Privacy Policy
Who we are:
“We” are author Katherine Villyard. “Our” website address is: https://www.katherinevillyard.com.
Information We Collect and Store:
We intentionally minimize the data we collect, including choosing a statistics plugin that hashes and anonymizes your IP address. During your visit, we monitor:
- Pages Viewed: This helps us analyze site usage statistics and understand what content you enjoy or find useful.
- Browser user agent: we’ll use this for purposes like creating charts of views, most used browsers, etc., in hopes of maintaining compatibility with your preferred browser.
- An anonymized string created from your ip address.
- A hashed string created from your ip address.
As well as:
- Any comments you voluntarily choose to leave, along with other information directly provided by you such as your name, email address, website, etc., and your IP address (this is default WordPress behavior, and also used by Akismet antispam).
- If you optionally and voluntarily sign up for my newsletter, we collect your email address and name.
- If you optionally and voluntarily buy things at my store, we collect information related to fulfilling your order (mostly your email address, but also your physical address if you purchase a physical product).
Some of this information is also stored un-anonymized in our web host’s standard log files, but our web host has a minimal retention policy.
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. Visitor comments are checked through Akismet, an automated spam detection service. You can view Akismet’s privacy policy at https://akismet.com/privacy/.
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.
Obviously, your comments are public and can be seen by anyone.
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.
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 (e.g. YouTube).
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. We have no control over the privacy policy and behavior of other sites.
Who we share your data with:
If you optionally choose to sign up for my newsletter, your email address and name will be shared with Mailerlite, Bookfunnel, and StoryOrigin for mailing list administration. Mailerlite’s privacy policy is at https://www.mailerlite.com/legal/privacy-policy. StoryOrigin’s privacy policy is at https://storyoriginapp.com/privacy. Bookfunnel’s privacy policy is at https://bookfunnel.com/privacy/.
If you optionally choose to buy items from my shop, you are purchasing via PayHip (the shop is located on Payhip’s servers) and they are storing your purchase information. Payhip’s privacy policy is located at https://payhip.com/privacy.
If you optionally choose to leave a comment, your comment and its metadata will be shared with the Akismet antispam service to prevent spam. You can view Akismet’s privacy policy at https://akismet.com/privacy/.
We back up our website with VaultPress. The data sent to VaultPress is all of our posts, plugins, and images, any comments you voluntarily choose to leave and their metadata, and the anonymized page view statistics (browser, anonymized IP hash, page views, etc.) stored in the database. You can view VaultPress’s privacy policy at https://automattic.com/privacy/.
We trust these third parties only use your data to operate our email newsletter, prevent spam on our site, or back up our website. We do not lease or sell your information to anyone
Our contact form is protected by reCAPTCHA v2 because spammers found it and used it to spam us silly. Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply to our contact form.
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.
Anonymized page view, location, and browser data is stored for a year.
Where your data is sent:
Visitor comments are checked through an automated spam detection service. You can view Akismet’s privacy policy at https://akismet.com/privacy/.
We back up our website with VaultPress. The data sent to VaultPress is all of our posts, plugins, and images, any comments you voluntarily choose to leave and their metadata, and anonymized page view statistics (browser, anonymized IP hash, page views, etc.) stored in the database. You can view VaultPress’s privacy policy at https://automattic.com/privacy/.
If you use our contact form to contact us, the information you enter into the form (including name, email address, and the message) are emailed to us. Also Google will do the reCAPTCHA thing. Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply to our contact form.
What we do with your data:
We create pretty graphs out of your anonymized page usage statistics and use them to infer which of our pages are more popular than others.
If you voluntarily choose to comment, we display your comment and optionally link to your website (but never display your email address, browser agent, IP, etc.).
If you voluntarily choose to sign up for our newsletter, we send you our email newsletter with writing news and links to content we think you’ll find interesting. You can unsubscribe at any time.
We do not use your web data for any kind of commercial purpose; we do not run ads on our site, nor do we sell or lease your data to anyone because that’s gross and also illegal. We do secretly hope that if you subscribe to our newsletter, that means you LIKE US and might buy a book, but we also believe that the purpose of a newsletter is to deepen engagement, not to sell. So again, we do not sell or lease your data to anyone.