Who the “we” (the Running After My Hat blog) referred to below is:
Running After My Hat is the personal blog of John E. Simpson, who administers the site and is responsible for all content here. On a typical day, the site may get a few dozen site visitors — some of them returning here from earlier visits, most referred here by way of one search engine or another. RAMH‘s website address is: https://johnesimpson.com/blog.
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
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 such images on the website.
However, since you can’t upload images here, this point is moot.
Contact forms
We don’t have one of these (except in the very limited form of name/email address/URL accepted for comments).
Cookies
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.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
Since only the blog administrator can log in to the site, edit articles, or publish articles, we don’t set or refer to any cookies related to those activities.
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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
We use statcounter.com and Google Analytics to monitor activity on the various pages and posts here. See the “How we protect your data” section, below, for details.
Who we share your data with
No one.
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 (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
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. Otherwise, we don’t send your data anywhere unless you explicitly ask us to (e.g., for communicating with other specific site visitors through means other than comments).
Your contact information
You can always reach RAMH via email, here.
Additional information
How we protect your data
Well, we’re not really doing anything with any data we might “collect” and hence have instituted no particular “protection” procedures.
Note, though, that information about your visit(s) here may be captured by automated website-statistics and -management services, especially statcounter.com and Google Analytics. Among the data collected by those services are the IP address you’re accessing the site from (which can be masked using VPN and similar tools), your browser name and version number, the date and time of your visit, and so on. However, this information can’t be used to identify you personally unless you explicitly grant permission (e.g., by logging in via Gravatar to post comments).
