Summary

Our website address is https://judysharer.com. Judy Sharer is a historical romance author. This site does not collect any personally-identifying information without your consent.  This site uses Google Analytics which tracks anonymous usage data about your activity on our website. This information is shared with Google Analytics and is used to improve our site’s usability and performance. It contains no personally-identifying information, and we only share it with Google.  Contact form submissions may ask for your name and email address. All contact form submissions are sent directly to the site owner. We never share these submissions without your consent.  Newsletter subscriptions submit to MailChimp. The site may create cookies when you leave a comment. These cookies expire after one year, or you can clear them from your browser history at any time.

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.

Contact forms

Contact form submissions may contain personally identifying information such as your name and email address. We never share this information and only use it for fan/customer outreach.  We retain your contact form submissions indefinitely, but you can contact us at any time to delete your contact form submissions.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt-in to save 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.

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 site.

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.

Analytics

This site runs Google Analytics.  We do not collect or share any personally-identifying data with Analytics.

Who we share your data with

We share anonymous statistics about your interaction with our site with Google Analytics service. We share newsletter subscriptions with MailChimp. Contact form submissions are sent directly to the site owner.

How long we retain your data

We keep submitted comments and associated metadata indefinitely so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

We store Contact form submissions indefinitely, or until you request we delete them.

Newsletter subscriptions are stored indefinitely in MailChimp or until you unsubscribe.

What rights you have over your data

If you have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal information we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also ask that we erase any personal data we hold about you, excluding any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Additional information

How we protect your data

This site is SSL-encrypted which means that any information you submit to our site is encrypted and protected from prying eyes as it travels from your computer to our website. Any information sent from our website to your computer is encrypted as well.  Any information sent to third-party services, such as Google Analytics and MailChimp, is also encrypted.

We limit administrative access to our website, limit login attempts, and proactively block access to the IP addresses of known “bad actors” which limits hacker’s ability to hack our site.

We keep our website updated on a regular basis, eliminating attack vectors in old software.

What data breach procedures we have in place

We do not collect or store sensitive information in our database, which limits your exposure if a breach occurs. If a breach occurs, we work with our website host to fix the issues that led to it and determine what, if any, information leaked.  We will compile a list and notify any users that may have been affected by the breach.

What third parties we collect data from

We receive data from Google Analytics and MailChimp.

What automated decision making or profiling we do with user data

We may use your anonymous analytics data to understand better how users interact with our website and to improve their experience.