Privacy Policy and Amazon Disclosure
privacy policy
This site
This is a personal blog started in 2007, written and edited by me. It accepts forms of advertising and occasionally sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.
On occasion this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though I receive compensation for the occasional post or advertisement, I aim to give my honest opinions or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this site are purely mine unless attributed to a guest writer. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.
What personal data is collected and why
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Cookies
If you leave a comment you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
Google Analytics is installed on this blog. Google Analytics is a piece of software that grabs data about visitors (you).
What does Google Analytics record?
- What website you came from to get here.
- How long you stay.
- What kind of computer you’re using.
- And quite a bit more.
What do we do with your data?
The tracking information allows us to better understand the kind of people who come to this site and what content they’re reading. This allows us to make better decisions about design and writing.
All activity falls within the bounds of the Google Analytics Terms of Service.
Want to opt out of tracking?
Who we share your data with
No one, to our knowledge. Just this writer.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
How long we retain your data
What rights you have over your data
If you have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Contact information: [email protected]
How we protect your data
Standard WordPress.org protections. Since 2007 there has been no breach on this site. This site has SSL protection, verified by COMODO CA Limited.
What data breach procedures we have in place
Standard WordPress.org procedures.
What third parties we receive data from
None, as far as this blogger knows.
What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data
None takes place, as far as this blogger knows.
Gravatar Hovercards
Data Used: This feature will send a hash of the user’s email address (if logged in to the site or WordPress.com — or if they submitted a comment on the site using their email address that is attached to an active Gravatar profile) to the Gravatar service (also owned by Automattic) in order to retrieve their profile image.
Mobile Theme
Data Used: A visitor’s preference on viewing the mobile version of a site.
Activity Tracked: A cookie (akm_mobile) is stored for 3.5 days to remember whether or not a visitor of the site wishes to view its mobile version. Learn more about this cookie.
Subscriptions
Data Used: A visitor’s pr
Data Used: To initiate and process subscriptions, the following information is used: subscriber’s email address and the ID of the post or comment (depending on the specific subscription being processed). In the event of a new subscription being initiated, we also collect some basic server data, including all of the subscribing user’s HTTP request headers, the IP address from which the subscribing user is viewing the page, and the URI which was given in order to access the page (REQUEST_URI and DOCUMENT_URI). This server data used for the exclusive purpose of monitoring and preventing abuse and spam.
Activity Tracked: Functionality cookies are set for a duration of 347 days to remember a visitor’s blog and post subscription choices if, in fact, they have an active subscription.