Privacy Policy

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 with spam detection.

An anonymizing 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 with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included, visitors to the website will be able to download and extract any location data from these images.

Contact forms

Submission forms on our website are facilitated by our marketing automation platform – Pardot. The information collected is limited to: name, affiliated organization, email, and location data. Information submitted through these forms is only used for activities corresponding with the form designation.

You can find more on Pardot’s privacy policy here:  https://www.salesforce.com/company/privacy/full_privacy/

Embedded content from other websites

Some 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.

Cookies

Our website does utilize cookies. Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer through your web browser (if enabled by the user) that allow the site to recognize your browser and capture certain information. We use cookies to ensure that the shopping/checkout process runs smoothly, to monitor the performance of advertisements and other marketing initiatives, and to aggregate data about site traffic and interaction - we do these things to evaluate and adapt our offerings to create a better customer experience. Occasionally third-party service providers are used to assist in the gathering and segmentation of user traffic data. These service providers do not have access to any of the data that we acquire through their platform.

Third-party providers

We share some information with external providers that may include, but not limited to, analytics, marketing, payment gateways, shipping providers, and third party embeds.

We share this information to allow us to provide our goods and services to you.

Google Analytics

Data Used: Please refer to the appropriate Google Analytics documentation for the specific type of data it collects. This site operates a WooCommerce (also owned by Automattic) store and has all purchase tracking explicitly enabled, purchase events will send Google Analytics the following information: order number, product id and name, product category, total cost, and quantity of items purchased. Google Analytics does offer IP anonymization.

Activity Tracked: This feature sends page view events (and potentially video play events) over to Google Analytics for consumption. WooCommerce sends some additional events to Google Analytics: shopping cart additions and removals, product listing views and clicks, product detail views, and purchases.

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. 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 classified it as spam.

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.

Sharing

Data Used: When sharing content via email, 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, when reCAPTCHA (by Google) is submitted the 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

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. Video play events will be sent to Google Analytics as well.

Activity Tracked: Video plays.

WooCommerce Services

Data Used: For payments with PayPal: 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 (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. We also store the purchased shipping labels on our server to make it easy to reprint them and handle support requests.

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: we does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, we can see that a specific post has 285 views, but we 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.).

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 obligated to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

If you would like more information about these practices and to learn about your choices in connection with these practices, please visit http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp and http://aboutads.info/.

Data protection

Your Personal Information will not be sold, exchanged, transferred or given to any other entity for any reason without your express consent, other than for the specific purpose of delivering a product or service that was requested.

We implement a variety of security measures to maintain the security of your data when you submit your personal information. We offer the use of a secure server. All data is transmitted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology. In addition, all ecommerce transactions are encrypted into our Payment gateway provider’s database (Paypal), only to be accessible by those authorized with special access rights and legally responsible to keep said data confidential. Once a transaction is complete, no sensitive data (credit cards etc.) is stored on our servers.