Privacy Policy

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Here’s the deal on how we handle your information when you visit or interact with this site.

Comments

When you leave a comment, we collect what you type into the comment form, plus your IP address and browser user agent string. Boring as that sounds, it’s mainly there to help us catch spam before it clutters the page.

We also run your email address through a one-way scramble (a “hash”) and send that to Gravatar, just to check if you’ve got a Gravatar account tied to that email. You can read more about how Gravatar handles things in Automattic’s privacy policy. If your comment gets approved, whatever profile picture is linked to your email will show up next to it for anyone to see.

Photos and Images

Quick tip if you ever upload a photo here: strip out the location data first. A lot of phones tuck GPS coordinates right into the image file without you noticing, and once that photo’s on the site, anyone can pull that data back out.

Cookies

Leaving a comment? You’ll get the option to save your name, email, and website in a cookie so you don’t have to type it all out again next time. Those stick around for about a year.

Head to the login page, and we’ll drop a small test cookie just to check whether your browser even accepts cookies. Nothing personal in it, just disappears once you close the browser.

Once you actually log in, a few more cookies kick in to remember who you are and how you like your screen set up. The login ones expire after two days (or two weeks if you tick “Remember Me”), and the display preference ones last a year. Log out, and the login cookies get cleared right away.

If you’re publishing or editing a post, one more cookie pops up just to keep track of which post you’re working on. No personal info in it, and it’s gone within a day.

Content From Other Sites

Sometimes a post here might embed something from elsewhere, like a YouTube video or an Instagram photo, that sort of thing. Just know that embedded content is treated as if you visited that site directly. They can drop their own cookies and track your activity, and this applies even more if you’re logged into their platform while you’re viewing it here.

Who Else Sees Your Data

If you ever reset your password, your IP address gets tucked into that reset email automatically. That’s about the extent of outside sharing on this site.

How Long We Keep Things

Comments stick around indefinitely, along with the info attached to them. The main reason is practical: it lets us recognize you if you comment again, so your future comments don’t get stuck waiting for approval.

If you’ve registered an account with us, we retain the profile details you’ve added. You’re free to view, update, or delete that info whenever you want; the only thing you can’t change is your username. Site admins can also view and edit that same info if needed.

Your Rights

Whether you’ve got an account or just left a comment or two, you can ask us for a copy of the personal data we have on you. You can also ask us to delete it. The one exception is anything we’re legally required to hang onto for security, admin, or compliance reasons.

Spam Checks

Comments get run through an automated spam-filtering service before they go live, just to keep the noise down.