This page is intended to let you know what personal information I collect about you, why I collect it, what I will do with it, and how you can choose how I use it.

Privacy is very important to me, and so I take your privacy seriously too. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have any of your information at all. But sometimes I need to use your information, and this sets out exactly what information I’ll ask you for and how I’ll use it.

If you ever feel uncomfortable with the way I’m using your information, please tell me. I never want you to feel uncomfortable.

The Basics:

Comments

When leaving a comment on this website, you will be asked for your

• name, which will be used to identify you within the discussion
• email address, which helps prevent spam as well as allowing you to use services like Gravatar to show a photo next to the comment (it is never displayed publicly)
• website URL (optional)

This information will be used by the spam filter I have installed, Askimet, to help prevent my site from being flooded by spam. It will also be stored within my site’s database in order to keep your comment on display. I will never share the information you provide when posting a comment, nor will I use it to contact you. You have the right to request that I remove this information from my database and delete the comment; if you would like to make such a request, please contact me.

Contact form

If you choose to contact me via my contact form, I will receive your

• email address (so I can reply to you)
• name (so I know what to call you)
• website URL (optional)
• and any information you provide in the comment field.

This information is only stored on my site long enough for me to address your question/concern. It will not be displayed publicly unless I receive your permission, first. Any information you provide will only be used by me to address your question or request and then deleted.

You will not be added to any mailings and your information will not be shared.

Subscribe to blog

My blog offers an option to subscribe and receive notifications of new posts via email. If you exercise this option, I will receive your email address and it will be stored by the JetPack plug-in that I use to administer the subscription.

When you sign up, you will receive an email to confirm your consent to receive email notifications. You can change your preferences at any time by updating your profile; you’ll find a link to your profile at the bottom of every email sent to you, or you can contact me directly. I will never use your email to contact you directly, you will not be added to any other mailings, and I will not sell or give it to any other party.

Cookies

Some of the plugins used on this site to improve the user experience do collect cookies. These include but are not limited to: comment and anti-spam plugins, as well as plugins which serve links to my social media. WordPress.com also uses cookies on this site. If you use a profile at another site to log in and comment on this site, cookies may also be used to prevent you from having to log in again. None of the cookies contain personally identifiable information. As they are not created, administered, or stored by me, I have no control over the information collected.

Ordering books

If you choose to order signed copies of books through my site, the payment transaction will be handled by PayPal and their privacy policies govern the use of your information on their site. All I receive from PayPal is enough information to send you the books/complete the transaction:

• your mailing address
• email address
• and which/how many books you are ordering.

I do not receive your payment information. All information that I receive is discarded after the transaction is completed.

I will only contact you if there is a problem fulfilling your order. Purchasing books through my site will not sign you up for any other communications from me.

Links

This website contains links to other sites. Please be aware that I am not responsible for the content or privacy practices of such other sites. I encourage my users to be aware when they leave this site and to read the privacy statements of any other site that collects personally identifiable information.

Analytics:

This site uses the JETPACK by Automattic plugin for multiple functions including analytics tracking. BELOW is a list of ways Jetpack may collect data on our website. For a better understanding of how Jetpack uses your data, please refer to the Automattic Privacy Notice (Automattic owns and operates the Jetpack plugin), and our detailed What Data Does Jetpack Sync? support article.

Activity Log

This feature only records activities of a site’s registered users, and the retention duration of activity data will depend on the site’s plan and activity type.

Data Used: To deliver this functionality and record activities around site management, the following information is captured: user email address, user role, user login, user display name, WordPress.com and local user IDs, the activity to be recorded, the WordPress.com-connected site ID of the site on which the activity takes place, the site’s Jetpack version, and the timestamp of the activity. Some activities may also include the actor’s IP address (login attempts, for example) and user agent.

Activity Tracked: Login attempts/actions, post and page update and publish actions, comment/pingback submission and management actions, plugin and theme management actions, widget updates, user management actions, and the modification of other various site settings and options. Retention duration of activity data depends on the site’s plan and activity type. See the complete list of currently-recorded activities (along with retention information).

Data Synced (?): Successful and failed login attempts, which will include the actor’s IP address and user agent.

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.

Google Analytics

Data Used: Please refer to the appropriate Google Analytics documentation for the specific type of data it collects. For sites running WooCommerce (also owned by Automattic) and this feature simultaneously and having all purchase tracking explicitly enabled, purchase events will send Google Analytics the following information: order number, product id and name, product category, total cost, and quantity of items purchased. Google Analytics does offer IP anonymization, which can be enabled by the site owner.

Activity Tracked: This feature sends page view events (and potentially video play events) over to Google Analytics for consumption. For sites running WooCommerce-powered stores, some additional events are also sent to Google Analytics: shopping cart additions and removals, product listing views and clicks, product detail views, and purchases. Tracking for each specific WooCommerce event needs to be enabled by the site owner.

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.

Jetpack Comments

Data Used: Commenter’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided via the comment form), timestamp, and IP address. Additionally, a jetpack.wordpress.com IFrame receives the following data: WordPress.com blog ID attached to the site, ID of the post on which the comment is being submitted, commenter’s local user ID (if available), commenter’s local username (if available), commenter’s site URL (if available), MD5 hash of the commenter’s email address (if available), and the comment content. If Akismet (also owned by Automattic) is enabled on the site, the following information is sent to the service for the sole purpose of spam checking: commenter’s name, email address, site URL, IP address, and user agent.

Activity Tracked: The comment author’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided during the comment submission) are stored in cookies. Learn more about these cookies.

Data Synced (?): All data and metadata (see above) associated with comments. This includes the status of the comment and, if Akismet is enabled on the site, whether or not it was classified as spam by Akismet.

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.

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.

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.

Sharing

Data Used: When sharing content via email (this option is only available if Akismet is active on the site), the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if the user is logged in, this information will be pulled directly from their account), IP address (for spam checking), user agent (for spam checking), and email body/content. This content will be sent to Akismet (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed. Additionally, if reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared with that service. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.

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.

WordPress.com Secure Sign On

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site with WordPress.com accounts.

Data Used: User ID (local site and WordPress.com), role (e.g. administrator), email address, username and display name. Additionally, for activity tracking (see below): 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.

Activity Tracked: The following usage events are recorded: starting the login process, completing the login process, failing the login process, successfully being redirected after login, and failing to be redirected after login. Several functionality cookies are also set, and these are detailed explicitly in our Cookie documentation.

Data Synced (?): The user ID and role of any user who successfully signed in via this feature.

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.

The principles behind using your information

• I will only use your information with your explicit consent.
• You can provide or withdraw your consent at any time.
• Your privacy is important to me, and it will always be the most important consideration when I use your information.
• The only times I will use your information without your consent is if I have a legal or contractual obligation to do so.

Finally, if you have any questions, or if you ever feel uncomfortable with the way I’m using your information, please tell me.

(Photo courtesy of geralt)