Privacy policy

1. Story Ocean™ respects your right to privacy and is committed to safeguarding the privacy of our customers and website visitors. We adhere to the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

2. Story Ocean™ will, from time to time, receive and store personal information you enter onto our website. This will for the most part be: your email address, and what stories you read. We may also use your email address for various communications from us, such a newsletter. But again you can choose to opt out of this.

2.1 We do not store any of your credit card information. If any credit card information is stored, PayPal does that for us. To search out what they require you will have to refer to PayPal’s terms and conditions, and privacy policy.

Plus your credit card company has their own policies regarding your credit card number and how to maintain its security and privacy.

3. Story Ocean™ collects your email address when you register or if you change your email address later. Story Ocean™ collects what stories you read purely for ranking and aggregation purposes.

Your email address will not be shared with anyone else. What stories you read will be used indirectly for the ranking of stories, and other display of information about stories stored.

If you choose to use Story Ocean™ to publish your stories more information will be stored. For example, the story itself, and further information to identify the respective author and their payment details in order to get royalty payments to the appropriate author.

4. Story Ocean™ does not currently use cookies, except browsers' standard cookie to story your password. If this changes in the future will of course let you know. Plus you would have to give your consent for us to store this cookie.

5. We may from time to time need to disclose personal information to comply with a legal requirement, such as a law, regulation, court order, subpoena, warrant, in the course of a legal proceeding or in response to a law enforcement agency request. However, again, we cannot be forced to provide information we do not have.

5.1. We may also use your personal information to protect the copyright, trademarks, legal rights, property or safety of Story Ocean™, its customers or third parties. We thoroughly support and adhere to international copyright law.

6. If there is a change of control in our business or a sale or transfer of business assets, we reserve the right to transfer to the extent permissible at law our user databases, together with any personal information and non-personal information contained in those databases. This information may be disclosed to a potential purchaser under an agreement to maintain confidentiality. We would seek to only disclose information in good faith and where required by any of the above circumstances.

7. Story Ocean™ is committed to ensuring that the information you provide to us is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure information and protect it from misuse, interference, loss and unauthorised access, modification and disclosure.

7.1. The transmission and exchange of information is carried out at your own risk. We cannot guarantee the security of any information that you transmit to us, or receive from us. Although we take measures to safeguard against unauthorised disclosures of information, we cannot assure you that personal information that we collect will not be disclosed in a manner that is inconsistent with this Privacy Policy. But again, information we don’t have cannot be hacked from us.

8. You may request details of personal information that we hold about you in accordance with the provisions of the GDPR.

In the normal course of operations you should be able to access all the information Story Ocean™ has from you. Such as through ‘your votes’ and your account details.

However, in the event you feel this is inadequate and you would like a copy of the information which we hold about you or believe that any information we hold on you is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant or misleading, please email us at contact@wooshka.com.

9. You have the following rights under the GDPR:

9.1. Right of Access – the right to access the personal information that we hold or process about you.

9.2. Right to Rectification – the right to update, correct or amend the personal information that we hold or process about you.

9.3. Right to Erasure – the right to request remove personal information that we hold about you.

9.4. Right to Restrict – the right stop processing all or some of your personal data.

9.5. Right to Object – the right to object to your personal information being used for direct marketing purposes.

9.6. Right to Data Portability – the right to request a copy of your personal data in electronic format.

9.7. Right not to be subject to Automated Decision making – the right to not be subject to a decision based solely on automated decision making, including profiling, where the decision would have a legal effect on you or produce a similarly significant effect.

9.3. We reserve the right to refuse to provide you with information that we hold about you, in certain circumstances set out in the Privacy Act.

10. If you have any complaints about our privacy practices, please feel free to send in details of your complaints to ‘contact@story-ocean.com’. We take complaints very seriously and will respond shortly after receiving written notice of your complaint. Story Ocean™ is the data controller for the purposes of the personal data processed under this privacy policy.

11. Please be aware that we may change this Privacy Policy in the future. We may modify this Policy at any time, in our sole discretion and all modifications will be effective immediately upon our posting of the modifications on our website or notice board. Please check back from time to time to review our Privacy Policy.

12. Our site has links to other websites not owned or controlled by us. Links to third party websites do not constitute sponsorship or endorsement or approval of these websites. Please be aware that Story Ocean™ is not responsible for the privacy practises of other such websites. We encourage our users to be aware, when they leave our website, to read the privacy statements of each and every website that collects personal identifiable information.

13. Thank you for reading our Privacy Policy. If you have any questions relating to this Policy, please contact our data protection officer by emailing contact@storyocean.com.