provider’s site.

I will only store your information for as long as I have your permission to keep it.

I will only ever share your information with other people or companies for the purpose of providing the products or services you requested from Clarity (like with Aweber so they can deliver any emails you subscribe to). In other words, I will not share or sell your details to people who would use them market to you.

How your data is used, and why

First – I will never send you any unsolicited marketing emails, aka spam.

The information you share with Clarity will only be used to:

• Provide, manage and inform you about your access to the Clarity website, including any products and services you order and any free stuff you request. (For instance, your Clarity account controls which courses, downloads and forums you can access, and when you join a forum I’ll email you information on how to use it.) This is all to fulfil a contract or agreement between us.
• Inform you about Clarity’s products and services – when, and only when, you have explicitly consented to hearing about them (eg by subscribing to the ‘Friends’ Notes’ newsletter).
• If you’ve purchased from Clarity in the past, I may contact you again with information about related products and services. (For instance, if you attended an online class, I might email to ask if you would be interested in a follow-up class.) This is on the basis of my legitimate interests as a business owner.

How you can control the data Clarity holds about you, and how it’s used

In summary: you have complete control over all the personally identifiable information Clarity holds about you and what I do with it. The only absolute exception would be if the government demanded to see it. (I’m  guessing they probably won’t.)

Managing emails

You can unsubscribe from any ‘newsletter’-type emails I send at any time via the ‘unsubscribe’ link in every email. There’s also a list of your Clarity subscriptions with convenient checkboxes to control them on your account page.

If you join the Clarity forum, you have detailed control over what emails it sends you through the ‘Messaging and notification’ section of the settings page.

Viewing, editing or deleting your information

You can view and edit your information or delete your account at Clarity at any time via your account page.

Deleting your account erases your name and email address from Clarity’s records. This means that your forum posts are no longer personally identifiable information: the only information remaining is what’s visible on the web page.

You have a legal right to see all the personal data I hold about you, or to formally withdraw your consent for me to hold your data and request that I delete it completely  – contact me if you want to request either of these.

Information your browser sends

By default, your browser sends certain information to every page you visit. Depending on your browser settings, this may include:

• Your I.P. address
• Information about what you’re using to browse the site – phone/computer, operating system, and which browser.
• Your location
• Which pages you visit – starting from the page you came from, ending with the page you leave to, and the pages at Clarity you visit inbetween.

This information is anonymised – so it can’t be linked to you as an individual – and then sent to Google Analytics and Hockeystack, another web analytics provider, via a cookie: see the Cookie Policy just below for details.

On the Clarity website, this information is only accessed when necessary to provide the service you request: specifically, your IP address is used to help identify you as an individual user, and with some purchases (eg online courses) the site’s systems will check to ensure you were able to access and use what you paid for.

What are cookies?

Most websites you visit will ask your browser to store cookies. These are tiny text files containing information about your visit, that are downloaded to your computer to improve your future experience of a website. For more information on cookies in general, and how to control them in your particular browser, see this guide.

How Clarity uses cookies

When you visit Clarity, two kinds of cookie are stored on your computer:

Cookies set by onlineClarity

During your visit, Clarity uses cookies to remember your identity from one page to the next –

• to manage the signup process when you create an account here
• to identify when you are logged in, for example to the forums or Foundations Course, so you can access member-only areas and functions (eg posting to the forums)
• during purchases, to ensure your order details are remembered between pages and the order’s processed correctly

These cookies are normally deleted when you log out.

Clarity also uses some cookies to remember you on your next visit, so your experience on the site is smoother – for instance, remembering your preferences, or showing you which forum threads you’ve already viewed.

These are called ‘first party cookies’, and if you disable them, it will break stuff – specifically, you won’t be able to use Clarity as a logged-in member.

Cookies from third parties

These are cookies set by other sites, not Clarity, while you visit this site.

Some embedded videos on Clarity are hosted on Youtube. Youtube sets cookies to collect statistics and improve user experience.

The company I use to send email, Aweber, sets a cookie when you click a link in one of my emails to visit Clarity. This allows me to see who’s visited which pages, so I can send emails that are a better fit for what interests you.

Clarity is signed up to the Amazon Associates scheme. This means that if you click an Amazon book link on this site, you’ll be redirected to the best Amazon site for your location, and if you buy the book they’ll pay me a small percentage of the price (without charging you any extra). Amazon places a cookie on your device to accomplish this.

I collect statistics with Google Analytics and Hockeystack to give me a broad picture of how people use the website and how I can improve it. These cookies make it possible to learn such things as how many people visit a page and how long they spend viewing it on average. The information they store is anonymous: it doesn’t identify individual visitors. (Your IP address is anonymised.)

Clarity’s use of Google Analytics is tightly controlled: no data is collected for advertising purposes, and it does not identify you as the same user when you visit the site with different devices, eg your computer and your phone. (Those are both features available in Google Analytics; I keep them turned off! Hockeystack is smaller and simpler, and doesn’t offer these things in the first place.)

You can opt out of Google Analytics tracking on all websites with this browser add-on.

Unlike with first party cookies, you can disable third party cookies without causing any major problems with this website.

If at any time you’re not satisfied with a product or service you’ve received from Clarity, you can contact me to have things put right. I most definitely do not want to keep your money if you’re unhappy, so everything I sell comes with a money-back guarantee

Money-back guarantee for the Foundations Course, I Ching readings and chats, and all products delivered by instant download

At any time after your purchase, I will refund your complete payment. There is no time limit and there are no conditions; you only have to ask.

Change Circle and WikiWing guarantees

Naturally you control your membership: you can cancel and stop the recurring payments at any time. In addition, there is a money-back guarantee to give you time to look round and decide whether this is for you. If you want to leave at any time during the first month of your WikiWing membership, or the first two months of your Change Circle membership, simply let me know and I’ll refund your payment in full. (No fiddly ‘unused portion’ stuff, just a straightforward, complete refund.)

Processing and storing credit card details is definitely a matter for the experts. So all card transactions initiated at this site are conducted on the secure servers of specialist online payment processors:

• Paypal, the best-known online payment processor (as recommended at Ebay)
• Worldpay
• Paypro Global (used to sell digital goods such as downloads because they have the capability to process VAT in compliance with EU law)
• Avangate (used to sell the Resonance Journal and process VAT in compliance with EU law)

This means that you don’t enter your card details at onlineClarity at all: you’re not asked for them until you’re in a fully secure environment, protected by complex encryption procedures. The onlineClarity website never processes or stores your card details. But because the integration is seamless, ordering is quick and simple as well as completely secure.

Note: please never email me – or anyone else – your credit card details. Ordinary email travels through many relay servers that are not fully secure, and your card details could be intercepted.