Let’s talk first about who we are again, what we do, and what this Privacy Notice covers.

I write such cherished works as the Jason Sheridan Chronicles, The Dark Harp, Day Life Breaks, and other tellings. And use a few services to host this site.

• WordPress offers the design, features, and support to bring a website to life.
• With Jetpack, website owners that host their websites elsewhere can connect those websites to features and tools available through WordPress.com and WooCommerce Shipping & Tax.
• Crowdsignal helps site owners create quizzes, surveys, and polls that fit their brand and vision.
• AWS for the back-end of some hosting services and digital books.
• Akismet helps keep spam under control by filtering out spam comments–thousands every day.
• Substack is used for notifications and email distribution lists.

This Privacy Notice was put together to help Users understand the information collected. Alright, with those introductions out of the way, let’s turn to how we collect, use, and share information about visitors to our Users’ Sites.

The policy is only to collect information about you if I have a reason to do so — for example, to provide Services, to communicate with you, or to make the Services better. This information is collected from three sources: if and when you provide information, automatically through operating said Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:

• Communications (hi there!): You may also provide information when you respond to surveys, etc., When you communicate with via form, email, phone, WordPress.com comment, or otherwise, a copy of the communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law). As comments aren’t turned on for long, this is rare.
• Submissions: If you send me an email, that’s great. I keep that detail to review. And I might not respond, which is typical.

Information Collected Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

• Log information: The service provider collects information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. Surprisingly, a number of bad actors try to hijack this site, which is wh said information is reviewed.
• Location information: I may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. I collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people read stuff from certain geographic regions.
• Information from cookies & other technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:

• Third Party Login: If one creates or log in to your WordPress.com account through another service (like Google) I might receive associated login information (e.g. a connection token, your username, your email address).
• Social Sharing Services: If you connect your website or account to a social media service (like Twitter) through our Publicize feature, we’ll receive information from that service (e.g., your username, basic profile information, friends list) via the authorization procedures for that service.
• Financial Account Info: If you use WooCommerce Payments, we’ll receive information relating to your Stripe account, such as your email address and phone number. If you use WooPay, we’ll receive your payment information from Stripe.

The information we receive depends on which services you use or authorize and what options are available.

Third-party services may also give us information, like mailing addresses for individuals who are not yet our users (but we hope will be!). We use this information for marketing purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our Services.

I generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes.

Security

Hosting providers are awesome these days, but bad actors happen. That’s why I try not to keep things around longer than necessary.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the information that you provide.
• Opt out of communications: You may opt-out of receiving promotional communications from me. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. Substack handles this, feel free to bow out at anytime.
• Set your browser to reject cookies: There are caveats to this, hard for the site to function in some cases.

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

• To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback. This is rare.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that: (1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under the applicable terms of service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account — for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or (2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or (3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or (4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our Services; to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our Services; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services; and to personalize your experience; or (5) You have given us your consent — for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.

If one leaves a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely (or until you want it removed). This is so one can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on the website (not common), I also store the personal information provided 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. Typically, this is turned off. I might delete your account if I see one registered.

If one has an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data, including any data you have provided. One 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. If you have questions, feel free to reach out on the submission form.

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. I don’t typically approve or accept comments on the site and consider this communication as spam.

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.

European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
• Request portability of your personal data.

You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) requires us to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law, so, here it is. In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:

• Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
• Commercial information (your billing information and purchase history, for example);
• Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender as part of a research survey for us);
• Internet or other electronic network activity information (such as your usage of our Services, like the actions you take as an administrator of a WordPress.com site);
• Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
• Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your profile picture, if you uploaded one);
• Professional or employment-related information (for example, your company and team information if you are a Happy Tools user, or information you provide in a job application); and
• Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

You can find more information about what we collect and sources of that information in the Information We Collect section above. We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section. If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:

• Request to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, the categories of third parties we share it with, and the specific pieces of information we collect about you;
• Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
• Opt out of any sale of personal information; and
• Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

Although most changes are likely to be minor, I may change the Privacy Policy from time to time.

Typically, I don’t think I collect anything but that’s not how the web works. Software, WordPress in particular, collects cookie and such to operate. I don’t sell your data and only really leverage your email to reach out once in a great while. At all times, you have the ability to control such things. Details as follows:

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. Typically, I don’t allow the ability to 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.

Contact forms:

As noted above, I do haver a contact form on the site to get in touch with me and an email distribution list for those who want to reach out. These services, MailChimp, are all GDPR compliant and you can choose not to use them.

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.

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, I 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 one 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:

I do leverage Jetpack and other services from Automattic. You can learn more about their GDPR compliance here. Typically, I only look at the location and if a post struck a chord. This doesn’t happen often but I did shut down my server once when ole’ Mizzou played Auburn in the SEC title game.

I don’t share your data. It’s only used to reach out from time to time.

Typically, I keep fairly close watch on the site through regular updates, this is a managed service that includes data breach procedures and such. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out through the contact form.

1/26/23: Made a few cosmetic changes, including the accordion format for ease.