Data Collection Policy

Last Updated: 6/19/2024

What We Collect

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

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 visit our login page, 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, we 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 1 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How Long We Retain 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.

For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username as it is a limitation of the user management system, to change your username you will need to create a new account). Website administrators can also see and edit that information, this is only done as it is requested by the user.

Your Data Rights

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, 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.

Plugins We Use

Defender Pro – This site may be using WPMU DEV third-party cloud storage to store backups of its audit logs where personal information is collected. This site creates and stores an activity log that capture the IP address, username, email address and tracks user activity (like when a user makes a comment). Information will be stored locally for 30 days and remotely for 1 year. Information on remote logs cannot be cleared for security purposes.

WooCommerce – While you visit our site, we’ll track:

Products you’ve viewed: we’ll use this to, for example, show you products you’ve recently viewed
Location, IP address and browser type: we’ll use this for purposes like estimating taxes and shipping
Shipping address: we’ll ask you to enter this so we can, for instance, estimate shipping before you place an order, and send you the order!
We’ll also use cookies to keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing our site.

When you purchase from us, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details and optional account information like username and password. We’ll use this information for purposes, such as, to:

Send you information about your account and order
Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints
Process payments and prevent fraud
Set up your account for our store
Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
Improve our store offerings
Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them
If you create an account, we will store your name, address, email and phone number, which will be used to populate the checkout for future orders.

We generally store information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we will store order information for 2 (two) years for tax and accounting purposes. This includes your name, email address and billing and shipping addresses.

We will also store comments or reviews, if you choose to leave them.

Who on our team has access
Members of our team have access to the information you provide us. For example, both Administrators and Shop Managers can access:

Order information like what was purchased, when it was purchased and where it should be sent, and
Customer information like your name, email address, and billing and shipping information.
Our team members have access to this information to help fulfill orders, process refunds and support you.

What we share with others
We share information with third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you; for example —

Payments
We accept payments through PayPal. When processing payments, some of your data will be passed to PayPal, including information required to process or support the payment, such as the purchase total and billing information.

Please see the PayPal Privacy Policy for more details.

WP Job Manager – This site adds the following cookies to help users resume job submissions that they have started but have not completed: wp-job-manager-submitting-job-id and wp-job-manager-submitting-job-key

Smush – NOTE: Smush does not interact with end users on your website. The only input option Smush has is to a newsletter subscription for site admins only. If you would like to notify your users of this in your privacy policy, you can use the information below.

Smush sends images to the WPMU DEV servers to optimize them for web use. This includes the transfer of EXIF data. The EXIF data will either be stripped or returned as it is. It is not stored on the WPMU DEV servers.

Smush uses the Stackpath Content Delivery Network (CDN). Stackpath may store web log information of site visitors, including IPs, UA, referrer, Location and ISP info of site visitors for 7 days. Files and images served by the CDN may be stored and served from countries other than your own. Stackpath’s privacy policy can be found here.

WooCommerce Payments / FluidPay Payments / PayPal Payments – By using these extensions, you may be storing personal data or sharing data with an external service.

What We Collect

If you have any questions about these Terms, please contact us.

Gruber Communications