Privacy Policy

Current Privacy Policy:

Who we are

Our website address is: https://janetsketchley.ca.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

If you leave a comment on the website or use our contact form, we may collect your name, email address, website URL, and IP address. These are useful in responding to your communications and in attempting to avoid spam and website attacks. They are also useful in cookies to enhance your experience visiting our site.

This site is powered by WordPress. 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. However some of our plugins may collect personal data. Please see the relevant information below.

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.

This site uses the Akismet anti-spam service, which collects information about visitors who comment on the site. The information we collect 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.

Contact forms

As with comments (above) the information we collect on our contact forms 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).

We keep contact form submissions indefinitely for customer service purposes, but we do not use the information submitted through them for marketing purposes.

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. View our cookie policy: https://janetsketchley.ca/cookie-policy/.

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.

We use Wordfence for WordPress plugin, which uses cookies and processes data. View their privacy policy here: https://www.wordfence.com/help/general-data-protection-regulation/.

We use the analytics provided by the Jetpack plugin from Automattic, which also uses cookies. View their privacy policy here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.

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

By default WordPress does not collect any analytics data. However, many web hosting accounts collect some anonymous analytics data.

Data used by the Jetpack plugin:

Activity Log

This feature only records activities of a site’s registered users, and the retention duration of activity data will depend on the site’s plan and activity type.

Data Used: To deliver this functionality and record activities around site management, the following information is captured: user email address, user role, user login, user display name, WordPress.com and local user IDs, the activity to be recorded, the WordPress.com-connected site ID of the site on which the activity takes place, the site’s Jetpack version, and the timestamp of the activity. Some activities may also include the actor’s IP address (login attempts, for example) and user agent.

Activity Tracked: Login attempts/actions, post and page update and publish actions, comment/pingback submission and management actions, plugin and theme management actions, widget updates, user management actions, and the modification of other various site settings and options. Retention duration of activity data depends on the site’s plan and activity type. See the complete list of currently-recorded activities (along with retention information).

Data Synced (?): Successful and failed login attempts, which will include the actor’s IP address and user agent.

Carousel

Image views are only recorded if the site owner, has explicitly enabled image view stats tracking for this feature via the jetpack_enable_carousel_stats filter.

Data Used: If image view tracking is enabled, the following information is 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.

Activity Tracked: Image views.

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: Because Akismet is enabled on this 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.

Gravatar Hovercards

Data Used: This feature will send a hash of the user’s email address (if logged in to the site or WordPress.com — or if they submitted a comment on the site using their email address that is attached to an active Gravatar profile) to the Gravatar service (also owned by Automattic) in order to retrieve their profile image.

Infinite Scroll

Data Used: In order to record page views via WordPress.com Stats (which must be enabled for page view tracking here to work) with additional loads, the following information is 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.

Activity Tracked: Page views will be tracked with each additional load (i.e. when you scroll down to the bottom of the page and a new set of posts loads automatically). If the site owner has enabled Google Analytics to work with this feature, a page view event will also be sent to the appropriate Google Analytics account with each additional load.

Jetpack Comments

Data Used: Commenter’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided via the comment form), timestamp, and IP address. Additionally, a jetpack.wordpress.com IFrame receives the following data: WordPress.com blog ID attached to the site, ID of the post on which the comment is being submitted, commenter’s local user ID (if available), commenter’s local username (if available), commenter’s site URL (if available), MD5 hash of the commenter’s email address (if available), and the comment content. If Akismet (also owned by Automattic) is enabled on the site, the following information is sent to the service for the sole purpose of spam checking: commenter’s name, email address, site URL, IP address, and user agent.

Activity Tracked: The comment author’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided during the comment submission) are stored in cookies. Learn more about these cookies.

Data Synced (?): All data and metadata (see above) associated with comments. This includes the status of the comment and, if Akismet is enabled on the site, whether or not it was classified as spam by Akismet.

Likes

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

Data Used: In order to process a post like action, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID (on which the post was liked), post ID (of the post that was liked), user agent, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: Post likes.

Mobile Theme

Data Used: A visitor’s preference on viewing the mobile version of a site.

Activity Tracked: A cookie (akm_mobile) is stored for 3.5 days to remember whether or not a visitor of the site wishes to view its mobile version. Learn more about this cookie.

Notifications

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Some visitor-related information or activity may be sent to the site owner via this feature. This may include: email address, WordPress.com username, site URL, email address, comment content, follow actions, etc.

Activity Tracked: Sending notifications (i.e. when we send a notification to a particular user), opening notifications (i.e. when a user opens a notification that they receive), performing an action from within the notification panel (e.g. liking a comment or marking a comment as spam), and clicking on any link from within the notification panel/interface.

Protect

Data Used: In order to check login activity and potentially block fraudulent attempts, the following information is used: attempting user’s IP address, attempting user’s email address/username (i.e. according to the value they were attempting to use during the login process), and all IP-related HTTP headers attached to the attempting user.

Activity Tracked: Failed login attempts (these include IP address and user agent). We also set a cookie (jpp_math_pass) for 1 day to remember if/when a user has successfully completed a math captcha to prove that they’re a real human. Learn more about this cookie.

Data Synced (?): Failed login attempts, which contain the user’s IP address, attempted username or email address, and user agent information.

Search

This feature is only available to sites on the Professional plan.

Data Used: Any of the visitor-chosen search filters and query data in order to process a search request on the WordPress.com servers.

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. Additionally, if reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared with that service. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.

Subscriptions

Data Used: To initiate and process subscriptions, the following information is used: subscriber’s email address and the ID of the post or comment (depending on the specific subscription being processed). In the event of a new subscription being initiated, we also collect some basic server data, including all of the subscribing user’s HTTP request headers, the IP address from which the subscribing user is viewing the page, and the URI which was given in order to access the page (REQUEST_URI and DOCUMENT_URI). This server data used for the exclusive purpose of monitoring and preventing abuse and spam.

Activity Tracked: Functionality cookies are set for a duration of 347 days to remember a visitor’s blog and post subscription choices if, in fact, they have an active subscription.

Video Hosting

This feature is only available to sites on the Premium and Professional plans.

Data Used: For video play tracking via WordPress.com Stats, the following information is used: viewer’s 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. If Google Analytics is enabled, video play events will be sent there, as well.

Activity Tracked: Video plays.

WooCommerce Services

Data Used: For payments with PayPal or Stripe: purchase total, currency, billing information. For taxes: the value of goods in the cart, value of shipping, destination address. For checkout rates: destination address, purchased product IDs, dimensions, weight, and quantities. For shipping labels: customer’s name, address as well as the dimensions, weight, and quantities of purchased products.

Data Synced (?): For payments, we send the purchase total, currency and customer’s billing information to the respective payment processor. Please see the respective third party’s privacy policy (Stripe’s Privacy Policy and PayPal’s Privacy Policy) for more details. For automated taxes we send the value of goods in the cart, the value of shipping, and the destination address to TaxJar. Please see TaxJar’s Privacy Policy for details about how they handle this information. For checkout rates we send the destination ZIP/postal code and purchased product dimensions, weight and quantities to USPS or Canada Post, depending on the service used. For shipping labels we send the customer’s name, address as well as the dimensions, weight, and quantities of purchased products to EasyPost. We also store the purchased shipping labels on our server to make it easy to reprint them and handle support requests.

WordPress.com Secure Sign On

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site with WordPress.com accounts.

Data Used: User ID (local site and WordPress.com), role (e.g. administrator), email address, username and display name. Additionally, for activity tracking (see below): IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: The following usage events are recorded: starting the login process, completing the login process, failing the login process, successfully being redirected after login, and failing to be redirected after login. Several functionality cookies are also set, and these are detailed explicitly in our Cookie documentation.

Data Synced (?): The user ID and role of any user who successfully signed in via this feature.

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 in order 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 has the ability to force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.

WordPress.com Toolbar

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are also logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: Gravatar image URL of the logged-in user in order to display it in the toolbar and the WordPress.com user ID of the logged-in user. Additionally, for activity tracking (detailed below): IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: Click actions within the toolbar.

Other (non Jetpack) analytics are provided by:

Polldaddy for occasional surveys or informal polls. The only data we’re interested in is the answers you give to the questions asked. Polldaddy may keep other information for their own records. If you don’t want them collecting your data, don’t answer the polls. Please view Automattic’s privacy policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/.

Wordfence for anti-virus, firewall, and malware scans. View their privacy policy at https://www.wordfence.com/privacy-policy/.

Who we share your data with

This site is powered by WordPress. By default WordPress does not share any personal data with anyone.

Please be aware that if you follow a link from this site to another site, we are not responsible for that site’s privacy and data practices. Users would need to view that site’s privacy policy for the necessary information. This includes “liking” and sharing information from this site on social media sites.

This site is hosted by 1&1.ca, and its data is maintained on their servers. View their privacy policy here: https://www.1and1.ca/terms-gtc/terms-privacy/.

If you subscribe to this site’s blog posts or to comments on posts, your information will be processed either by WordPress or Google feedburner. View their privacy policies: https://wordpress.org/about/privacy/ and https://policies.google.com/privacy.

If you subscribe to Janet Sketchley’s author newsletter, your information will be used to send you newsletter emails. This is powered by MailChimp. View their privacy policy: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/?_ga=2.195787503.237521764.1527004810-297698257.1527004810.

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.

If you submit communication through our contact form, your contact information and message are retained indefinitely. This is so we can have a record of communications and so we can respond to your message. Information submitted in this way will not be used for marketing purposes.

Users are not allowed to register on our website, but if they did, we would 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. We use Akismet and Jetpack (view Automattic’s privacy policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/).

Akismet blocks spam, and Jetpack provides “security and protection features, up-time monitoring, site stats, a free global CDN that optimizes and speeds up your images, and various traffic tools like Related Posts and Publicize.”

We also use:

MailChimp for subscriptions to our newsletter. View their privacy policy: https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/?_ga=2.195787503.237521764.1527004810-297698257.1527004810.

MyBookTable plugins to generate the book pages on this site. View the privacy policy for Author Media here: http://www.authormedia.com/.

Polldaddy for occasional surveys or informal polls. The only data we’re interested in is the answers you give to the questions asked. Polldaddy may keep other information for their own records. Please view Automattic’s privacy policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/.

UpdraftPlus Backup/Restore to… back up and restore site data. View their privacy policy at https://updraftplus.com/.

Wordfence for anti-virus, firewall, and malware scans. View their privacy policy at https://www.wordfence.com/privacy-policy/.

WordPress or Google feedburner for blog post subscriptions and comment subscriptions. View their privacy policies: https://wordpress.org/about/privacy/ and https://policies.google.com/privacy.

WPtouch mobile plugin for WordPress, to optimize this site for mobile users. View WPtouch Pro’s privacy policy at https://www.wptouch.com/privacy-policy/.

This site is hosted by 1&1.ca, and its data is maintained on their servers. View their privacy policy here: https://www.1and1.ca/terms-gtc/terms-privacy/.

Our contact information

Janet Sketchley info <at> janetsketchley.ca or use our contact form.

Additional information

We do not use this site for commercial purposes or for more complex collection or processing of personal data.

How we protect your data

Data is protected by our web host, 1&1.ca, on personal computers with regular malware scans, or occasionally on paper filed in secure locations.

What data breach procedures we have in place

Should there be a data breach, we would contact those involved as soon as possible via the appropriate method (website blog post, newsletter subscribers’ email, etc.) Note we never collect financial or other information of that sort.

What third parties we receive data from

None, to our knowledge.

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

Automated decision making and/or profiling is not done on this site, other than Akismet Anti-spam (view Automattic’s privacy policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/) and security protection provided by Wordfence and Automattic.

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements

This site is not a member of a regulated industry, nor is it subject to additional privacy laws.

Last updated: 2018-12-14