Your privacy is very important to us. Here at The Parchment Rustler we have a few fundamental principles that we follow:
- We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it (we aren’t fans of services that ask you for lots of extra details for no apparent reason).
- We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our blog content, or protect our rights.
- We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of our site.
The Parchment Rustler is the personal blog of Dr. Sophie Kay, operating over the domain www.parchmentrustler.com. It is our policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating this site.
All our information is stored on a server at Siteground, the website hosting company which we use. Siteground operates via several data centres and content delivery networks around the world, each maintained by a dedicated and qualified team of technical staff. Siteground’s provision is compliant with both UK and EU General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR and EU GDPR) and their terms of service are available on their website.
The Parchment Rustler is a self-hosted blog powered by WordPress, which is also GDPR compliant.
Who we are
Our website address is https://www.parchmentrustler.com.
For any privacy-specific concerns you may have, please contact Sophie Kay via email at sophie[AT]parchmentrustler.com. To use this email address, you’ll need to replace the [AT] characters with @ when you type the address into the ‘Send To’ field.
The Parchment Rustler blog is separate from Dr. Sophie Kay’s professional site, Khronicle. As separate entities, The Parchment Rustler and Khronicle do not share your personal information with one another. For example, if you sign up to receive mailings from The Parchment Rustler, your personal details will not be used in any way for mailings from Khronicle.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
There are four main aspects of The Parchment Rustler which may involve the collection of user data: our blog subscription facility, our blog comment facility, our site usage statistics, and occasional competitions or surveys.
Subscription
If you subscribe to our followers list, you consent to receive email notifications of any new posts made on The Parchment Rustler blog. As a subscriber, your details will not be distributed elsewhere and will not be used for any purpose other than notifying you that a new entry has been posted on The Parchment Rustler. If you unsubscribe, your information will be deleted permanently and with immediate effect.
Should The Parchment Rustler cease activity, all subscriber details will be deleted.
Our Email Subscribers feature creates the following tables in our database, some of which are amended whenever a new subscriber joins or leaves:
- A table containing the details provided to us by our subscribers at point of joining;
- A file containing all the post notifications that we create to send new blog notifications;
- A log which has information about post notification and newsletter emails that we have sent;
- A detailed log which has information about post notification and newsletter emails that we have sent.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site, they consent to us collecting the data shown in the comments form, along with 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. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Comments and other content submitted to the Akismet anti-spam service are not saved on our servers unless they were marked as false positives, in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the service to avoid future false positives.
Forms, Surveys and Competitions
Form submissions on The Parchment Rustler are used for competitions, surveys or to receive applications for giveaways. When visitors complete such forms, they consent to us collecting the data shown in the form, and to implement spam detection services which may require personal information such as the user’s IP address.
Form submissions are managed by the Quiz and Survey Master plugin: you can read their Privacy Policy here. Any personal details submitted by visitors to The Parchment Rustler via a Quiz and Survey Master form for the purposes of a competition, survey or giveaway are used solely for the purposes of managing that event or process and will not be shared or used by us for any other purpose.
Form submissions on The Parchment Rustler site may be validated using reCAPTCHA (v2). This is a free service provided by Google to help protect websites from spam and abuse and takes the form of a click-test or a picture recognition test to ensure that a human, and not a machine, is submitting the form. In order to operate, reCAPTCHA may access data including, but not limited to: the calendar date; recent Google-placed cookies; the number of mouse clicks or screen touches carried out by the user, CSS information for the current webpage, browser language, Javascript objects and installed plugins. You can access Google’s Privacy Policy here.
The Parchment Rustler does not implement either reCAPTCHA or Quiz and Survey Master products on any posts other than submitted forms and quizzes.
Media
If you upload images to the website, 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 (including Usage Statistics)
A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. The Parchment Rustler uses cookies to help it identify and track visitors, their usage of its website, and their website access preferences. Visitors to The Parchment Rustler who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using the website, with the drawback that certain features of the website may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
Google Analytics’ official statement on cookies and identifiers states that “Users may disable Google Analytics cookies or delete any individual cookie. In addition, Google Analytics supports an optional browser add-on that – once installed and enabled – disables measurement by Google Analytics for any site a user visits. Google Analytics also collects Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to provide and protect the security of the service, and to give website owners a sense of which country, state, or city in the world their users come from.”
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. 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.
Analytics
The Parchment Rustler website uses the Google Analytics service to evaluate website traffic, understand how and when our users interact with our content, and understand how to develop our site in the future. These may include several types of non-personally-identifying data which web browsers and servers usually make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request.
Users may choose to disable Google Analytics cookies by following the procedures laid out in the Cookies section above. A summary of Google Analytics’ data policies and procedures is available on the Google website.
Similar data types are also handled by Jetpack, our site statistics plugin. The Parchment Rustler’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how visitors use its website.
Forms for competitions, quizzes, surveys and giveaways may require the use of reCAPTCHA, which carries out its own analytics via Google services in order to confirm that a user is human and not an automated bot. This is intended to protect The Parchment Rustler from spam. Details of the Analytics and Terms for reCAPTCHA are provided in the Forms, Surveys and Competitions section above.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from external websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited that external website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Whom we share your data with
We do not share your data with any third parties other than carefully selected providers essential to the day-to-day functioning of The Parchment Rustler.
Our email subscriber service is handled through a local plugin on The Parchment Rustler’s Siteground servers and does not involve any sharing of personal data with the plugin provider, Icegram.
Continued functioning of The Parchment Rustler depends upon a small number of third-party plugins which process your personal data:
- Akismet, an anti-spam service which assists in moderating our blog comments;
- Jetpack, which manages our website statistics;
- reCAPTCHA, an anti-spam service for form submission.
Both Akismet and Jetpack are owned and managed by Automattic, which regularly updates its products and policies to ensure GDPR compliance. You can view their cookie policy here.
reCAPTCHA is owned by Google. Details of reCAPTCHA analytics and privacy are provided in the Forms, Surveys and Competitions section above. You can access Google’s Privacy Policy here.
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 register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (with the exception of their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
If you choose to enter a competition or giveaway, we will store your personal information for as long as is necessary to conclude the competition or giveaway process. After this time, your submitted information will be deleted from our systems.
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 obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Details of our web hosting, and the providers of our third party plugins, can be found in the introduction to this Policy and the above sections entitled “What personal data we collect and why we collect it” and “whom we share your data with”.
How we protect your data
Here at The Parchment Rustler, we operate a data minimisation policy. This means that we take the minimum personal data from you required to operate our service, and that we minimise the sharing of that data with third-party organisations in order to reduce the risks of breaches occurring.
We regularly update our plugins to ensure that The Parchment Rustler uses the most up-to-date versions and that any patches or security fixes are applied as soon as possible. Our in-house operatives undertake regular refresher training in data management and the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulations (UK and EU GDPR) and we review our procedures on a regular basis to ensure we continue to meet current standards as requirements evolve.
Our website is hosted by Siteground. They operate their own data centres and have built in a secure network infrastructure. SiteGround personnel are only permitted to process customer data when authorised to do so by SiteGround, which states in its Privacy Policy that access to such data “is limited to those personnel whose role and responsibilities are connected to the provision of Services…SiteGround imposes appropriate contractual obligations upon its personnel, including relevant obligations regarding confidentiality, data protection and data security. SiteGround ensures that these confidentiality obligations survive the termination of the personnel engagement.”
What data breach procedures we have in place
Should a data breach ever occur at The Parchment Rustler, we would notify any affected subscribers by email as soon as possible, and within 72 hours of becoming aware of the breach. This approach complies with current requirements under the UK GDPR.
Following any breach, we would undertake a critical analysis to determine how such a breach had occurred and take appropriate steps to reduce the chances of it recurring.
Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, The Parchment Rustler may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and at its sole discretion. The Parchment Rustler encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.