Here’s the plain-language privacy policy.
Here’s what we have and how we use it!
The Newsletter and ARC list
Subscription is by double opt-in to prevent accidental or third-party subscriptions. Data collected at subscription includes your email address, your first/personal name, and the time/date of subscription, which we need to prove consent. Your email and name are used when sending the newsletters. The time/date of form submission is used only if our permission to send newsletters is ever legally questioned.
Your name and email are provided to the third party mailing service and to your own email software for the purposes of email delivery. It would be very hard to deliver an email without an email address. These are securely stored in the mailing list database.
Our email software records if you open or click in a newsletter, which allows us to see overall trends of what subscribers like overall (sneak peeks and discounts!) or to delete subscribers who do not seem interested in the newsletter. That activity is not shared.
We don’t sell, trade, or share your data with any other list, or with anyone at all except as necessary to deliver your email.
Website Visits & Comments
When you comment here, we collect:
- the data shown in the comments form (that’s your comment, so it can be displayed). The comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely, so we can approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
- your name and email address
- your own website URL, if you include it
- your IP address and browser user agent string, to help spam detection, because no one likes spam
Please note also:
- 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/. If you have opted to use Gravatar, after approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
- If you leave a comment, you may opt-in to saving your name, email address, and website URL in cookies. This is for convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies, if you opt for them, will last for one year.
- Comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. This doesn’t share any personal data, it just checks to see if your comment fits the pattern of a typical spammer (irrelevant text, irrelevant links, etc.).
- All searches performed using the internal site search are logged in the database, including the following information: the search query, the number of hits found, user ID for logged-in users, and date and time.
WordPress, download management software, and comment management software may also collect your IP address, country, and time/date of site visit. This information is not shared and is reviewed only in aggregate (“Oh, look, I had six visitors from Australia yesterday”), not used for personal tracking or targeting.
Some third-party content may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and/or 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. (For example, if you watch an embedded Youtube video here while logged into your Youtube account, Youtube will remember the video in your history.)
If you follow a referral link—say, an Amazon link to buy one of my books—that link will carry data that you started from this site. It has no personally identifiable data.
No other tracking or targeting software is used on this site. I don’t follow you around the internet.
Contact Form
If you contact me through the site and provide an email address for a response, I collect and use that email address for response. That’s it.
