This Privacy Policy applies to information that I (JD Stanley) may collect about you when you visit my website jdstanley.com. It also discloses any connected services, partner or affiliate relationships and how those third parties, in turn, might use your personal information acquired by you visiting my website.
By visiting JDStanley.com, you accept the practices described in this Privacy Policy. If you don’t accept them, please immediately discontinue visiting my site.
Who I am
My website address is: jdstanley.com.
I’m a Canadian author located in Toronto, Canada.
My Ontario Master Business Licence registered business name is: JD Stanley
Type of legal entity: Sole Proprietorship
What personal data I collect and why I collect it
Comments
When visitors leave comments on my blog, I collect the data shown in the comments form. Also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymised string created from your e-mail address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you’re using it. This let’s your own profile picture show rather than a blog-generated one. 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 blog post comment.
Media
If you upload images along with your blog post comment, 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.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on one of my posts, you may opt in to saving your name, e-mail address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience, so you don’t have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year and then expire.
If we’re working together creating content (for something like a guest post) and I give you rights to 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 you visited the other website.
Those websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content. This could include tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that external website at the time you view the embedded content on my website.
Some areas of my website (like the sidebar, footer, etc.) contain embedded content to purchase items in my Zazzle Store called The Roaming Druid. The Zazzle Privacy Policy is available here: https://www.zazzle.ca/mk/policy/privacy_policy
Analytics
By default, WordPress the hosting plug-in I use through my hosting company for my website, does not collect any analytics data. My site is about my own content and there are no user accounts for visitors to log into, so I don’t collect analytics on anything like that, either.
A Google Analytics plugin installed on my site does collect some anonymous analytics data for me. This helps me know things like how many people read my blog posts every day and the time of day I have the most visitors, so I can keep that in mind when posting my content. It also collects a visitor’s browser type, referring websites (how you got to my site) and how long visitors stay on a page to help me optimize my webpages, so they’re easier to navigate on any device, app or browser. This data also helps me notice when links are broken, so I can fix them and know who I should thank for sending readers my way. You can read here about the Google Analytics service and “How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps“.
Who I share your data with
By default, WordPress does not share any personal data with anyone.
At this time, I don’t keep mailing lists or have any direct ecommerce so have no payment gateway on my website. That means, I don’t need to collect or share any of that type of personal data with anyone, either.
In some areas of my website, I link direct to Amazon, so visitors can purchase my books. They’ll probably collect data about how you got to them. Their Privacy Policy is available here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_v4_sib?ie=UTF8&nodeId=201909010
I have a partner relationship with Draft2Digital, an independent book publishing platform I also use. In other areas of my website, I link to Books2Read.com which is the consumer (reader) hub of Draft2Digital. It allows readers to reach multiple online book retailers to purchase my books through the retailer they prefer. Those retailers, in turn, are probably going to collect data on how you reached them. You can find the link to Draft2Digital’s Privacy Policy and how they interact with their partners here: https://draft2digital.com/privacy-policy/
How long I retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so I can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on my website (if any), I also store the personal information you provide in your user profile. Each user 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. I’m the only administrator of my website.
What rights you have over your data
If you’ve left comments on blog posts, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data held about you, including any data you’ve provided to me. You can also request that I erase any personal data I have about you. This does not include any data I’m obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
In my day job, I work for the world’s second largest domain registrar and am fully cognisant of the latest GDPR requirements. I wholly support you if you ask me to delete any of the small amount of information I may collect about you. I have no problem doing that – personal privacy is super important and you should be in control of that.
Where I send your data
Visitor comments are checked through an automated spam detection service called Akismet. For transparency, I choose to display a privacy notice about that under your comment form. You can find their privacy policy here: https://akismet.com/privacy/
They collect information about visitors who comment on sites like mine that use their Akismet anti-spam service. The information collected depends on how a user sets up Akismet for their Site. On JDStanley.com, the information collected is: 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).
I use HostPapa.com for my overall hosting platform. Most of the information they collect is about me in relation to what they need for my account with them. They do collect some statistics like traffic on the websites and email accounts created on their servers. That means, they may collect some non-identifying info about your use of my website as it sits on one of their servers. You can find the Privacy Policy for HostPapa here: https://www.hostpapa.ca/privacy/
My contact information
To reach me about this Privacy Policy or with a request to remove personal info: privacy@jdstanley.com
Additional information
The privacy of my personal information is highly important to me and I operate under the assumption it’s equally important to everyone. And my day job makes me hyper-aware of what can happen when we don’t actively guard our own personal information. I also have data protection training and stay up-to-date with it.
I make conscious choices in the plug-ins, apps, affiliate partnerships and other services I use. For example, my underlying hosting platform, HostPapa, is a Canadian web hosting company and their hosting servers are on Canadian soil. That means, the contents are under Canadian law. I won’t use services that don’t give me enough protection over and control of my own info. If it’s not safe enough for me, I won’t use it for you. Yeah, that means I have less fancy, fun stuff on my website. But at least anyone who visits can know I’ll continue to ensure the least amount of personal data is collected and be relatively sure their personal data isn’t going anywhere I don’t know about and haven’t disclosed.
If and when anything changes, I’ll update this page for you.