The European Union’s “General Data Protection Regulation” or GDPR requires that internet users be appraised of their rights for privacy of their personal information. Following is information that we, non-lawyers, non-technical people, and persons who would rather be writing history, believe you may need to know concerning your personal information and cookies on this website. Please use our Contact Form if you have any questions about any of this, and we will try to find the answer for you because we really don’t know more than what is included here.
There are three important components of data collection, processing, and storage:
- Right to Access
- Right to be Forgotten
- Data Portability
1. Right to Access
We do not collect information from our readers unless you leave feedback, comments, or sign up to receive a notification when a new blog is posted. Heritage Ramblings will collect only the information you provide on that page, plus WordPress provides your IP address to the editors/administrators. Comments will be published with the name you use and your Gravatar, but only administrators see your IP address.
We do look at WordPress analytics but they only give a simple number of persons who have viewed or commented- no personal data is viewable by the editor. We do not use Google Analytics.
We do not purposefully “share” your information with anyone, ever, with the only exception being if you contact us about our/your family, and you agree that we can pass your name and email address on to other family members. After all, the whole idea of this blog is to connect cousins and tell the stories of our ancestors, but we would only share with your permission.
Some plug-ins and software used by WordPress for this website, however, do use cookies and you will need to read their information below to learn more about how your data may be used. Sometimes these programs are used to make the website load faster or work the way we intend, like with subscriptions or links. Other times, it is sort of like making sausage- as bloggers we don’t want to know what goes in to it, we just want your hunger to be well satisfied (for family history information). You do have the right to know what the ingredients are, however, so read on.
We use WordPress security plug-ins to encrypt and secure our website, such as Captcha. Some of these new ones with tighter security are a pain to have on the blog, but we want your visit to be safe and secure. If we are notified of a data breach, we will contact any persons who have data on our site within 72 hours.
All readers of this site must be age 16 or over, or parents must provide consent. By clicking on any page in this website, you consent to all the uses detailed here and on any pop-ups.
A basic privacy statement for the plug-ins, etc. used for this blog can be found at–
https://automattic.com/privacy-notice/
For much greater detail, the following is what various applications have listed as information you need to know when using this site with their applications. (This is great bedtime reading for insomniacs- induced sleep very quickly, which is why this page did not get posted last night!):
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.
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: Akismet is enabled on the site, therefore 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. Akismet is enabled on the site, thus 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 (we haven’t), 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. Akismet (also owned by Automattic) is enabled on the site, so 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.
Data Synced (?): All data and metadata (see above) associated with comments. This includes the status of the comment and since 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.
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.
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. Please see Google’s privacy policy.
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.
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.
2. Right to Be Forgotten
If you wish your data to be removed from this website, please notify the administrators/editors via the contact form and it will be removed within 48 hours. You may also use the “Delete Me” button and take yourself off the blog if officially a subscriber or administrator.
3. Data Portability
We do not share data with other sites for marketing, etc., so this aspect is not applicable to our blog.
