Privacy Policy

Who I am

I’m a blogger in the UK. More details are on the About me page.

What personal data the site collects and why it collects it

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 anonymised 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: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

See also “What rights you have over your data” below.

Contact forms

If you raise a query in a contact form, I will be emailed with the name you enter, your email address and your message. I will not use this information for marketing purposes, but solely to answer whatever query you have raised in your contact form.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on the 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.

How do I use cookies?

As most of the online services, our website uses first-party and third-party cookies for several purposes. First-party cookies are mostly necessary for the website to function the right way, and they do not collect any of your personally identifiable data.

The third-party cookies used on our website are mainly for understanding how the website performs, how you interact with our website, keeping our services secure, providing advertisements that are relevant to you, and all in all providing you with a better and improved user experience and help speed up your future interactions with our website.

What types of cookies do I use?

Essential: As explained further below, some cookies are essential for you to be able to experience the full functionality of our site. They allow us to maintain user sessions and prevent any security threats. They do not collect or store any personal information.

Statistics: These cookies store information like the number of visitors to the website, the number of unique visitors, which pages of the website have been visited, the source of the visit, etc. These data help us understand and analyze how well the website performs and where it needs improvement.

Functional: These are the cookies that help certain non-essential functionalities on our website. These functionalities include embedding content like videos or sharing content of the website on social media platforms.

Preferences: These cookies help us store your settings and browsing preferences so that you have a better and efficient experience on future visits to the website.

How do you manage, control or block cookies?

You can manage your preferences regarding Cookies via the link below:

Your current state: No consent given. Manage your consent.

You can opt-out of each cookie category (except strictly necessary cookies) by clicking on the corresponding category and disabling it.

You can also modify your Cookie preferences directly from your browser. Almost all browsers allow to detect Cookies and block them automatically. Please note that if you disable our website Cookies or Cookies in general in your browser settings, this will prevent Site functionally-required cookies and certain sections or features of our Site will not work. 

Browser settings are usually found in the ‘Options’ or ‘Preferences’ menu. Browser-specific help with cookies can be found in the links below. For further information, we recommend referring to the documentation of your browser.

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.

Subscriptions

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.

Likes

This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: In order to process a post like action, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID (on which the post was liked), post ID (of the post that was liked), user agent, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: Post likes.

Comment Likes

This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: In order to process a comment like, the following information is used: WordPress.com user ID/username (you must be logged in to use this feature), the local site-specific user ID (if the user is signed in to the site on which the like occurred), and a true/false data point that tells us if the user liked a specific comment. If you perform a like action from one of our mobile apps, some additional information is used to track the activity: IP address, user agent, timestamp of event, blog ID, browser language, country code, and device info.

Activity Tracked: Comment likes.

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.

Notifications

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Some visitor-related information or activity may be sent to the site owner via this feature. This may include: email address, WordPress.com username, site URL, email address, comment content, follow actions, etc.

Activity Tracked: Sending notifications (i.e. when we send a notification to a particular user), opening notifications (i.e. when a user opens a notification that they receive), performing an action from within the notification panel (e.g. liking a comment or marking a comment as spam), and clicking on any link from within the notification panel/interface.

Protect

Data Used: In order to check login activity and potentially block fraudulent attempts, the following information is used: attempting user’s IP address, attempting user’s email address/username (i.e. according to the value they were attempting to use during the login process), and all IP-related HTTP headers attached to the attempting user.

Activity Tracked: Failed login attempts (these include IP address and user agent). We also set a cookie (jpp_math_pass) for 1 day to remember if/when a user has successfully completed a math captcha to prove that they’re a real human. Learn more about this cookie.

Data Synced (?): Failed login attempts, which contain the user’s IP address, attempted username or email address, and user agent information.

WordPress.com Stats

Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Important: The site owner does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but he/she cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Stats logs — containing visitor IP addresses and WordPress.com usernames (if available) — are retained by Automattic for 28 days and are used for the sole purpose of powering this feature.

Activity Tracked: Post and page views, video plays (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms, and country. When this module is enabled, Jetpack also tracks performance on each page load that includes the Javascript file used for tracking stats. This is exclusively for aggregate performance tracking across Jetpack sites in order to make sure that our plugin and code is not causing performance issues. This includes the tracking of page load times and resource loading duration (image files, Javascript files, CSS files, etc.). The site owner has the ability to force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.

Akismet

I use the Akismet anti-spam service. The information collected typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself).

Who I share your data with

I don’t share your data with any third party marketers. I may share your data for legal or security purposes.

How long I retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so I can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

What rights you have over your data

If you have left comments on this site, 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.

You can make such a request via the form below.

[wpgdprc_access_request_form]

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. They also get emailed to me.

Additional information

How I protect your data and what data breach procedures I have in place

I’m proud to say my hosting provider Siteground takes measures to make sure the data of this website is securely stored and they will notify me if there is a breach affecting the data of this website. In the event that this site is hacked (which, obviously, I don’t want) I will work with Siteground to resolve and notify you if your data is affected in a way which is reportable under the General Data Protection Regulation.

Partners list

Siteground (read their privacy policy)

Akismet (see above)

WordPress.com (Automattic) (as covered above)

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