AOA's Online Privacy Policy

What this privacy policy covers
This policy covers how AOA treats personal information that AOA collects and receives.

Information Collection and use
You may choose whether or not to provide personal information to AOA. If you choose not to provide the personal information, you can still visit most of AOA's web sites, but you wil be unable to access certain functionality. Should you choose to register, we do require some personal information, such as username, email address and date of birth.

AOA provides the option for you to enter futher information about yourself should you wish to do so. This information is publically viewable and a warning is supplied to notify you that any optional information entered will be public. This information includes details such as: Home Page URL, ICQ Number, AIM Screen Name, MSN Messenger Handle, Yahoo! Messenger Handle, Biography, Location, Interests and Occupation.

AOA automatically receives and records information in our server logs. This information is supplied by your browser, and includes your IP address, the URL your brower requests, browser software and operating system.

AOA uses the information gathered for several purposes: to customise the content you see; to improve our services; to contact you; and to provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.

Children's privacy
AOA is not structured to attract children. As such, we will decline attempts at registration for those who indicate they are under 13.

Information sharing and disclosure
AOA does not rent, sell or share personal information about you with other people or companies, with the following exceptions:

We respond to subpoenas, court orders, legal process or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims.
We believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activies, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of AOA's terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.
We transfer information about you if AOA is acquired by or merged with another company. In this event, AOA will notify you before the information is transferred, as long as the email address you have supplied is valid. In this instance, it is possible that your information will be subject to a different privacy policy.

AOA displays targetted advertisements, based on personal information. Advertisers may asume that people who interact with, view or click on targetted ads meet the targetting criteria. AOA does not provide any personal information to the advertiser when you interact with or view a targeted advert. However, by interacting with or viewing an ad you are consenting to the possibility that the advertiser will make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the advert.

Cookies
AOA will attempt to set and access AOA cookies on your computer. AOA allows advertisers to set and access their own cookies on your computer. Advertisers use of cookies is subject to their own privacy policies, not this privacy policy. Advertisers do not have access to the cookies that AOA uses. Please note that if you choose to erase or block the cookies that AOA uses, you will need to re-enter your User ID and password to gain access to certain parts and functions of AOA's web sites. Certain aspects of AOA's web sites may fail to provide the expected functionality if cookies are blocked.

Account Information
Should you choose to provide AOA with personal information, AOA would like to maintain the accuracy of that information. Our goal is to provide a means to contact AOA should you need to correct or update any personal information you have submitted. In almost all cases, this information can be changed directly by yourself. However, some items of information can only be changed by contacting AOA directly. Should you need to contact AOA, you can do so from this link.

Due to the public nature of posts, their threading and quotes on the forum, we do not delete user accounts except under exceptional curcircumstances. We can disable user accounts on AOA, should we be informed that they are no longe required. Note that we will not normally re-enable an account that has been disabled.

We reserve the right to send you certain communications relating to the AOA server, such as service announcements, and administrative messages without offering you the opportunity to opt-out of receiving them.

Security
AOA limits access to personal information about you to AOA staff who we believe reasonably need to come in contact with that information in order to do their jobs. Note that no data transmission over the Internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. In this respect, we intend to take reasonable and appropriate steps to protect the personal information that you share with us from unauthorised access or disclosure.

Your consent
By using any of AOA's web sites, you consent to the terms of our online privacy policy, and to AOA's processing of your personal information.