1. My stance on Privacy and Data Protection
- Your privacy, and having it protected is important
- I only collect your data when it’s necessary
- Like you, I don’t like receiving spam and I don’t send it either
- I also don’t like complicated legal jargon and have tried to make this document simple and easy to understand
- I don’t sell, distribute or make your personal information public
2 Legislation
I’m based in the UK and do my best to make sure I adhere to the relevant regulations. If there is something that you’d like to tell me about regarding this, or need more information, please get in touch via my contact page. I’m not a legal expert but will do my best to help.
3 Personal information I collect and why
In order to carry out my day to day activities, I collect and use a limited amount of personal information for the following reasons:
3.a Site visitor tracking
Like many websites, I may use Google Analytics (GA) to track visitor interaction. This data is used to determine the number of people visiting my website so I can monitor how they find and use my web pages, and which pages they visit. Whilst GA does record data such as your geographical location, IP address, what device/internet browser you’re using and your operating system, none of this information can personally identify you to me. GA also uses cookies and you can disable them in your internet browser (see also point 4 below).
3.b Contact forms and email links
Email enquiries I receive via the website are stored on my mail server. I retrieve these emails and may store them on (or delete them from) the server, or my office computers in order to carry out my normal day-to-day activities efficiently. When contacting me via email, I recommend that you only provide me with information that you consider necessary for me to give you an accurate response. In other words, please avoid sending me confidential or otherwise sensitive information in your email.
4. More about cookies
A cookie is a small file that is placed on your computer’s hard drive when you visit a website. I use cookies on this website to remember information about your browsing session but they aren’t used to gather any personally identifiable information about you. In general, cookies help me provide you with a better website by enabling me to monitor which pages you visit and find useful. A cookie does NOT give me access to your computer.
You can choose to accept or decline cookies by altering the setting in your web browser e.g Chrome, Firefox etc. Although most web browsers automatically accept cookies, you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies to suit your preferences. However, this may affect your browsing experience. If you wish to prevent cookies from this website being stored on your computer, please disable them in your browser or navigate away and clear any cookies that have been set.
In general, cookies on this website are used for:
- Analytical/performance purposes (see also point 3.a above) – this allows me to recognise and calculate the number of visitors and to see how visitors navigate around the website when they are using it.
- Sharing purposes – this allows you to share pages with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
5. My blog/news posts
If you add a comment to any of my blog/news posts and include your name, email address and/or website, it will be stored in the website’s database. I ask that you don’t include these in your comment. Your IP address along with the time and date you submitted the comment is also logged. This doesn’t allow me to personally identify you. Your comment will remain on this site until I either remove the comment or remove the blog post. If you want your comment deleted, please email me and let me know. If you’re under 16, you must obtain parental consent before posting a comment on our website.
6. About this website’s hosting and server
This website is hosted by Siteground.co.uk which provides a shared hosting server environment. All traffic (transferral of files) between this website and your browser is encrypted and delivered over HTTPS.
7. Data breaches
I take data breaches seriously. In accordance with the ICO’s guidelines on this, I will report any unlawful personal data breach stored in an identifiable manner to the relevant individuals within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. This is dependent on whether or not it is deemed to be a ‘high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals’.
8. Changes to this Privacy Policy
This page may change from time to time to take into account any errors, omissions or changes of legislation. As it’s not practical to notify all clients or website users of these changes, I recommend that you check this page occasionally for any changes.