Who we are

My name is Gail Storey and I am an award winning author. This website address is: https://gailstorey.com and I can be contacted via the contact form on my site.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

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.

Contact forms

When you fill out our contact form, the info is saved within our WordPress database, and an email notification is sent to the appropriate person within our organization. Our age of consent to connect with us is 18 years or older. If someone is under the age of 18, they must have their parents/guardian fill out the form.

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.

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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Fonts, our hosting company’s tracking system, WordPress’s stats program and other 3rd party tools that do collect personal data including your IP address. We do not sell, rent or share this data outside of the tools mentioned. We do collect this data to help our site perform better and to speak more effectively with out site visitors. If you have any questions about what we do, please contact us.

You can read more about how Google uses your Personal Information here:  https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/.  You can also opt-out of Google Analytics here:  https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Who we share your data with

As mentioned, we do use Google products, as well as our email service provider, hosting company and 3rd party plugins. Subscriptions to newsletters are sent to MailChimp — you can read more about how MailChimp uses your personal information here: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/.

We restrict what data third-parties can see whenever possible. If you have questions, please contact us.

How long we retain your 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 (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.

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.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. This service is provided by Automattic.com: https://automattic.com/privacy/

Your contact information

Your personal info filled out on a contact form is only seen by our internal team either through the WordPress database or our email client (where we read the notification our system sends when you fill out our contact form). If you ever want that deleted, just let us know.

Additional information

How we protect your data

We use a WordPress exclusive hosting provider that takes on the challenge of keeping our site secure and backed up. They have specific security features, and we also use a Simple SSL certificate – which gives us a Green Security Padlock with our HTTPS:// address.

What data breach procedures we have in place

If we find our site has been hacked, we will notify the appropriate authorities within 72 hours or less.

What third parties we receive data from

We currently use some tracking tools that give us access to your IP address and other personal data, but we do it for site performance reasons and do not share, sell or rent that information.

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

We do not do any automated decision making or profiling.

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements

We follow the best practices and try to continuously keep on top of new legal regulations. If you ever have questions for us, please contact us, we are glad to discuss it with you.

Source: Akismet

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).

Contact Info

Contact Gail if you have concerns about this privacy policy, if we can clarify anything, and if you have any further questions or concerns.