My Privacy Policy

GDPR (the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation) has created some new requirements for bloggers and authors with mailing lists. I’m doing my best to comply, and publicly posting my privacy policy is part of that.

So, here goes. I’ll give this my best shot, but no lawyers were used in the making of this policy. 🙂

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1. I have no idea if my site uses cookies or not. (Tech is not an area of strength for me.) WordPress.com may need them to make the site function properly, but if they do, I don’t have access to them.
2. Comments on my site are public record–anyone can see them. I’ve never done anything with them (nor do I intend to) other than to reply to them here or to use the link to visit the commenter’s blog.
3. I’ve never loaded my email list onto Facebook to try to find more names to advertise to (called generating a “look-alike” list). I use my email list to send my short stories, book recommendations, and updates. That’s all. I will never make it available to any third party. The last scruple also applies to people who follow my blog. And if you follow my blog, I will not automatically add you to my email list. You have to decide to join that (or not) yourself.
4. I’m not an affiliate with anyone, for anything, anywhere. If I recommend something, either on my blog or my newsletter, it’s just because I like the book or service.
5. For my email list, I have a welcome email that asks people questions about themselves. I read and respond to these, and then delete them. The only data I keep is a simple tally sheet with age ranges and where people buy books, and that doesn’t have any names attached to the data, so your response will be anonymous in terms of storage.
6. Similarly, WordPress keeps statistics on blog visits. For any given month, week, or year, I can see how many times my site was accessed, and which posts were viewed. As far as I know, WordPress doesn’t keep records concerning what any one individual viewed. If they do, I don’t have access to them.
7. To my knowledge, I don’t have anyone but WordPress collecting data from my site. I don’t have Google Analytics (it’s unavailable to WordPress.com users), and I’ve never given Facebook or anyone else permission to collect data from my site.
8. You are free to unsubscribe from my email list or blog at any time. On my emails, the unsubscribe link is located at the lower right hand corner. I contacted MailerLite about making this larger and brighter, but apparently, info in the footer isn’t something I can modify. So it’s not super-noticeable, but it is there.

This is hardly scintillating reading material, but since some people have engaged in practices that others find intrusive, it’s become important to get the terms and conditions out there where everyone can see them.

Thanks for sticking with me on this post, and I hope it’s reassuring. 🙂

About cathleentownsend

Avid writer and reader of Faerie tales and noblebright fantasy.