Our Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: https://rbostrum.ca/ or https://rbostrum.ca

The site is maintained by R. Brent Ostrum (biographic information available here).

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, as well as the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help with 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 will be visible to the public in the context of your comment.

This site also uses the Akismet anti-spam service. That service collects information about visitors who comment on this site. The information collected includes the commenter’s IP address, user browser agent, referrer, and originating site URL, as well as other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself.

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 location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

If you submit information via our contact form information you provide will be retained indefinitely solely for customer service purposes. We do not use the information for marketing or any other purposes.

This site uses the Akismet anti-spam service. That service collects information about visitors who use our contact form. The information collected includes the submitter’s name, email, and website (if provided).

Cookies

If you leave a comment on the 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, and these cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to the site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and will be discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

As a rule, articles on this site do not include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.) but they may sometimes do so. When present, embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

Those 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.

Who we share your data with

Your information is not shared with any third party, other than as noted above in Comments, Media, Contact Forms, and Embedded content.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment on the site, both the posting and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is done so that we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register with our website, we also store personal information provide to us in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their own personal information at any time (however, they cannot change their username after registration). Website administrators can also see and edit user information.

As noted above, information submitted via our contact form is retained indefinitely for customer services purposes only.  We use the Contact Form 7 plugin to manage contact form submissions. The information is sent as email messages that are accessible only to our administrator. The information is also stored in the database on our hosting server for backup and later reference purposes. We use the Flamingo plugin to safely manage the data.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments on the site, you can ask 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 provided by Askimet.

Your contact information

For more information please contact me.