What personal data I collect and why I collect it
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site I collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
Fields other than the e-mail address will be displayed as part of the posted comment, while the e-mail address will be used for two purposes:
- Should the comment’s suitability for posting be unclear, I may use the e-mail to contact you in an attempt to arrange a correction, rather than simply deleting it.
- An anonymized string created from the submitted 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.
Contact form
Visitors are required to provide a name and e-mail address when using the contact form. In addition, the visitor’s IP address, preferred language and timezone, and browser user agent string will be gathered for the purpose of identifying new ways to filter out spam.
All submitted data will be slotted into a template and delivered to me as an e-mail, which is currently routed through a mail-forwarding system hosted by NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (privacy policy) and ends up in a GMail inbox (privacy policy). For personal records purposes, I typically retain all legitimate messages in perpetuity and delete spam immediately unless I need it as a reminder of a hole I need to fix in my spam detection mechanisms.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on this site, you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website address 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, the site 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, it 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
Posts on this blog may include embedded content (e.g. videos, GitHub Gists, 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
At the moment, this site uses no third-party analytics out of concern for visitor privacy and no first-party analytics due to the added costs involved in hosting such mechanisms.
When this changes, the intent is to retain HTTP access logs for one month for processing via a locally-hosted copy of the AWStats analysis package.
Who we share your data with
I do not directly share visitor data with anyone. Furthermore, the only indirect data sharing I knowingly engage in is the instances mentioned above.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so the site can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
User registration is disabled but, for users who have had an account manually created, I 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). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data I hold about you, including any data you have provided. You can also request that I erase any personal data I hold about you. This does not include any data I am obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where I send your data
Comments are exposed via the Comments RSS feed, which is distributed via Google FeedBurner.
Contact Information
For reasons of spam-prevention, I do not expose my e-mail address publicly. It is preferred that contact for privacy-related concerns occur via the contact form. Should that be discovered to be non-operational, please report the problem through any other means of contact.
By submitting a comment here you grant this site a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution under the same terms as the associated post.
All comments are moderated. If your comment is generic enough to apply to any post, it will be assumed to be spam. Borderline comments will have their URL field erased before being approved.