We share your data with no one

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Generically,  we collect very little. There are no goods or services sold from this site. There are three things that entail  collection of personal data via this site, as highlighted below. We’ll provide more details sequentially following the highlights. Cookies are also used for the purpose of facilitating return visits. They and their use are also further described below.

• Subscription Requests (to receive new posts)
• Comments (on posts, pages or comments by others)
• Requests for information or general comments (via the contact form). In order to respond to contact requests, we must have at least a name and an email address.

Subscription Requests

We must have an email address to send posts to. That’s it. It’s a double-opt in (meaning you must confirm the subscription or we won’t send it). At any time, if you don’t want to receive it anymore, let us know and your subscription will be removed. We neither share nor sell your email address to others and send no spam.

Comments

When you leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the your 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 embedded within the enormous privacy policy of Automattic. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Contact forms

The contact form is self-explanatory. Only your name and email address are required, but we encourage you to supply a website (if you have one) if that will enable a better response.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site 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.

Other cookies are temporary session cookies which expire no longer than 30 days after your visit, but generally are gone within 24 hours  Gravatar and WordPress itself also collects cookies (see the Comments Section above for more information on them)

Embedded content and links from other websites

Posts on this site may sometimes 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. We may also include simple links to other sites from which additional content may be found or attributions may be made to content found here.

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.

In all cases, we have no control over the privacy policy of those other sites. We cannot guarantee their policies, content or site behavior. When posted here, we believe that none of these sites take our visitors to sites with pornographic, racist or other inappropriate content. If you should find inappropriate material, broken or no longer valid links, please contact us via the form on the landing page so the link may be removed.

Analytics

We no longer use Google Analytics or similar tools to measure visits. Any data we did collect (limited—not in depth), will be deleted by Google in mid-August 2018. After GDPR and other privacy concerns raised around the world, the additional labor on our part to purge any data collected outweighs the small benefit of the results obtained for a blog like ours. We do ask Google and other search engines to index our site, but that does not entail any personally identifiable data returned to us. We can find a ranking of our site in terms of aggregate visitors, that’s it.

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.

The same principles apply to contact forms as with comments–although we may  archive or delete forms that no longer seem pertinent.

We retain subscription data so long as you subscribe; after that, the data is gone for good.

What rights you have over your data

If you have left comments or contact forms, 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 operated by Akismet, a part of WordPress enabled by Automattic. See the link to Autommatic above.