Who we are

Our website address is: https://www.michaelmccallister.com.

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 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.

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

We keep names, email addresses, and text included in Contact Form submissions indefinitely. I won’t ever add your email address obtained via a Contact Form to a commercial email list unless you directly ask me to.

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 extra 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 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Activity Log

This feature only records activities of a site’s registered users, and the retention duration of activity data will depend on the site’s plan and activity type.

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

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) to retrieve their profile image.

Mobile Theme

Data Used: A visitor’s preference on viewing the mobile version of a site.

Activity Tracked: A cookie (akm_mobile) is stored for 3.5 days to remember whether or not a visitor of the site wishes to view its mobile version. Learn more about this cookie.

Analytics

The site uses the MonsterInsights Google Analytics plugin. The plugin uses the Google Analytics Reporting API to gather analytics about this website and present them in an actionable way via charts, graphs and tables to any administrator of MichaelMcCallister.com.

WPMU Dev Defender

This site may be using WPMU DEV third-party cloud storage to store backups of its audit logs where personal information is collected.

Additional data

This site creates and stores an activity log that capture the IP address, username, email address and tracks user activity (like when a user makes a comment). Information will be stored locally for 30 days and remotely for 1 year. Information on remote logs cannot be cleared for security purposes.

Semantic Linkbacks

For received webmentions, pingbacks and trackbacks, such as responding to a post or article, this site stores information retrieved from the source to provide a richer comment. Items such as author name and image, summary of the text, etc may be stored if present in the source and are solely to provide richer comments. We will remove any of this on request.

Syndication Links

Syndication Links, which are links to the same content on other sites, may be displayed on comments, but only if supplied by the submitter or if your comment was generated by webmention, if they appear on your site.

Webmention

Webmentions are an explicit feature of your content management system: by sending a webmention to the webmention endpoint of this website, you request the server to take notice of that referral and process it. As long as public content is concerned (i.e. you are not sending a private webmention), such use of this website’s webmention endpoint implies that you are aware of it being published.

You can at any time request the removal of one or all webmentions originating from your website.

Processing

Incoming Webmentions are handled as a request to process personal data that you make available by explicitly providing metadata in your website’s markup.

Publishing

An incoming Webmention request is by design a request for publishing a comment from elsewhere on the web; this is what the protocol was designed for and why it is active on your website.

Personal data

The Webmention plugin processes the following data (if available):

  • Your name
  • The profile picture from your website
  • The URL of your website
  • Personal information you include in your post

Post Kinds

For responses to URLs, such as responding to a post or article, this site allows the storage of data around the post/article to generate a rich citation. Items such as author name and image, summary of the text, embed provided by third-party site, etc may be stored and are solely to provide this context. We will remove any of this on request.

IndieWeb

Users can optionally add additional information to their profile. As this is part of your user profile you have control of this information and can remove it at your discretion.

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).

Who we share your data with

Short answer: I don’t share your personal data with anybody.

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.

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.

Your contact information

If you have a privacy concern about anything you leave on MichaelMcCallister.com, write me at privacy@michaelmccallister.com.