Privacy Policy

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

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.

Some forms on this site require the use of Google’s reCAPTCHA service before they can be submitted. If you consent to use Google’s reCAPTCHA service, a cookie is created that stores your consent. This cookie deletes itself after thirty days.

Visiting the login page sets a temporary cookie that aids compatibility with some alternate login methods. This cookie contains no personal data and expires after 1 hour.

Security Logs

The IP address of visitors, user ID of logged-in users, and username of login attempts are conditionally logged to check for malicious activity and to protect the site from specific kinds of attacks. Examples of conditions when logging occurs include login attempts, log out requests, requests for suspicious URLs, changes to site content, and password updates. This information is retained for 30 days.

Login Device Protection

Session data, such as IP addresses and user agents, are stored to verify that users with the role or higher are logging-in from trusted devices.

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 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 can force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.

Commenting

We use the commenting system provided by Disqus due to its powerful features and popularity across the web. Please click here to view the privacy policy associated with this service. In addition, 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.

In addition, we collect information about visitors who comment on Sites that use our Akismet anti-spam service. The information we collect depends on how the User sets up Akismet for the Site, but typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself). 

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.

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 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.

Who we share your data with

A QR code image is generated for users that set up two-factor authentication for this site. This image is generated using an iThemes hosted API. As part of generating this image, your username is sent to the API. This data is not logged. For privacy policy details, please refer to the iThemes Privacy Policy.

Some forms on this site require the use of Google’s reCAPTCHA service before they can be submitted. Use of the reCAPTCHA service is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

This site is scanned for potential malware and vulnerabilities by the iThemes Site Scanner. We do not send personal information to the scanner; however, the scanner could find personal information posted publicly (such as in comments) during the scan.

In addition, if you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

How long we retain your data

Security logs are retained for 30 days. Moreover, 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 (if any), 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). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Moreover, this site is part of a network of sites that protect against distributed brute force attacks. To enable this protection, the IP address of visitors attempting to log into the site is shared with a service provided by ithemes.com. For privacy policy details, please refer to the iThemes Privacy Policy.