Privacy policy

winenous – my website

This website www.winenous.co.uk is run by me, Steve Slatcher, and I can be contacted about any matter relating to this privacy policy at steve.slatcher@pobox.com.

To the extent that I process your personal data at all, I do so as an individual who earns nothing through my website, and not as part of a legal entity that’s engaged in economic activity. As such I understand that the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) does not apply to me. However some of your data is passed on to third parties, and I want to be as transparent as possible about what I do with the small amount of your data I hold personally.

So to the best of my ability I describe here how your personal data is processed and stored. The technical detail may look scary, but nothing is unusual for websites that use blogging platforms.

Comments

When you leave comments on winenous I collect the data shown in the comments form, and also your IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. I use automatic spam detection by Akismet, and also manually check comments myself.

In the rare case where I feel an emailed response to your comment is helpful and/or appropriate, I may email you. But you will not be added to any mailing list.

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, if you have a Gravatar profile picture, it will be visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so any follow-up comments can be recognised and approved automatically instead of holding them in the moderation queue.

If you have left comments, you can request to receive the personal data I hold about you, including any data you have provided to me. You can also request that I erase any personal data I hold about you. This does not include any data I am obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Subscribe by email

To initiate and process subscriptions, the following information is used: subscriber’s email address and the ID of the post or comment where relevant (depending on the specific subscription being processed). In the event of a new subscription being initiated, some basic server data is collected, 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 is used for the exclusive purpose of monitoring and preventing abuse and spam, and is not directly available to me.

Sharing posts

When sharing posts via email, 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 information will be sent to Akismet so that a spam check can be performed, but it is not directly available to me.

Mobile theme

A cookie (akm_mobile) is stored for 3-5 days to remember whether or not you wish to view winenous’s mobile version. Learn more about this cookie.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on winenous may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites may behave in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and 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.

I believe that videos are the only external embedded content you will encounter here, and that all embedded mages (e.g. images in posts) are hosted directly on the winenous server.

WordPress.com Jetpack statistics

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. I personally do not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, I can see that a specific post has 285 views, but cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. 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 providing  this feature.

Activity Tracked: Post and page views, outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms, and country. 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 the 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.).

Google Analytics statistics

As of 11th December 2020, the winenous website no longer uses Google Analytics. But as this change was so recent, and I have not yet deleted any existing information, my earlier statement on Google Analytics is included below.

I find WordPress.com Jetpack statistics convenient to use, but they only go back 2-3 years. So to enable me to measure activity on winenous over longer periods, I also use Google Analytics. The winenous website sends page view events over to Google Analytics. Please refer to the appropriate Google Analytics documentation for the specific type of data it collects. As with WordPress.com, I personally cannot see the activity of individual users/accounts.