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Privacy Policy

We take your personal data and privacy very seriously at the Sonic Stadium. This Privacy Policy outlines all of the ways in which we may collect and store a user’s personal information, who we may share it with and the reasons why we do so. We may change this Policy from time to time – whenever it does, we will ask for you to re-read and agree to the Policy. By agreeing and continuing to browse the Sonic Stadium and its Forums, you agree to be bound by this Policy.

Your membership of the Sonic Stadium is conditional on your agreement to our Privacy Policy, as well as both our Terms and Conditions of Registration and our Community Guidelines. Breaking these guidelines or terms can result in penalties against, or termination of, your Sonic Stadium account.

This Privacy Policy was updated: 19 February 2024

Who We Are

The Sonic Stadium is a fan-operated website and community portal dedicated to news, information and discussion focusing on the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. We are based in the United Kingdom and serve an international audience. Our staff is made up exclusively of volunteer enthusiast writers. Our website address is: http://www.sonicstadium.org, and users can contact us via our group email address at contact@sonicstadium.org.

How We Use Your Data

Any data that you choose to submit to the Sonic Stadium will be used solely for the purposes of managing your account, assisting with moderation/admin activity (rule infractions, etc) and personalising your use of our websites (including site theme designs). Your personal data will never be used for marketing purposes, nor will be shared with third parties.

We may contact you via email address (or similar) to let you know about news, updates or security announcements related to the Sonic Stadium. New registrants may opt in to this 'broadcast' service. Existing members may need to opt-out, which they can do easily via User Settings. By reading and accepting this notice you agree to any automatic opt-in that your account is currently signed to, and accept that if you wish to opt-out you may do so yourself via your User Settings.

Our Commitment to Children's Privacy

Protecting the privacy of the very young is especially important. For that reason, we never collect or maintain information at our website from those we actually know are under 13, and no part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 13. As per our Registration Terms and Conditions, by signing up for an account on this platform, users formally declare that they are at least 13 years of age.

Data Retrieval and Account Deletion

Most, if not all, of the data we collect is easily visible on your User Settings page (Sex, Email Address, Post History, etc). However, you can request a document containing all of the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that we have for your account by formally requesting it via your User Settings (you can access this by going to the User Menu > User Settings > Security & Privacy). Please allow for a few days for your request to be acknowledged and fulfilled.

You can also request a user deletion and the removal of all PII associated with your account. Any content you may have posted will be maintained in order to preserve our platform, but any identifying information against the posts will be deleted and the posts will become anonymous. To action this, you can request an Account Deletion by going to your User Menu > User Settings > Security & Privacy screen. Please allow for a few days for your request to be acknowledged and fulfilled.

Please also note that once this action has been taken by the Sonic Stadium Moderation Team, there will be no way to reverse it, no way to restore your account information and no way to associate any existing anonymised, orphaned content to a new account.

The Data We Capture

User Profile Data
By registering an account on the Sonic Stadium, you agree to let us collect and store a small amount of data from you, including your email address, IP address from your visits and public display name, which you may choose to set as something that personally identifies you (although this is not required and is not recommended). We require this information to secure your account and to ensure that we can get in touch with you in emergency situations (such as a data breach, or other important news regarding the website or forums).

Log Files
Log files are maintained and analysed of all requests for files on this website's web servers. Log files do not capture personal information but do capture the user's IP address, which is automatically recognised by our web servers. We keep a record of IP addresses to enhance security and tackle spam on the forums, and to help enhance your experience on the website.

Media
We do not capture any data through use of uploaded media, but if you upload images to this website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Any visitor to this website can download and extract location data from images uploaded here, which may expose your personal data to anyone that may wish to see it.

Cookies
This website does not store any information that would, on its own, allow us to identify individual users of this service without their permission. Any cookies that may be used by this website are used either solely on a per session basis or to maintain user preferences. Cookies are not shared with any third parties.

Manage Cookies on our Cookie Page

Data Captured By External Partners

Embedded Content
Articles and community-generated content on this site may include embedded material (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc). Such content will behave in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited that external website directly. This includes (but is not limited to) embedded content from platforms such as X, Facebook or YouTube.

As a result, these external websites may collect additional data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content (including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website). This is not behaviour we can control. Please refer to the privacy policies of the external website/s in question for more information on how they handle (and you can manage) your data.

Third-Party Advertising
We have contracted with third parties to monitor certain pages for the purpose of advertising products and services on this website. When you visit these pages, information is collected by these third parties (not by the Sonic Stadium) using cookies, web beacons and/or other monitoring technologies. These technologies report traffic, statistics and “click-throughs” of adverts. No personally-identifiable information is collected by these third parties.

Affiliate Advertising
The Sonic Stadium is a participant in a number of affiliate/commerce partner programs, including Amazon (EU, US, Canada, China, Japan), eBay, Play-Asia, CDJapan, Forbidden Planet, and various other companies through Digital Window and TradeDoubler. Your user journey may be recorded after clicking a link to purchase a product from one of these external retailers. We will always clearly mark any affiliate links on our website for full disclosure.

Third Parties

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analysis service provided by Google Inc. (“Google”). Google utilizes the Data collected to track and examine the use of this website, to prepare reports on its activities and share them with other Google services.
Spam Defense
The IPS Spam Defense Service passes the email address and IP address of the registering member to the service to determine the likelihood a registering account is a spam source.
reCAPTCHA V2
This site uses a CAPTCHA to ensure humans are performing certain actions. The CAPTCHA provider may set a session cookie and get information about your internet browser and device accessing this website.
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