One of the risks that we associate with the Internet is the likelihood of our privacy being invaded. Whether it's spammers getting hold of your email address, being forced to sign up with sites in order to gain some information and then being bombarded with marketing and sales material that fills up your inbox, or picking up irksome viruses that secretly transmit your personal data data to sites, we all fear the 'wrong' people getting hold of information that can harm us or our finances.

This Privacy Statement is here to put your mind at rest. We value our privacy, therefore we know you value yours. Please read on to see how we respect that privacy.

We collect no personal information from anybody browsing this site. Simple as that.

If you 'ask our advice', we collect only enough information from you to verify from Paypal that you have made payment for your request. As Paypal is a separate site and company, and is not affiliated with us in any way other than as a payment gateway and account provider, we never see any of your financial information. Paypal is one of the world's leading payment networks and is secured by the most up-to-date security encryption technology available.

The only other thing we need is your email address to send you a reply. We don't need to know anything you don't want us to know. Your email address will be solely used for sending you a reply to your problem.

You will never receive unsolicited mail from us or any third party. That's right, no spam, marketing, or hard-sell junk mail.

If you agree to sign up to our mailing list, you will only receive a newsletter with useful information, and only a maximum of once a week. You can opt in or out of this whenever you want.

When you ask our advice, anything you disclose to us is strictly confidential. No-one outside our team will read any communication you send to us, and nothing of what you write or we reply with will be published anywhere on the Internet. It's totally private and secure. We strongly believe in the idea of 'doctor-patient' confidentiality; visit www.ethox.org.uk/ for more details.

Finally, a word about 'cookies'. Cookies are pieces of information in the form of a tiny text file placed on your computer, temporarily or permanently, by a webpage server when you visit a site and are used a form of identification to tell the server when you return to, or move pages within, a site. They are useful for gaining information about how many people use a site or particular page and how often. Cookies make the interaction between users and web sites faster and easier, and hence more enjoyable, by easing identification when users return or when filling shopping carts. Cookie use is industry standard, and almost all commercial sites use them. Cookies are quite benign, and any we place on your hard drive will not use up any noticeable space, nor will they obtain any personal information from your hard drive. In fact, any personal information on them will only be what you have already told us!

A number of our advertisers also use cookies for similar reasons. If you access a third-party site by clicking on an ad on our site, then that site may place a cookie on your computer, but please be aware that we don't control this or have access to these cookies, and that these cookies are subject to the advertiser's privacy policy, not ours.

Most browsers are set up to accept cookies, but you can configure your browser to refuse cookies or to notify you when you've received one. If you reject cookies, though, you may not be able to use certain features of our site or indeed anybody else's site! For more information on cookies, please go to www.aboutcookies.org/.