Privacy Policy

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1. Your Privacy
Your privacy is important to us. To better protect your privacy we provide this notice explaining our online information practices and the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. To make this notice easy to find, we make it available on our homepage and at every point where personally identifiable information may be requested.

2. Information about PaddlingLight,com

  • This site is operated and owned by Bryan Hansel
  • Address: PO Box 149, Grand Marais, MN 55604

3. What does this policy cover?

This policy applies only to this website. We have included links on this site for your use and reference. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites. You should be aware that the privacy policies of these sites may differ from our own.

4. Collection of Personal Information

The General Data Protection Regulation (EU Regulation 2016/679) (the “GDPR”) defines personal data as ‘any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified in particular by reference to an identifier’

Personal data is, in simpler terms, any information about you that enables you to be identified. This many include your name, email address, billing and physical address and telephone number or any number of electronic identifiers.

When visiting PaddlingLight.com, the IP address used to access the site will be logged along with the dates and times of access, the browser and operating system as well as other information. This information is used to analyze trends, administer the site, track users movement and gather broad demographic information for internal use and to improve the service. Most importantly, any recorded IP addresses are not linked to personally identifiable information.

5. Rights of the data subject under GDPR

  • Section 1 – Transparency and modalities
    • Article 12 – Transparent information, communication and modalities for the exercise of the rights of the data subject
    • Our note: This privacy policy should provide you with everything you need to know, but if you have questions, please, see below on how to contact us.
  • Section 2 – Information and access to personal data
    • Article 13 – Information to be provided where personal data are collected from the data subject
    • Article 14 – Information to be provided where personal data have not been obtained from the data subject
    • Article 15 – Right of access by the data subject
    • Our note: 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.
  • Section 3 – Rectification and erasure
    • Article 16 – Right to rectification
    • Article 17 – Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)
    • Article 18 – Right to restriction of processing
    • Article 19 – Notification obligation regarding rectification or erasure of personal data or restriction of processing
    • Article 20 – Right to data portability
    • Our note: 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.
  • Section 4 – Right to object and automated individual decision-making
    • Article 21 – Right to object
    • Article 22 – Automated individual decision-making, including profiling
    • Our note: We don’t even know what this really means, but we don’t do it.

6. What Personal Data Do We Collect?

Depending on how you use this site, we may collect some or all of this:

  • Name
  • Address
  • Email address
  • Telephone number
  • Business name
  • Payment information
  • IP address
  • Web browser type and version
  • Operating system
  • Referring URLs, links you visit and where you go
  • Your preferences and interests
  • 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.

Please, note that we use several Third-Party Services and they also collect data and have their own privacy policies. You can see the Appendix of this policy to see information that the Third-Party Services have provided us about their policies.

7. How Do We Use Your Personal Data?

  • Providing and managing your Account and access to our website.
  • Supplying our products and services to you. Your personal details are required in order for us to fulfill the order.
  • Communicating with you via email or social media.
  • Emailing newsletters and posts to you when you have opted-in. You can opt-out using the link in the email.
  • Analyzing your use of this website so we can improve it.
  • We may market to you as well using your personal data.
  • Send you information about your account and order
  • Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints
  • Process payments and prevent fraud
  • Set up your account for our store
  • Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
  • Improve our store offerings
  • Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them

8. How long do we keep your data?

We keep it as long as we need to keep it.

  • 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.
  • We keep order information indefinitely unless you request for us to delete it to allow downloads in the future.

9. Where and how do we keep your data?

We store your data on a server maintained by the hosting company we use. They have their own privacy policies as well. If you want more details about that company, please, contact us below.

10. How do we share your data?

  • Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
  • We accept payments through PayPal. When processing payments, some of your data will be passed to PayPal, including information required to process or support the payment, such as the purchase total and billing information. Please see the PayPal Privacy Policy for more details.
  • We also share your data with Third-Party Services by allowing them to collect data on this website. You can see the Appendix of this policy to see information that the Third-Party Services have provided us about their policies.

11. How we use Cookies

Cookies are small text files that are written to your computer. There are two types of cookies that you’ll get from our website: First-Party and Third-Party. First-Party Cookies are the ones this website puts on your computer. Third-Party are those placed on your computer that Third-Party Services that we use. We use Third-Party Services for numerous purposes. You can see the Appendix of this policy to see information that the Third-Party Services have provided us about their policies.

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

12. How do you contact us?

You can contact us by email or by the United States Postal Service.

13. Changes to this Privacy Statement
The contents of this statement may be altered at any time, at our discretion.

If you have any questions regarding the privacy policy of PaddlingLight.com then you may contact us at publisher@paddlinglight.com.

Appendix

Google Adsense and the DoubleClick DART Cookie

Google, as a third party advertisement vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site. The use of DART cookies by Google enables them to serve adverts to visitors that are based on their visits to this website as well as other sites on the internet.

To opt out of the DART cookies you may visit the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following url http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html Tracking of users through the DART cookie mechanisms are subject to Google’s own privacy policies.

Other Third Party ad servers or ad networks may also use cookies to track users activities on this website to measure advertisement effectiveness and other reasons that will be provided in their own privacy policies, PaddlingLight.com has no access or control over these cookies that may be used by third party advertisers. Users can opt out of some, but not all, of these cookies in one location at the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out website at www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.

WooCommerce

We collect information about you during the checkout process on our store.

What we collect and store

While you visit our site, we’ll track:

  • Products you’ve viewed: we’ll use this to, for example, show you products you’ve recently viewed
  • Location, IP address and browser type: we’ll use this for purposes like estimating taxes and shipping
  • Shipping address: we’ll ask you to enter this so we can, for instance, estimate shipping before you place an order, and send you the order!

We’ll also use cookies to keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing our site.

When you purchase from us, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, credit card/payment details and optional account information like username and password. We’ll use this information for purposes, such as, to:

  • Send you information about your account and order
  • Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints
  • Process payments and prevent fraud
  • Set up your account for our store
  • Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
  • Improve our store offerings
  • Send you marketing messages, if you choose to receive them

If you create an account, we will store your name, address, email and phone number, which will be used to populate the checkout for future orders.

We generally store information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it, and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we will store order information for XXX years for tax and accounting purposes. This includes your name, email address and billing and shipping addresses.

We will also store comments or reviews, if you choose to leave them.

Who on our team has access

Members of our team have access to the information you provide us. For example, both Administrators and Shop Managers can access:

  • Order information like what was purchased, when it was purchased and where it should be sent, and
  • Customer information like your name, email address, and billing and shipping information.

Our team members have access to this information to help fulfill orders, process refunds and support you.

What we share with others

We share information with third parties who help us provide our orders and store services to you; for example —

Payments

We accept payments through PayPal. When processing payments, some of your data will be passed to PayPal, including information required to process or support the payment, such as the purchase total and billing information.

Please see the PayPal Privacy Policy for more details.

Akismet 

We collect information about visitors who comment on Sites that use our Akismet anti-spam service. The information we collect depends on how the User sets up Akismet for the Site, but typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself).

Activity Log

Data Used: To deliver this 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 of the site on which the activity takes place, the site’s Jetpack version, 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. Retention duration of activity data depends on the site’s plan and activity type. See the complete list of currently-recorded activities (along with retention information).

Data Synced (?): Successful and failed login attempts, which will include the actor’s IP address and user agent.

Data Used: If image view tracking is enabled, 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: Image views.

Contact Form

Data Used: If Akismet is enabled on the site, the contact form submission data — IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message — is submitted to the Akismet service (also owned by Automattic) for the sole purpose of spam checking. The actual submission data is stored in the database of the site on which it was submitted and is emailed directly to the owner of the form (i.e. the site author who published the page on which the contact form resides). 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. If Akismet is enabled on the site, the IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.

Google Analytics

Data Used: Please refer to the appropriate Google Analytics documentation for the specific type of data it collects. For sites running WooCommerce (also owned by Automattic) and this feature simultaneously and having all purchase tracking explicitly enabled, purchase events will send Google Analytics the following information: order number, product id and name, product category, total cost, and quantity of items purchased. Google Analytics does offer IP anonymization, which can be enabled by the site owner.

Activity Tracked: This feature sends page view events (and potentially video play events) over to Google Analytics for consumption. For sites running WooCommerce-powered stores, some additional events are also sent to Google Analytics: shopping cart additions and removals, product listing views and clicks, product detail views, and purchases. Tracking for each specific WooCommerce event needs to be enabled by the site owner.

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 (also owned by Automattic) 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 here 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). If the site owner has enabled Google Analytics to work with this feature, a page view event will also be sent to the appropriate Google Analytics account with each additional load.

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. If Akismet (also owned by Automattic) is enabled on the site, the following information is sent to the service 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. Learn more about these cookies.

Data Synced (?): All data and metadata (see above) associated with comments. This includes the status of the comment and, if Akismet is enabled on the site, whether or not it was classified as spam by Akismet.

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. Learn more about this cookie.

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 (this option is only available if Akismet is active on the site), 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 (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed. Additionally, if reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared with that service. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.

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 (REQUEST_URI and DOCUMENT_URI). This server data 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 (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), 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.

OneSignal Push Notifications

OneSignal’s provides SDKs to mobile app developers and websites, and data and analytics services to other data partners and advertisers. These web and mobile SDKs permit app developers and websites to send, manage, optimize and customize push notifications to their users. Learn more at https://onesignal.com/privacy_policy.

Amazon.com

We participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. This service uses cookies and specially coded links to apply credit to our account. You can learn more about Amazon’s privacy policy by visiting: https://amzn.to/2IN8PIA

Last updated Mon, 25 Jul 2018

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PaddlingLight is written by me (Bryan), a canoeist and kayaker. With AI taking over the writing duties for many websites, I feel like there needs to be a human alternative left on the Internet. If you like what I'm doing, subscribe and help spread the word.


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