UK Terms of Service

ABOUT US

This site is operated in the UK by Future Publishing Limited, which is a subsidiary of Future plc. When we refer to ‘Future’, ‘us’, ‘our’, or ‘we’ in these terms of service, we mean Future Publishing Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 02008885. Our registered office at Quay House, The Ambury, Bath, BA1 1UA. Our VAT number is GB713111493.

We are registered with the Financial Conduct Authority under reference number 580299 as an ‘Appointed Representative’. You can find more information about our FCA permissions and activities by viewing our entry in the Financial Services Register.

You can contact us by email on the details found on this page.

BY USING OUR SITES YOU ACCEPT THESE TERMS

By using our sites, you confirm that you accept these terms and conditions. These terms, together with the other terms and conditions referenced in these terms, will form the contractual relationship between us.

If you don’t agree to these terms, you must not use our sites.
Our sites are usually targeted at adults. If you are not legally considered an adult where you live (normally this will be the case if you are under the age of 18), please talk to your parent or legal guardian and ask them for help as only they are allowed to agree to these terms for you. If you’re a parent or legal guardian allowing a child to access our sites or interact with our content, then you agree these terms apply to you and that you’re responsible for their activity and yours. You are also responsible for any transactions undertaken by you or the child.

THERE ARE OTHER TERMS THAT MAY APPLY TO YOU

In addition to these Terms, you can find:
Our Privacy Notice, available here, which explains how we collect, use and store your personal data.

Our Cookies Notice, available here, which sets out information about the cookies on our sites.

Depending on how you interact with our sites, additional terms and conditions may apply. For example, if you enter a prize draw or competition, our Competition Rules, available here, may apply.

If additional terms and conditions do apply, we will provide you with them at the time you interact with the relevant part of our content.

We will do our best to ensure that our terms and conditions do not contradict one another. But if they do, the terms and conditions that are most relevant to the content you are engaging with will prevail. For example, if you enter into a prize draw, and a section of the Competition Rules conflicts with a section of these terms of service, the section of the Competition Rules will apply instead of the section of these terms of service. This will apply only to the conflicting terms. The rest of the parts of the terms and conditions that do not conflict will still apply.

WE MAY MAKE CHANGES TO THESE TERMS

These terms might not be as exciting as the content you’ll find across our sites. But they are important. And we may amend them from time to time, so please check them for updates. The terms that apply will be the ones that appear at the time you browse or engage with our sites. Changes will apply from the moment we make them. You can see the date of the latest version on this page.

WE MAY SUSPEND, WITHDRAW, OR CHANGE OUR SERVICES OR PARTS OF THEM

We do not guarantee that our sites, or any content on them, will always be available or be uninterrupted. We may update, amend, or remove articles or areas of our sites.

Many of our sites are free to access. We may suspend or withdraw or restrict the availability of all or any part of our free-to-access sites at any time.

Some of our sites may be subject to subscriptions or sign ups. Those may be subject to additional terms and conditions, which will be presented to you at the time you sign up. If we have offered a paid subscription to a specific feature or access to categories of content, we will not withdraw that feature or access during your subscription in a way that would be unfair to you. However, we may make changes to our sites even for paid subscribers if those changes don’t worsen the service we offer for subscribers generally. For example, we may change the writers we use, or we may stop running particular columns, or we may focus on different things relevant to the particular publication, or other changes of that nature.

YOUR USER PROFILE

If you create a user profile for accessing our sites, you will be responsible for ensuring that you are the only person who accesses our sites using that profile. If you let other people use your profile, we may terminate your access to our sites or remove your profile. You must not create multiple user profiles except where we explicitly tell you that you can or must.

If you choose, or you are provided with, a user identification code, password or any other piece of information as part of our security procedures, you must treat such information as confidential. You must not share it. We have the right to disable any user identification code or password, whether chosen by you or allocated by us, at any time, if in our reasonable opinion you have failed to comply with any of the provisions of these terms of service.

 

YOUR INTERACTION WITH OUR SERVICES

You are responsible for the content you add to our sites. You must not post content that is untrue, could harm someone’s reputation, is obscene, offensive, hateful, or inflammatory, breaks any law of the country in which you are based or in which we are based, or incites others to break laws.

You must not use our sites to promote any commercial or business purposes, for example by advertising products in our comments section or promoting businesses or causes on our forums unless you have our agreement to do so.

 

COMMENTS

If you leave comments on any of our sites, then you must ensure that they are relevant, respectful, and true. You must not unnecessarily add the same comments repeatedly.

If you are confrontational to our writers, other staff members or freelancers, or other site users, we may remove your profile.

We may delete comments at our sole discretion.

USER-TO-USER INTERACTION INCLUDING FORUMS

If any of our sites allow you to create or upload content onto that site, you must comply with the applicable community guidelines, forum rules, and other policies of that site. We will make those guidelines, rules, and policies easily accessible to you and they will apply in addition to these terms of service.

Some of our sites enable user-to-user interaction in relation to which we have a duty to protect you from illegal content. Where that is the case, we will explain in the applicable community guidelines, forum rules, and other policies of that site:

• how we protect you from illegal content;
• what content and behaviours you should report;
• how to complain about or report illegal content and our actions in relation to that illegal content;
• how we will deal with those reports or complaints; and
  your right to bring a claim against us if we restrict access to your user-to-user content, or suspend or ban your use of our user-to-user services, in breach of the applicable community guidelines, forum rules, and other policies of that site.

You will ensure that any content you upload to our sites is non-confidential and not protected by any trade mark, patent, copyright, or other intellectual property right that would prevent it from being shown on our sites. You own your content, but you are required to grant us a licence to use, store and copy that content and to distribute and make it available to others. You acknowledge that once content is added to our sites, it may be accessed and used by third parties, and we will not be responsible for preventing those third parties from using your content, even if it remains your intellectual property.

We have the right to disclose your identity to anyone who is claiming that any content posted or uploaded by you to our sites violates their intellectual property rights or their right to privacy or otherwise breaks the law.

We have the right to remove any post you make on our sites at our sole discretion.

 

RIGHTS YOU ARE GIVING US TO USE MATERIAL YOU UPLOAD

If you upload content or comments, we and others may use it. You grant us the following rights to use that content:

• A worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform that user-generated content in connection with the service provided by the websites and across different media including to promote our sites or services forever.
• A worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable licence for other users, partners or advertisers to use the content for their purposes forever.

 

USER-GENERATED CONTENT IS NOT APPROVED BY US

Our sites may include information and materials uploaded by other users. This information and these materials have not been verified or approved by us. The views expressed by other users on our sites do not represent our views or values.

HOW YOU MAY USE MATERIAL ON OUR SITES

We are the owner or the licensee of all intellectual property rights in our sites, and in the material published on it. Those works are protected by intellectual property laws around the world.

You must not modify the paper or digital copies of any materials you have printed off or downloaded in any way, and you must not use any content, illustrations, photographs, video or audio sequences or any graphics separately from any accompanying text.

Our status (and that of any identified contributors) as the authors of content on our sites must always be acknowledged.

You must not use any part of the content on our sites for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us. You can find out more about licensing our content here or by emailing licensing@futurenet.com.

NO TEXT OR DATA MINING, OR WEB SCRAPING

You shall not conduct, facilitate, authorise or permit any text or data mining or web scraping in relation to our sites or any services provided via, or in relation to, our sites for any purpose, including the development, training, fine-tuning or validation of AI systems or models. This includes using (or permitting, authorising or attempting the use of):

• Any “robot”, “bot”, “spider”, “scraper” or other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, code, process or methodology to access, obtain, copy, monitor or republish any portion of our sites or any data, content, information or services accessed via the same.
• Any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form to generate information or develop, train, fine-tune or validate AI systems or models which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations.

 

The provisions in this clause should be treated as an express reservation of our rights in this regard, including for the purposes of Article 4(3) of the Digital Copyright Directive ((EU) 2019/790).

This clause will not apply insofar as (but only to the extent that) we are unable to exclude or limit text or data mining or web scraping activity by contract under the laws which are applicable to us.

RULES ABOUT LINKING TO OUR SITES

​You may link to our pages, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it. You must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval or endorsement on our part where none exists.

We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.

 

If you wish to link to or make any use of content on our sites other than that set out above, please contact our licensing team
here or by emailing licensing@futurenet.com.

 

WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR WEBSITES WE LINK TO

Where our sites contain links to other sites and resources provided by third parties, these links are provided for your information only. Those links should not be interpreted as approval by us of those linked websites or the information, or any products or services, you may obtain from them. We have no control over the contents of those sites or resources. There is more information about the links we include to other websites in our Privacy Notice.

OUR CONTENT

We take our editorial independence seriously. Future is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (which regulates the UK’s magazine and newspaper industry). We abide by the Editors’ Code of Practice and are committed to upholding the highest standards of journalism.

Because we take our editorial integrity seriously, we want you to know that we occasionally receive free products from marketers that we sometimes review or discuss in our editorials. We will ensure that this does not compromise our editorial independence and that advertising or sponsored content is clearly distinguished from editorial content.

OUR REVIEWS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

​We review products and make recommendations. Our reviews and recommendations are unbiased and written by experts. But they are based on the subjective views of our writers, and you should not rely solely on these when making purchasing decisions. We hope to inspire and inform you, but your purchasing decisions are your own responsibility. You should keep in mind that the reviews and recommendations made on our sites might become old or out of date, or may not include some products or services that may better suit you. Your experience of something we have recommended may vary. So we don’t accept any liability if you purchase something based on our views, reviews, or recommendations.

ADVERTISING

​To support our editorial work, we feature advertisements and other commercial content. We also commercialise content in other ways, such as including affiliate links in our content. This means that if you follow a link from one of our articles to buy a product or service, we may receive compensation. We may also make products and services available through our stores, including products and services we may have reviewed.

Advertising and sponsored content will be clearly marked as such. Articles that include affiliate links will include an explanation of that fact.

CORPORATE INFORMATION​

Our corporate site contains financial information such as our annual reports. This information is not intended to invite or induce investment. You should take independent financial advice before making any investments.

WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR VIRUSES​

We do not guarantee that our Services will be secure or free from bugs or viruses.

You are responsible for configuring your information technology, computer programs and platform to access our sites. You should use your own virus protection software.

 

YOU MUST NOT INTRODUCE VIRUSES

You must not misuse our sites by knowingly introducing viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs or other material that is malicious or technologically harmful, or otherwise harmfully interacting with our sites or any part of it. You must not attempt to gain unauthorised access to our sites, the server on which our sites are stored or any server, computer or database connected to our sites or any other equipment or network connected with our sites. You must not interfere with, damage or disrupt any software used in the provision of our sites or any equipment or network or software owned or used by any third party on which our sites rely in any way. You must not attack our sites via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of-service attack. By breaching this provision, you would commit a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. We may report any such breach to the relevant law enforcement authorities and we will co-operate with those authorities by disclosing your identity to them. In the event of such a breach, your right to use our sites will cease immediately.

OUR RESPONSIBILITY FOR LOSS OR DAMAGE SUFFERED BY YOU

Whether you are a consumer or a business user:

We do not exclude or limit in any way our liability to you where it would be unlawful to do so. This includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence or the negligence of our employees, agents or subcontractors and for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

Different limitations and exclusions of liability will apply to liability arising as a result of the supply of any products or services to you. We will provide you with the terms and conditions applicable to those products or services during that purchase.

In these terms of service when we refer to a ‘consumer’, we mean an individual who visits any of our sites or uses any of our content for purposes that are wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft or profession.

In these terms of service when we refer to a ‘business user’ we mean any person (legal or natural) who visits any of our sites or uses any of our content who is not a consumer.

In some circumstances, you may be both a consumer and a business user. For example, if you visit one of our sites mainly for purposes relating to your job, but another one of our sites for your own personal interest, you will be a business user of the first and a consumer of the second.

If you are a business user:

• We exclude all implied conditions, warranties, representations or other terms that may apply to our sites or any content on it.
• We will not be liable to you for any loss or damage, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, even if foreseeable, arising under or in connection with:
  • use of, or inability to use, our sites; or
  • use of or reliance on any content displayed on our sites.
• In particular, we will not be liable for:
  • loss of profits, sales, business, or revenue;
  • business interruption;
  • loss of anticipated savings;
  • loss of business opportunity, goodwill or reputation; or
  • any indirect or consequential loss or damage.

 

If you are a consumer:

• We only provide our sites for domestic and private use. You agree not to use our sites for any commercial or business purposes, and we have no liability to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption, or loss of business opportunity.
• If we provide you with digital content for which you pay, and that digital content is defective because of our failure to use reasonable care and skill, we will either repair the damage or pay you compensation if you can show that our digital content has damaged a device or digital content belonging to you.

WE MAY TRANSFER THIS AGREEMENT TO SOMEONE ELSE

​We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation. If this happens, we will ensure that the transfer will not affect your rights under the contract between us.

LAWS THAT WILL APPLY TO ANY DISPUTES

 

If you are a consumer, please note that these terms of service, their subject matter and their formation, are governed by English law. We both agree that the courts of England and Wales will have exclusive jurisdiction, except that if you are a resident of Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in Northern Ireland, and if you are a resident of Scotland, you may also bring proceedings in Scotland.

If you are a business user, these terms of service, their subject matter and their formation (and any non-contractual disputes or claims) are governed by English law. We both agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.