1 Introduction
This User Policy sets out how the Services may be used and any restrictions on your use of the Services. Many of the guidelines will be obvious; however, we set them out here so there can be no confusion or doubt over what is or is not acceptable. You should check this User Policy regularly as we may change it to take on board new issues that may arise in connection with your use of the Services or the way we provide the Services. The most up-to-date version of the User Policy will apply to your use of the Services, even if you have not read the updated version. If we have reasonable grounds to suspect that you are in breach of this User Policy or any other terms on which we provide the Services to you, or you do anything which would put us in breach of our statutory or other obligations, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your access to the Services without liability to you. We will give you notice of suspension or termination as soon as it is practical to do so.
2 General Use
As a general principle, you must not use the Services in any
way that is unlawful or illegal or in a way that affects the
enjoyment of other users of the Services. Nobody may use the
Services, either directly or indirectly:
• to transmit, publish, link to, make available or
receive any material which is defamatory, offensive,
abusive, obscene, indecent, racist, harmful, threatening or
menacing; or
• in a way that will be a breach of any
person’s rights, including a breach of confidence,
copyright, privacy, or any other rights; or
• in
breach of any instructions we have given you under the Terms
and Conditions of Service; or
• in a way that is
associated with a criminal offence; or
• in a way that
does not conform with the acceptable use or anti-spam
policies of any connected networks, the standards of the
Advertising Standards Authority, professional publishing
standards or any Internet standards; or
• to infringe
by the use of any domain name, mailbox name or otherwise
upon the rights of any other person in a trademark or name,
whether in statute or common law; or
• to send e-mail
or any other type of electronic message with the intention
or result of affecting the performance or functionality of
any computer facilities.
3 Content
It is a well-known fact that the Internet contains inappropriate material for minors and may cause offence to others. We do not censor or restrict access to any material or information on the Internet unless required to do so by a competent authority. We will, however, refer any complaints to COMREG for further investigation.
4 Unacceptable Behaviour
Nobody may use the Services, either directly or indirectly:
• to threaten, harass or cause distress, annoyance or
discomfort to any other person or entity;
• to
intentionally disrupt or adversely affect any other person
or entity’s access to or use of the Internet or any features
which form part of the Internet;
• to transmit or
cause to be transmitted any advertising, promotional or
other materials that are unsolicited (commonly known as
“spam”);
• to transmit or cause to be transmitted mail
bombs, chain letters or pyramid schemes.
4.1 Business
Phone Package – Business Phone packages Talk Starter, is
defined as including 2500 Ireland/UK landline minutes per
month.
5 Security
One of the main dangers when using the Internet is the
possibility of someone gaining access to your PC (or any
other device you use to access the Internet) and the
information you keep on it. To help prevent this, we
strongly recommend you use a firewall. A firewall is a
product which helps protect your machine from unauthorised
access. No firewall can guarantee security, but an adequate
firewall will increase the security of your machine and help
protect your anonymity. It is your responsibility to ensure
the security of your machine, and we cannot be responsible
to you in the event that a person gains unauthorised access,
whether or not you use a firewall.
• You must not use the Services to carry out Port
scanning/probing (which is an attempt to identify an open
gateway into another Internet user’s machine). Where it has
been identified that an account has been used for this
activity, we may withdraw the Services without notice.
• You must not use the Services to run any program
that can be used to compromise the efficiency and security
of network traffic.
• You must not use the Services to
knowingly or unknowingly cause to be transmitted Worms,
Trojans or Viruses. Any account found to have been used to
transmit such items can be subject to immediate suspension
or disconnection of Services without notice.
We in no
way offer support for the detection or removal of Viruses,
Worms or Trojans. We strongly recommend that you use good
quality, up-to-date anti-virus software supplied by a
reputable anti-virus developer to protect your system from
unwanted Viruses, Worms, and Trojans.
6 Data Protection and Privacy
6.1. Our policy is to respect and protect the privacy of our
customers, and we shall endeavour not to disclose your
personal information to any third party.
6.2. We are a data controller in relation to your
personal information for the purposes of the Data Protection
Acts 1998 as amended and shall comply with our obligations
regarding your personal information.
6.3.
Notwithstanding the above, you hereby give your consent and
accept and agree that we may disclose any information we
hold relating to you to outside parties where:
o
6.3.1. We have a good faith belief that such action is
necessary to protect our rights;
o 6.3.2. where we
have a good faith belief that you have committed an unlawful
act;
o where we have a good faith belief that the
legitimate rights of a third party appear to have been
interfered with; or
o 6.3.4. where a court or tribunal
orders disclosure.
6.4. Before completing any forms or
passing your personal details on to anyone via the Internet,
you should be certain about who is receiving those details,
and if you do not wish them to sell your name to third
parties, you should check the opt-out boxes.
Details
of Irish Data Protection law and registration requirements
can be found at www.dataprotection.ie Nobody may use the
Services, either directly or indirectly:
o in breach
of the provisions of the data protection legislation or any
directions issued by the Data Protection Commissioner.
o to collect names and personal details of other users
of the Services.
o to transmit, publish, link to, make
available or cause to be transmitted any material designed
to obtain passwords, account information or other
information from other Services users.
6.5. We will
use traffic and other usage-related data, from time to time,
in an aggregated format (which does not identify the user
individually) in order to better understand our traffic
management and improve the quality and content of our
services. In addition, if we believe that individual users
are suffering from poor service, we may store additional
data on the traffic characteristics and usage patterns in
order to help us optimize service delivery.
7 Copyright and Third-Party Rights
Any images, photographs, articles, pages, designs, drawings, software, music, information and other materials published on the Internet and on the Services are protected by copyright. Publishing material on the Internet and on the Services does not mean it is available for anyone to copy. Unless the owner of that copyright states explicitly that you may copy the work, you should assume that you cannot. It is an infringement of copyright to copy, reproduce, adapt, translate, broadcast, or perform copyright-protected material without permission, to make infringing copies available to the public or otherwise to knowingly deal in infringing copies. The Services must not be used, directly or indirectly, to transmit, publish, link to or otherwise make available any confidential information or trade secrets of any person or entity.
8 Fraud
Nobody may use the Services, either directly or indirectly, to impersonate any person, entity or a minor or to commit or attempt to commit any fraud. In using the Services, you must not use a false name or a name you are not entitled to use.
9 Shopping
Remember that consumer protection laws do apply to transactions on our Services which means that all merchants should act honestly and fairly.
10 Chat
Our Interactive Services and Internet Services provide access to chatroom services offered by third-party organisations. We do not moderate or control the content of any chatrooms, and we are not responsible for any of the content that appears in the chatrooms or any activity that occurs in the chatrooms.
11 Web Search
The Services may include a web directory and the capability to search the web. The web directory provides links to the Internet, and the use of search facilities will produce information from websites on the Internet and links to the Internet. We are not responsible for content on the Internet accessed via the directory or as the result of any search.
12 Servers
You are solely responsible for the setup and security of all servers that you may run on your PC. You are also responsible for all traffic that may pass through your PC. We cannot be held liable for any losses or damages that may occur due to a compromise of your server. Please note that your account may be subject to immediate suspension or disconnection without notice if any security breaches do occur or if any server causes any degradation in network performance. You should also note that running servers on your PC may cause your own connection to operate in a less-than-optimal manner. Webservers: see section 7, Websites Remote Access: all remote access (FTP; SSH; PC Anywhere etc.) must be password protected, and the address must not be publicly advertised. Games: if the game in question has a password/IP access restriction option, this must be used. Your IP address must not be publicly advertised on gaming sites etc. E-mails: you must ensure that you do not enable the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mails by others. This applies to both materials that originate on your system and also third-party material that might pass through it. This includes but is not limited to a prohibition on running an “open mail relay”, i.e., a machine which accepts mail from unauthorized or unknown senders and forwards it to a destination outside of your machine or network. If your machine does relay mail, on an authorized basis, then it must record its passing through your system by means of an appropriate “received” line. Other: you may run other servers but be aware that we reserve the right to restrict access to them should they cause network problems or should we receive complaints from other customers. We may, at our sole discretion, run manual or automatic systems to determine your compliance with our User Policy (e.g., scanning for “open mail relays”). You are deemed to have granted permission for this limited intrusion onto your network or machine. Please be aware that we do not offer any DNS services, e.g., Domain Name Redirection. Telecom Stack service is based on dynamic IP addressing, and you must not specify IP addresses (other than DNS servers) in the network settings for your Internet connection. Please note that should we receive any complaints about any server that you may be running that your Internet access may be suspended without notice pending further investigation.
13 Use of Virtual Private Network (VPN)
You may use VPN, but you acknowledge that your Services may be adversely affected by such use. If you use VPN and this affects our network performance or any users of our Services, we reserve the right to instruct you to stop using VPN, and you must comply with this request.
14 Communications from Telecom Stack
We may use e-mail to communicate with you from time to time. We will consider the e-mail delivered at the same time that it is sent. Communication from us via post will be considered delivered after a full 2 working days, i.e., mail sent on a Monday will be considered delivered on the following Thursday. All post will be sent to the address registered on your Internet account.