Privacy
In accordance with international law, this page details my blog’s privacy policy.
Who I am:
This website, https://watchingthewhirlwind.net, is solely owned and maintained by Bettina di Fiore. I can be contacted at bettina@watchingthewhirlwind.net.
Personal data WordPress collects and why it’s collected:
Activity Log: This feature only records activities of the site’s registered users.
Data Used: To deliver functionality and record activities around site management, the following information is captured: user email address, user role, user login, user display name, WordPress.com and local user IDs, the activity to be recorded, the WordPress.com-connected site ID, and the timestamp of the activity. Some activities may also include the actor’s IP address (login attempts, for example) and user agent.
Activity Tracked: Login attempts/actions, post and page update and publish actions, comment/pingback submission and management actions, plugin and theme management actions, widget updates, user management actions, and the modification of other various site settings and options.
Data Synced: Successful and failed login attempts, which will include the actor’s IP address and user agent.
Comment Likes: This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.
Data Used: In order to process a comment like, the following information is used: WordPress.com user ID/username (you must be logged in to use this feature), the local site-specific user ID (if the user is signed in to the site on which the like occurred), and a true/false data point that tells WordPress if the user liked a specific comment. If you perform a like action from one of WordPress’s mobile apps, some additional information is used to track the activity: IP address, user agent, timestamp of event, blog ID, browser language, country code, and device info.
Activity Tracked: Comment likes.
Contact Form:
Data Used: Contact form submission data — IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message — is submitted to the Akismet service for the sole purpose of spam checking. The actual submission data is stored in the database of this site and is emailed directly to the owner. 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. The IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.
Gravatar Hovercards:
Data Used: This feature will send a hash of the user’s email address (if logged in to the site or WordPress.com — or if they submitted a comment on the site using their email address that is attached to an active Gravatar profile) to the Gravatar service in order to retrieve their profile image.
Infinite Scroll:
Data Used: In order to record page views via WordPress.com Stats (which must be enabled for page view tracking to work) with additional loads, the following information is 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.
Activity Tracked: Page views will be tracked with each additional load (i.e. when you scroll down to the bottom of the page and a new set of posts loads automatically).
Jetpack Comments:
Data Used: Commenter’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided via the comment form), timestamp, and IP address. Additionally, a jetpack.wordpress.com IFrame receives the following data: WordPress.com blog ID attached to the site, ID of the post on which the comment is being submitted, commenter’s local user ID (if available), commenter’s local username (if available), commenter’s site URL (if available), MD5 hash of the commenter’s email address (if available), and the comment content. The following information is sent to Akismet for the sole purpose of spam checking: commenter’s name, email address, site URL, IP address, and user agent.
Activity Tracked: The comment author’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided during the comment submission) are stored in cookies.
Data Synced: All data and metadata associated with comments. This includes the status of the comment and whether or not it was classified as spam by Akismet.
Likes: This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.
Data Used: In order to process a post like action, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID (on which the post was liked), post ID (of the post that was liked), user agent, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.
Activity Tracked: Post likes.
Mobile Theme:
Data Used: A visitor’s preference on viewing the mobile version of a site.
Activity Tracked: A cookie is stored for 3.5 days to remember whether or not a visitor of the site wishes to view its mobile version.
Notifications: This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are logged in to WordPress.com.
Data Used: 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. Some visitor-related information or activity may be sent to the site owner via this feature. This may include: email address, WordPress.com username, site URL, email address, comment content, follow actions, etc.
Activity Tracked: Sending notifications (i.e. when we send a notification to a particular user), opening notifications (i.e. when a user opens a notification that they receive), performing an action from within the notification panel (e.g. liking a comment or marking a comment as spam), and clicking on any link from within the notification panel/interface.
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.
Data Synced: Failed login attempts, which contain the user’s IP address, attempted username or email address, and user agent information.
Sharing:
Data Used: When sharing content 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 content will be sent to Akismet so that a spam check can be performed.
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. This server data is 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 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.
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, 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.
WordPress.com Toolbar: This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are also logged in to WordPress.com.
Data Used: Gravatar image URL of the logged-in user in order to display it in the toolbar and the WordPress.com user ID of the logged-in user. Additionally, for activity tracking (detailed 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: Click actions within the toolbar.