The Fashion Codex:Privacy policy

It is essential to understand that, by using The Fashion Codex site, you consent to the collection, transfer, processing, storage, disclosure, and use of your information as described in this Privacy Policy.

We believe that you should not have to provide nonpublic Personal Information to participate in the free knowledge movement. You do not have to provide things like your real name, address, or date of birth to sign up for a standard account or contribute content to The Fashion Codex.

We do not sell or rent your Personal Information, nor do we give it to others to sell you anything. We use it to figure out how to make The Fashion Codex more engaging and accessible, to see which ideas work, and to make learning and contributing to fashion history and knowledge more fun.

Collection & Use of Info

When you make a contribution to The Fashion Codex, including on user or discussion pages, you are creating a permanent, public record of every piece of content added, removed, or altered by you. The page history will show when your contribution or deletion was made, as well as your username (if you are signed in) or your IP address (if you are not signed in). We may use your public contributions, either aggregated with the public contributions of others or individually, to create new features or data-related products for you.

Unless this Policy says otherwise, you should assume that information that you actively contribute to The Fashion Codex, including Personal Information, is publicly visible and can be found by search engines. Like most things on the Internet, anything you share may be copied and redistributed throughout the Internet by other people. Please do not contribute any information that you are uncomfortable making permanently public, like revealing your real name or location in your contributions.

You should be aware that specific data made public by you or aggregated data that is made public by us can be used by anyone for analysis and to infer further information, such as which country a user is from, political affiliation and gender.

Account Information & Registration

You are not required to create an account to read or contribute to The Fashion Codex, except under rare circumstances. However, if you contribute without signing in, your contribution will be publicly attributed to the IP address associated with your device.

If you want to create a standard account, in most cases we require only a username and a password. However, if you choose not to provide an email address, we cannot help you recover your password.

Your username will be publicly visible, so please be careful about revealing your real name or other Personal Information in your username. Your password is only used to verify that the account is yours. Your IP address is also automatically submitted to us, and we record it temporarily. This is to protect The Fashion Codex site users and project content; in the event of abuse, IP addresses may be associated with usernames as part of an investigation. No other Personal Information is required: no name, no email address, no date of birth, and no credit card information.

Once created, user accounts cannot be removed entirely (although you can usually hide the information on your user page if you choose to). This is because your public contributions must be associated with their author. In some circumstances, The Fashion Codex community can assist users with removing additional information related to their account from the projects.

Use & Collection of Information

We actively collect some types of information with a variety of commonly-used technologies. These generally include tracking pixels, JavaScript, and a variety of "locally stored data" technologies, such as cookies and local storage. These types of technologies may also be used in online tools on a third-party site that loads information from the Wikimedia Sites to make our services safer and easier to use, and to help create a better and more customizable experience for you. We believe this data collection helps improve your user experience, but you may remove or disable some or all locally stored data through your browser settings, depending on your browser. While locally stored data may not be necessary to use our sites, some features will not function properly if you disable locally stored data.

When you visit The Fashion Codex site, we automatically receive the IP address of the device (or your proxy server) you are using to access the Internet, which could be used to infer your geographical location. We keep IP addresses confidential, except as provided in this Policy. If you are visiting The Fashion Codex site with your mobile device, we may use your IP address to provide anonymised or aggregated information to service providers regarding the volume of usage in certain areas.

In the extremely unlikely event that ownership of all or substantially all of The Fashion Codex changes, or we go through a reorganisation (such as a merger, consolidation, or acquisition), consistent with our legitimate interest, we will continue to keep your Personal Information confidential, except as provided in this Policy.

We, or particular users with certain administrative rights as described below, need to use and share your Personal Information if it is reasonably believed to be necessary to enforce or investigate potential violations of our Terms of Use, this Privacy Policy, or any Wikimedia Foundation or user community-based policies. We may also need to access and share Personal Information to investigate and defend ourselves against legal threats or actions.

The Fashion Codex is collaborative, with users writing most of the policies and selecting from amongst themselves people to hold certain administrative rights. These rights may include access to limited amounts of otherwise nonpublic information about recent contributions and activity by other users. They use this access to help protect against vandalism and abuse, fight harassment of other users, and generally try to minimise disruptive behaviour on The Fashion Codex site. These various user-selected administrative groups have their own privacy and confidentiality guidelines, but all such groups are supposed to agree to follow our Access to nonpublic personal data policy. These user-selected administrative groups are accountable to other users through checks and balances: users are selected through a community-driven process and overseen by their peers through a logged history of their actions. However, the legal names of these users are not known to the Wikimedia Foundation.

We hope that this never comes up, but we may disclose your Personal Information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily harm or death to a person, or to protect our organization, employees, contractors, users, or the public. We may also disclose your Personal Information if we reasonably believe it necessary to detect, prevent, or otherwise assess and address potential spam, malware, fraud, abuse, unlawful activity, and security or technical concerns.

Disclosure of Information

We will access, use, preserve, and/or disclose your Personal Information if we reasonably believe it necessary to satisfy a valid and legally enforceable warrant, subpoena, court order, law or regulation, or other judicial or administrative order. However, if we believe that a particular request for disclosure of a user's information is legally invalid or an abuse of the legal system and the affected user does not intend to oppose the disclosure themselves, we will try our best to fight it. We are committed to notifying you via your registered email at least ten (10) calendar days, when possible, before we disclose your Personal Information in response to a legal demand. However, we may only provide notice if we are not legally restrained from contacting you, there is no credible threat to life or limb that is created or increased by disclosing the request, and you have provided us with an email address.

Nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal objections or defenses you may have to a third-party's request (whether it be civil, criminal, or governmental) to disclose your Personal Information. We recommend seeking the advice of legal counsel immediately if such a request is made involving you.

We use third-party service providers or contractors to help run or improve the The Fashion Codex site for you and other users. We give access to your Personal Information to these providers or contractors as needed to perform their services for us or to use their tools and services. We put requirements, such as confidentiality agreements, in place to help ensure that these service providers treat your Personal Information consistently with, and no less protective of your privacy than, the principles of this Policy.

Contact Us

If you have questions or suggestions about this Privacy Policy, or the information collected under this Privacy Policy, please email us at privacy@thefashioncodex.org or contact us directly. If you are located in the European Economic Area and have questions about your personal data or would like to request to access, update, or delete it, you may contact our representative via email at privacy@thefashioncodex.org.

Please note that in the event of any differences in meaning or interpretation between the original English version of this Privacy Policy and a translation, the original English version takes precedence.