Last revised June 6th, 2019
Who we are
willangley.org is the personal blog of Will Angley, a software engineer.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Email Subscriptions
If you want to receive new posts from willangley.org by email, you can enter your email address to sign up for them. We don’t know where to send posts until you tell us :).
You can unsubscribe at any time. We never buy or sell email addresses.
Analytics
We may set cookies to see how many people are using the website, which posts are being only mostly ignored instead of being completely ignored, and roughly where in the world (what country and language) you’re coming from.
willangley.org will function normally if you block these cookies.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Who we share your data with
If things are going well, mostly Automattic; they run the Akismet and Jetpack services we use to power the site day-to-day.
If things are going badly, DigitalOcean hosts the server that willangley.org runs on, and their support engineers can look at the site or the data it contains.
If things are going either really well, or really badly, we may route you through Cloudflare to protect our server from overload. This hasn’t come up yet though.
Details about the Jetpack services we use
Source: the Jetpack Privacy Policy Helper. Akismet is enabled on willangley.org.
Contact Form
Data Used: If Akismet is enabled on the site, 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. If Akismet is enabled on the site, the IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.
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. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.
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 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.
Less Common Features
Protect and WordPress.com Secure Sign On only collect data if you try to register or log in. willangley.org isn’t accepting comments, so you never need to do this.
Protect
Data Used: In order to check login activity and potentially block fraudulent attempts, the following information is used: attempting user’s IP address, attempting user’s email address/username (i.e. according to the value they were attempting to use during the login process), and all IP-related HTTP headers attached to the attempting user.
Activity Tracked: Failed login attempts (these include IP address and user agent). We also set a cookie (jpp_math_pass) for 1 day to remember if/when a user has successfully completed a math captcha to prove that they’re a real human. Learn more about this cookie.
Data Synced (?): Failed login attempts, which contain the user’s IP address, attempted username or email address, and user agent information.
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.
How long we retain your data
We retain email addresses as long as you’re subscribed to willangley.org. If you unsubscribe (and we’re sad to see you go!) we’ll delete them immediately.
We keep up to 30 days of backups to recover from data loss.
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 contact form submissions are checked through an automated spam detection service.
Your contact information
Will Angley
will@willangley.org
Additional information
How we protect your data
The server that runs willangley.org installs updates automatically, is protected by a firewall and software that rejects risky login attempts, and is regularly scanned for malware.
What data breach procedures we have in place
If we learn we’ve been breached, we’ll:
- restore the server to a clean state (probably by wiping the server and restoring from backups, because it’s hard to selectively remove malware)
- awkwardly blog about it (so you’ll get notified if you’ve subscribed by email)
- and try to do better next time
What third parties we receive data from
We don’t receive any data from third parties.
What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data
None.