Privacy Policy

We respect your privacy.

(effective date of this Policy: March 1st, 2018)

At zinezoo.com, we respect your privacy. We endeavor to make our policies for the collection and use of information relating to you and others who use our services understandable, fair, and consistent with applicable privacy and data protection laws, and the EU privacy law in particular. We adhere to the principle of data minimisation, recording as little personal data as possible for zinezoo.com to provide its services. This Privacy Policy describes the personal data we collect, how and why we use that data, the purposes for which we share that data with others, and how you can contact us to ask any questions or express any concerns you may have about our privacy practices or data that you have provided.

Personal Data We Collect and How We Use It

We only keep information about you if you give us permission.

We adhere to the principle of data minimisation and we retain the minimum amount of personal data necessary for as long as necessary to provide our service and to fulfill any other purposes for which the data was initially collected and to which you have given consent.

We only start collecting data about you after you created an account, consenting to us collecting the data by ticking a checkbox. At log-in, a session cookie is created that connects the internet address of the computer or mobile device you are visiting zinezoo.com from to your account.

The personal data we store is either given to us by you, or it is personal data generated by activities on our site.

Personal data you give us

You give us information about you.

Below, you can find the personal data we record for your account if give it to us, with a short explanation of how we use the personal data:

Your name, so we can mention you as the author of articles or zines or channels you create.
Your password, which we store in encrypted form.
Your email address, in order for us to be able to for example validate your account and send invoices and purchased content, or to send an email that allows you to reset your password if you have forgotten your password, or to generally be able to contact you if there is any zine with your account or your personal data.
a unique id created specifically for you and which is connected to your email address and password.
Your preferred currency, so we can show you the prices in a currency you are used to.
You have to specify that you are 13 or older, and if you are between 13 and 18, your parents or guardians need to give permission.
Before using zinezoo.com, you have to consent to our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. This consent may be recorded in the database, or may be implicitly implied, as you can't create an account without consenting to the terms and policies.
Whether you want to receive a newsletter from us. We may send a newsletter with information that we hope is useful to you; for example when articles or zines you purchased have been updated, channels you follow contain new content, or when someone you follow has put up new content, or to remind you to download content you purchased.
Your bio, which is optional, and may help potential buyers learn about who is behind the article or zine they are purchasing.
Your "Role" on the site. You can be a Member, or we can make you an Editor. Editors curates channels that can be seen on the landing page.
State of the account: validated through email or not, or disabled.
When logged in, a session record is held for every computer that is currently logged in, and an associated cookie is stored in your browser. This allows us to keep you logged in in a safe way and it allows us to terminate a session as soon as we discover a log-in on your account is unauthorized.
We store images for the pages of articles, and we store the covers of articles and zines, whether pre-generated, or submitted by you.
We store the channels you create, and the zines you put in them, whether your zines or zines created by others.
We store the zines you create, and the articles you include in them. You may include articles created by others, and others may include in their zines articles created by you.
When purchasing something on our site, you may be required to give us additional billing information for tax purposes.
We sell digital goods, and that may mean we need to pay VAT in the country where you purchased the digital good. This means we may be required by law to keep a record of information relating to your transactions, for a number of years, even after you closed your zinezoo.com account. We may for example need to record a description of the transaction, the transaction amount, VAT paid, and your ip address and billing address in order to prove we paid VAT in the right country.

Personal data generated by activities on our site

We also remember things about how people use this website.

There is also personal data we record for your account that is generated when you interact with our site. Below is a list, with a short explanation of how we use the personal data:

Many fields in the database records keep track of and record the channels, zines or articles and the pages inside the articles you created, zines or articles you purchased, other members you follow, who follow you, who purchased or downloaded content by you or included zines or articles by you in their channels, or articles by you in their zines. We need to record all of this in order to also be able to remove content again. According to EU Privacy laws, you have a "right to be forgotten", and in order to be able to remove you from the system entirely, we need records for where your information is stored in the system. For example, if you purchase an article, we will store that in a list of items you purchased, but we will also store with the article that you purchased it, so when the creator of the article shuts down his or her account, we can remove the article from your list of purchased items.
If you purchased articles and zines collecting articles, we will record that you purchased those items, so you can view updated versions of these documents online in the future. In addition, we record all information that needs to be on an invoice, and, as required by Dutch law, we keep a record of all invoices for at least ten years.
We maintain anonymous statistics on how often puchasable items were viewed, downloaded, purchased, featured by an editor, or channels or users were followed.
We may store temporary information preventing a browser refresh from re-submitting the same form data
We may store log files. These log files may contain personal data about you such as your internet address and other personal information. We may need to record this to guard the safety and security of the website, or to help us fix problems with the website. In addition, such log files may be used for "web analytics" — to store information about the website use in order to improve the user experience of the website.
The server may be configured to send emails that allow us to monitor these servers, in order to keep them up and running and secure. These emails may contain some of your personal data.
We may maintain a data record with information on what happened on this platform that might be relevant to you, so that we can send you a newsletter with that information. And vice versa, if another member showed interest in you or your work, and you did something on this platform, we might record your activity so that we can notify that other member. For example, if a member you follow published a new article, we may notify you in a newsletter, and vice versa.
We record the royalties we still have to pay out to you.
When you purchase something on our website, we may be required by the tax authorities to keep a record of that purchase for a number of years, for VAT purposes.
We keep track of the last time you attempted to log in, and the number of times a login failed so we can protect your account against hackers trying to guess your password.

Your Rights and Choices

Make sure you are allowed to use this website.

If you are 13 or older, you have the right to create an account, and to view content uploaded by other members, for free or for a payment. If you are between 13 and 18, approval of a parent or guardian is needed.

You can change or remove information about you.

In accordance with EU Privacy Law, you can see all information relating to your account on your personal Account page. All the information is provided by you and can be modified at any time. In addition, according to EU Privacy law, you have the "right to be forgotten", and so you can shut down your account, in which case people will not be able to see your account or your channels, zines, articles or pages anymore on zinezoo.com. All your personal data is removed from all other channels, and your account is removed from all follows. For as much as we can, we remove any reference to you, but certain laws and regulations may require us to keep records, and there may be some remnants of your personal data in our log files and internal emails, for example sent automatically by the servers.

Your articles and zines are personal data, and if you sell these articles and zines on our platform, we have to also treat them as consumer products and consider the laws relating to consumer rights. That personal data — in the context of zinezoo.com; the articles and zines that third-parties create and offer through our website — are also consumer products in that case, and consumers have rights too. We are committed to doing our best to uphold the rights of all the users of this website — creators as well as buyers. It is for this reason that we store a private copy of a pdf for the person who bought a license to that content to download within 30 days of purchasing the article.

When you created an account, you consented to us using your personal data within the context of this website. When you shut down your account, you withdraw consent from that moment on, but we were allowed to use your personal data up until the moment you withdrew consent by shutting down your account.

When someone purchases a PDF with an article by you, we provide that person with a guaranteed download for 30 days, but after that, if you shut down your account, the article is not available to anyone from the zinezoo.com website anymore. Of course, people who downloaded the PDF may still have the PDF stored locally on their computers.

You have the right to contact a supervisory authority.

You have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. In the Netherlands, the organisation to contact is the Authoriteit Persoonsgegevens.

Data We Transfer to Third Parties

If you pay, that is handled by another company.

When working with third parties for order fulfillment, we may need to share your personal data with them in order to allow you to pay for content you are about to purchase. We may need to record your personal account number at a financial institution or transaction processing entity in order to facilitate financial transactions. For example, if someone wants to purchase something from you, we need to know the account the money should be transferred to.

We may use Google's reCAPTCHA API in order to keep the website safe from bots. In order to do this, Google collects hardware and software information, such as device and application data and the results of integrity checks. That data is sent to Google for analysis. you consent to us sharing and Google collecting this data.

We host zinezoo.com on a dedicated server at ixlhosting.nl. In practical terms, the employees have physical access to that server, and they may have access to the contents on the harddisks, and they may make backups of the system. However, ixlhosting stipulate in their terms of use, article 19.2 that they will not look at our data unless they are required to by law.

Members may download a PDF of an article or zine you made available. The principle of data minimisation requires us to not record who downloaded the PDF, because we don't need that information to provide this service. In addition, members have "the right to be forgotten". This means that we could not send an email to everyone who downloaded PDFs in order to communicate your wish that the PDF be destroyed.

We may also use other companies to archive the invoices, and we may use existing bookkeeping software to do our bookkeeping. We may also need to transfer information about transactions you made and report royalties that were paid to you to the Dutch tax authorities.

International Transfers

Everyone in the world can see and buy what you make.

We are based in the Netherlands. Although you may access zinezoo.com from a location outside of the Netherlands, any data collected in connection with zinezoo.com may be transferred to, processed, and stored within the Netherlands. The Netherlands may not have the same data protection framework as the country in which you may be using zinezoo.com. When we transfer your data to the Netherlands, we will treat you personal data in accordance with the requirements of the European Union Privacy laws.

That said, this website allows you to publish and sell pdf documents world-wide. Your pages, articles and zines may therefore end up in any country.

In principle, your personal data, in the form of articles and zines, only becomes visible to others when it is featured in a channel. Note that the administrator needs to be able to see all content in order to determine that no law was broken — copyright infringement for example — and that the content is acceptable according to the Terms of Use. In addition, this website may assign editors, who may also see all digital content, and who may then feature digital content in a channel also. This means that an editor may be the first to make an article you created publicly visible.

Data Retention and Security

We do our best to keep information about you as safe as possible.

We maintain appropriate administrative, technical and physical safeguards to protect personal data against loss, misuse, and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. We use Secure Sockets Layer encryption for the transmission all data. When sensitive data is involved, we encrypt it. We keep the data retained to a minimum, and we have backup systems in place to guard against data loss. Permissions on the server are carefully managed using the principle of least privilege. Care has been taken to avoid buffer overruns and malicious code injection.

Keeping a server secure is an on-going process as ways of compromising servers also evolve and zinezoo.com is committed to stay ahead of any potential security zines. But you understand that hackers may compromise your account. For example, the "right to be forgotten" means that a hacker can irreversibly remove your entire account and all your channels, articles and zines if they get ahold of your password. You should therefore not use this service as a way to archive your work.

We will never ask you for your password in any unsolicited communication (including by telephone or email). If you believe your username or password has been compromised, please contact us through . You should understand that no feasible system of data security is invulnerable, but we are committed to storing data at zinezoo.com as securely as possible.

Links to Other Websites and Services

We are not responsible for what other companies do.

We may provide links to various third party websites and services. Those sites and services are not under our control. Those sites and services may have their own privacy policies, which we strongly suggest you review if you visit them or utilize them. We are not responsible for those third party privacy policies, the related data processing practices, or any other aspects of those sites and services.

Changes to this Policy

If we make changes to this policy, we may need to ask you to accept these changes before you can continue using this website.

We may change this Privacy Policy at any time, and may even be required to do so under certain Regulations in the future. EU Privacy regulations require that we obtain consent from you for these changes. If such changes involve collection of or use of information materially different from that described in our Cookies Policy or Privacy Policy, we will inform you accordingly and post a revised Privacy Policy and a revised Cookie Policy. Changes are effective when disclosed, or at such later date as may be stated in the revised Policy. We will indicate above the effective date of this Policy. All sessions will be closed, and you will be required to consent to the changes on next log-in, before being able to continue using the services provided by zinezoo.com.

How to Contact us

You can always contact us through .

If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy practices or your personal data, please contact our us through .