Who we are
Our website address is: https://francesbalek.com. We are two people: a book author, and a web site administrator.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
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.
Media or other uploads
This site does not enable public file uploads.
Contact forms
The information collected in our Contact forms is stored in our private WordPress database, and is also used in our MailChimp (mail subscriber management) account, so that we can send you emails. MailChimp’s privacy policy is available here. Our email messages, and our Subscription sign-up form both contain an Unsubscribe button.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies on your machine. 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.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site do not include embedded content from other websites (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.).
Analytics
We track anonymous statistics including the IP address of your machine, the dates you visited our site, how many minutes you spent on our site, and the links you clicked on our site. This is stored in an analytical database, so that we can learn general information about users of our site… which pages are ignored, which are interesting, etc.
We also track whether or not you opened our emails, and whether you clicked the link inside. Again, this helps us understand whether you are interested in our messages. We attempt to clean “stale” email addresses (for which the messages have never been opened, and the link never clicked) out of our database at least once per year.
Who we share your data with
Visitor comments are checked through an automated spam detection service.
Your subscription data (the data in your profile) may be briefly visible to Help Desk employees of MailChimp and/or BlueHost if we ask them to resolve a specific website or database issue.
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.
For users that subscribe to our mailing list, we 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 or database administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have left comments on this site, 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.
Additional information
How we protect your data
Your data is stored in an SQL database, which has industry-leading security standards. The database is stored on a shared BlueHost server in server farms serving millions of users per day. These servers utilize extensive physical and electronic data security. BlueHost is owned by Endurance International Group. See the BlueHost/Endurance privacy policy, here.
What third party data we use
We don’t use third party data about our users (e.g., we don’t buy email lists, we don’t use a credit-checker, we don’t use house address look-ups, etc.). We may elect to use or license third party photos or images; attribution of each is included in the image “alt tag”.