Privacy Information

I do not collect any personal information from you through cookies of any kind on this website. I have no need to know where you are from, who you are, how you surf the net, or anything else about you. I’m just glad you dropped by. I do not allow people to register to this WordPress site, therefore cookies that would store your name and email address are not present here.

However, if you choose to subscribe to the weekly newsletter, you will be submitting your email address and your name if you choose to give them, to MailChimp, the email list server that I use. Their privacy policy may be found here. They are compliant with the strictest of privacy standards.

As of May 14, 2018, I no longer have a relationship with Google Adsense or Google Analytics in order to protect your privacy.

I am an affiliate of Amazon, and as such, I occasionally will place a suggestion for a book or item that I feel would be of help to you. I do receive a small affiliate fee at no cost to you if you choose to buy that book or item through Amazon by following the link provided. Amazon tracks your visit to their site using that link. Amazon’s privacy policy is found here.

Further Details:

Who we are

Our website address is: https://www.katherinewalden.com.
This website is owned by Katherine Walden and this is not a business site.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it
By default WordPress does not collect any personal data about visitors, and only collects the data shown on the User Profile screen from registered users.

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 anonymised 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. But only if you use Gravatar.

Media
We do not use images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included.

Contact forms
I delete any contact form information in any submission after I respond to them, no data is saved beyond a week.

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, 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.

We embed Facebook Comments plugin to allow you to leave comment at our website using your Facebook account. This plugin may collect your IP address, your web browser User Agent, store and retrieve cookies on your browser, embed additional tracking, and monitor your interaction with the commenting interface, including correlating your Facebook account with whatever action you take within the interface (such as “liking” someone’s comment, replying to other comments), if you are logged into Facebook. For more information about how this data may be used, please see Facebook’s data privacy policy: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update

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. (*YouTube Videos*)

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. We suggest that you log out of such sites, such as YouTube, before watching the YouTube Videos we have on this site.

Analytics
By default, WordPress does not collect any analytics data. My web service provider, SiteGround, has an excellent record of privacy protection, however, they do gather completely anonymous information from your IP for spam protection.

Who we share your data with
MailChimp is our email mailing list provider. When you sign up for our mailing list, we give your email address to them. Once again, MailChimp has a robust privacy protection system.

By default WordPress does not share any personal data with anyone.

How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

As we do not allow users to actually register for this site, we do not store any personal 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 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. Of course, if we already deleted your comments and/or account, we cannot give you an exported file as you no longer exist in our database.

Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service, however no other data is sent to any other service.

Contact information
Email us by using this form:

How we protect your data
In this section you should explain what measures you have taken to protect your users’ data. This could include technical measures such as encryption; security measures such as two-factor authentication; and measures such as staff training in data protection. If you have carried out a Privacy Impact Assessment, you can mention it here too.

What data breach procedures we have in place
As we do not collect any data that contains any personal information such as your address, credit cards, government identification, etc on this site and as we use SiteGround who have very strict and advanced privacy features, we feel that this suffices.

What third parties we receive data from
As a member of the Amazon Affiliate Program, I give Amazon permission to place advertisements to products that I feel will be of benefit to you.If you are logged into Amazon while surfing this website, Amazon will assume you are browsing their website as well. I suggest you look into how to clear your browsing history at Amazon and clear it every now and again.

Other Information:
I use Jetpack, a plugin for WordPress. This is the information they gather on my behalf.

Comment Likes

This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: In order to process a comment like, the following information is used: WordPress.com user ID/username (you must be logged in to use this feature), the local site-specific user ID (if the user is signed in to the site on which the like occurred), and a true/false data point that tells us if the user liked a specific comment. If you perform a like action from one of our mobile apps, some additional information is used to track the activity: IP address, user agent, timestamp of event, blog ID, browser language, country code, and device info.

Activity Tracked: Comment likes.


Contact Form

Data Used: Akismet is enabled on the site, the contact form submission data — IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message — is submitted to the Akismet service (also owned by Automattic) for the sole purpose of spam checking. The actual submission data is stored in the database of the site on which it was submitted and is emailed directly to the owner of the form (i.e. the site author who published the page on which the contact form resides). This email will include the submitter’s IP address, timestamp, name, email address, website, and message.

Data Synced (?): Post and post meta data associated with a user’s contact form submission. If Akismet is enabled on the site, the IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.


Sharing

Data Used: When sharing content via email (this option is only available if Akismet is active on the site), the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if the user is logged in, this information will be pulled directly from their account), IP address (for spam checking), user agent (for spam checking), and email body/content. This content will be sent to Akismet (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed. reCAPTCHA (by Google) is NOT enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will NOT be shared with that service. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.

When you use the SHARE buttons to share an article, you will be logging into the various sites you might share the article, such as FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Please read THEIR privacy information to find out what their policies are and what they do with your personal information.