Who we are
Our website address is: https://theinterconnected.net
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, 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.
Generally, we have comments turned off, so it would be exceedingly rare that these provisions would be in place.
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 any location data from images on the website.
Contact forms
When visitors complete our contact or submission forms 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. We retain the content indefinitely, and use it only to resolve the issue raised in the form. We never use your information for marketing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Analytics
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: We at The Interconnected do not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, a we can see that a specific post has 285 views, but we 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.
Our host, DreamHost, may also gather analytics information in their logs. We do not use analytics for any purpose other than patting ourselves on the back for gaining readers.
Who we share your data with
As mentioned, Jetpack and Dreamhost gather anonymous analytics data. Our contact form plugin is by Cimatti – to our knowledge, they are not collecting any of the data.
Smush sends images to the WPMU DEV servers to optimize them for web use. This includes the transfer of EXIF data. The EXIF data will either be stripped or returned as it is. It is not stored on the WPMU DEV servers.
Smush uses a third-party email service (Drip) to send informational emails to the site administrator. The administrator’s email address is sent to Drip and a cookie is set by the service. Only administrator information is collected by Drip.
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).
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.
If you fill out the submissions or contact forms, the data gathered there is also retained indefinitely. This is so we can address your requests and feedback.
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.
What rights you have over your data
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.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Our web host is located in the United States, so if you submit data to us, it is stored there.
Your contact information
Use our contact form or email theeditors at theinterconnected.net
Additional information
How we protect your data
We use 256-bit encryption to encrypt messages to and from the server.
What data breach procedures we have in place
We don’t have any established procedures at this time.
What third parties we receive data from
We do not collect data about our visitors from anyone else.
What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data
We use Akismet to sort comments into spam folders (if comments are turned on), but manually confirm that the messages are spam before handling them.
Industry regulatory disclosure requirements
To our knowledge, we have no disclosure requirements.