Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site it collects 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.
To combat spam, the site will send comments to the Akismet service for checking before submission. This data is only retained for a short period of time (between two weeks and ninety days for the vast majority of data). This data is never sold to other parties. For further details see Akismet Privacy.
Contact form
If you use my contact form, the data will be sent to the Akismet antispam service in the same way as comments (see above).
Email subscriptions
This site uses Mailchimp to manage email subscriptions. If you subscribe to email updates, your email address will be sent to Mailchimp and held on their database. You can unsubscribe at any time, at which point your email address will be removed from the Mailchimp system.
Analytics
My server logs the following information when you use my site:
- IP address
- date and time
- page requested
- status code (indicating if the request was successful)
- amount of data returned
- referrer
- browser name and version
This information is used for troubleshooting and security purposes. Data from the logs is processed for site statistics in an aggregated way so that individual users cannot be identified from it.
How long I retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely, as they become an important part of the content of the site.
If you use the contact form, your data will be deleted once I have finished processing your query.
Server logs are deleted after four weeks.
What rights you have over your data
If you have have left comments on this site or used the contact form, you can use the contact form to request an exported file of the personal data that I hold about you. You can also request that I erase this personal data. This does not include any data I am obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.