We share your data with no one

 

Personal data we collect and why

Basically, we collect very little. There are no goods or services sold from this site. At times, there will be promotional links to third party sellers of books by the author (see below); this site neither collects nor receives any data regarding that.

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 facilitating return visits (see separate discussion 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). 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 you. That’s it. It’s a double-opt in (meaning you must confirm the subscription or you receive nothing). At any time, if you don’t want to receive updates from us anymore, check the box and your subscription will be removed. We neither share nor sell your email address to others and we send no spam.

Comments

When you leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, as well as your IP address and browser user agent string (to foil spam).

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 larger 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).

Promotional links to other websites

As noted above, we do not sell items here. Nor do we advertise products or services other than books by the author of this blog. Those third-party sites 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. Please review the privacy policies of such sites if you wish to know more. Sellers of our books do NOT disclose any personally identifiable information to us (name, physical or email address, etc.) of visitors or buyers. The only information available to us is the country from which books are sold.

Analytics

We no longer use Google Analytics or similar tools to measure visits. 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 data returned to us. We can find a site ranking, 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, they’re 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 Automattic above.

Questions about this Privacy Policy?

Click on the contact form. We will do our best to answer your questions.