Magiq, data protection & privacy
Magiq's Objectives
Magiq products are designed to help site owners provide a better experience to their customers by providing relevant and timely communications to those customers.
To do this Magiq collects information about how visitors use sites which use Magiq. We know such sites as "Instrumented Sites". A site is instrumented if it includes the Magiq File provided for the site owner's use.
The Captured Information
Magiq gathers the following information about visitors in the following ways:
- It looks at the user's IP address to determine their location in the world
- It discovers the organization providing their internet access in the same way
- It discovers the search terms they used in reaching your site from search engines using the referral URLs
- It uses text mining to find email addresses that users enter into the website
- It also uses simple anonymous 1st-party cookies to remember returning visitors and link their sessions together in the visitor records it builds to help with the personalization and optimization process.
- It records user's interactions with the site, pages viewed, clicks, text entered into forms (except on secure pages), time on site, selections (except on secure sites) etc.
No other data is captured
- Magiq can see nothing outside of the pages the users view on the instrumented site.
- Magiq can't track them to other web sites.
- Magiq can't link visitor data between sites (e.g. if two sites use Magiq and a visitor visits both sites The Magiq account or site owner on one site will know nothing about the visitor's actions or visits to the other site).
- Magiq can't read the disks or other information on the user's computer.
- Magiq can't collect any text from secure (SSL/HTTPS) pages.
The Magiq file only runs and inside the pages from the instrumented site. Nothing is downloaded to run outside of the visitor's browser - so spyware and personal firewall products will not stop the Magiq file from running because it is safe, and poses no security or privacy risk.
(If users of the site do not want to be tracked or recorded they can normally block or control Magiq's collection via the privacy pages of the instrumented site or via the P3P controls in their browser. In Microsoft Internet Explorer use the menu options "View>Webpage Privacy Policy" and select any of the Magiq sites shown in the list and click "summary" to find out more about their data collection policy.)
Data Protection & Processing
Any data Magiq captures about the user's behavior in the browsing session is obfuscated (scrambled) before it is sent to Magiq's servers, if the page the user is using is a secure page this data will fully encrypted using SSL before it is sent, to protect the visitor's security.
The collected data is processed by Magiq's systems to create a record of each visit and compile records these into a history of each visitor's interactions with the site.
If the user does not provide the web site with any data to identify themselves, then this record will be anonymous.
If the user does provide personally identifiable data then this will be stored with their record.
These records are held in Magiq's computers in a secure environment. Each site has it's own instance to make sure that the visitor's data cannot be accidentally accessed by other Magiq users.
What are Instances?
Magiq provides all its services via "Cloud Computing" services. Currently we use Amazon's EC2 services to do this.
Amazon's EC2 service (and other Cloud computing companies) provide computing power in the same way utilities provide you water and power at home or the office. You don't need to worry about where your electricity, water or gas come from or how they are produced - you just use the product and pay for what you use.
In the computing environment the same is true - but to ensure security and privacy the service provider provides you a "virtual computer" which operates and behaves just the same as a PC or Mac, but is dynamically created as part of a larger data centre when it is needed (people often call this "on-demand" or "utility" computing).
Magiq uses these virtual computers to operate its account, and undertake all the work you assign to your gnomes. These virtual computers are also called "Instances". Because they are typically a clone of a standard system - so each Magiq Account is running in its own instance, which is a clone of a standard Magiq system.
This approach makes the systems very secure, simple to manage and affordable.
Where is my Instance located?
When you open your account you tell us whether you want your instance to be located in America or the European Union (EEC/EU).
We will create your instance in the location you choose.
You should normally choose to locate your instance where your business is - as it will be holding some personal customer data (email addresses etc.) and the European privacy and US safe harbor laws normally require this.
You should check with your customer data management people or some other competent authority if you are not sure what to do.
More information
We have a wiki (wiki.magiq.com) with more information, or you might read our terms and conditions.
You probably should review our terms and conditions of service.
Lastly, if you have any questions or concerns about our management of visitor data, you can email me as CEO of Magic Limited malcolm@magiq.com but actually it's easier for us if you submit your question via the contact us page - thanks.
