Tweaks to Privacy Policy & Acceptable Use Policy

Hello everyone

We know from the Consultation Results that 76% of blippers feel the current level of moderation is about right, so we won't be making any huge changes. However, as part of our continual process of keeping everything running smoothly, we have made some changes to the Privacy Policy and Acceptable Use pages on our site.

We have amended the Privacy Policy to allow us to contact you offering the chance for you to participate in community activities. 
Lawyers told us this was technically covered before, but we didn’t think it was clear enough so we have added some words for transparency.

We have also amended the Privacy Policy to make it a little clearer what a “protected journal” is.  We didn’t think the previous wording made it clear that while “protected” journals are not visible in the “Browse” views, we can’t prevent someone who can see the journal copying and pasting content or posting a link to social media.

We have added some “Additional Notes on Acceptable Use” to the Acceptable Use page.  This is not intended to change what is covered by the policy, but rather to clarify what is there already with some examples and additional detail.  Some of this was covered in our Post on Copyright and we wanted to make sure that it was more visible.  Other notes around Advertising and Commercial Use cover areas where there seems to be some confusion, and which is important to our status as a Community Interest Company.

Finally, we have changed the options when reporting an entry to more closely match the wording used in the Acceptable Use Policy policy.

This will be irrelevant to nearly all of you, nearly all of the time, as the Blipfoto community is very good at sticking to the rules.  However, we want to be transparent about our policies.  We’re letting you know that just as we have already had to up our game a little around copyright, we’re going to have to be more careful about commercial use and advertising in the future.  

Journals or entries that clearly break the rules will be suspended if they come to our attention.  If we get reports in areas where our moderation might have been inconsistent in the past, we’ll try to contact the journal owner and advise of any concerns we may have, and give them some time to comply with the site policies.