There was a time when cookies were only set by the first-party – that is, the website you were visiting – and just for convenience features. Alas … the system slowly became abused, to the point where we found ourselves fighting to keep our privacy, fighting to prevent the needless setting of hundreds of third-party cookies in our browsers, to track us around the web for other people’s interests.

Although this is only a personal website, I take my responsibility towards your data very seriously. The following article is split into two sections:

Overview outlines what cookies are set on this site and how your privacy may be affected.
Policy goes into some more detail about what cookies are used and why.

Overview

There are several ways in which data related to you may be contributed to, and processed and/or stored on or via, this site.

During your use of the site:

the web server will log your IP address, (potentially) where you came from before you visited this site, the “user agent” (your browser – e.g. Chrome) and the page(s) you visited. These logs are kept on the server, never shared with anyone, and are essential in maintaining this site, as they help me analyse usage and interests.
the browser-based analytics tool Matomo (formerly “Piwik”) may gather additional information about your browser, such as the pages you visited, links you clicked, and the time you spent on each page. This is an opt-in feature and should be thought of as “server logs plus”. Usage analytics helps me further understand what interests my visitors have in my content, but as some of my content (and general attitude) is towards a privacy-respecting web, I completely understand if you don’t want this and opt out. In case you want to do that now, here’s the link:[matomo_opt_out]
optional first-party cookies may need to be set, in order to permit certain functions to work. An example of this is the comment feature. If you wish to leave a comment (please do!), you have the option of being “remembered”. Obviously, this means a cookie needs to be set in your browser, which contains a unique “key” that identifies you when you next visit.
this site uses services provided by Automattic (creators of WordPress and owners of associated services and assets), which are facilitated through the the Jetpack plug-in. Some features provided via Jetpack require setting cookies from the associated domains – in other words, third-party cookies. Those cookies help to determine if you’re a person or a bot and can influence comment-handling behaviour on the site (using Akismet in this instance). They can also help with your cross-domain identity – for example, using your “Gravatar” avatar, you can comment on many different WordPress blogs with one identity.
application performance monitoring is occurring in the background, which is provided by NewRelic. APM does some deep-diving on application functionality and performance characteristics on the server and, optionally, links site usage to this server-side application behaviour. It also alerts upon changes to the normal behaviour or, worse, site outage. Prohibiting running JavaScript in your browser from newrelic.com would prevent any possibility of usage tracking occurring, as the browser won’t be “reporting back” to NewRelic. You can also block third-party cookies entirely, or just that set by js.newrelic.com, as a further measure to prevent tracking. The application performance monitoring on this site can’t be stopped entirely, as it’s integral to PHP on this server.

Notes on the above

Regarding Apache server-based logs, web servers routinely log this information to help system administrators diagnose issues. The second of these you can influence. The extreme end of the scale would be to use a JavaScript blocker to block all scripts, but this will likely break functionality. By all means, make use of anti-tracking capabilities in your browser (recommending Firefox, Brave (all platforms), or Safari (macOS/iOS) here).

However, all this being said, I would ask that you consider letting me collect interaction statistics for my site. I write out of personal interest, but it’s useful to me to understand what compels someone to visit in the first place, and what their – i.e. your – satisfaction is at having arrived at my site and read something on it. But it’s your call, and I respect that.

Errors and/or omissions!

* If you see any cookies being set or any other behaviour occurring on this site that hasn’t been covered here, please let me know. Thank you.

Policy

Who we are

My name is Steve Dowe and my website address is: https://dowe.uk.

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 anonymised 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.

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 visit our login page, 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise 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 your data is sent

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

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.

Webmentions

Webmentions are an explicit feature of this 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

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.

Simple Location

Location and weather data is optionally stored for all posts, attachments, and comments. Location data is extracted from uploaded images along with other metadata. This data can be removed prior to uploading if you do not wish this to be stored. There are options to display this information or hide it.

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 in order 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.

Akismet

Akismet (Automattic) collects information about visitors who comment on sites that use its Akismet Anti-spam service, which includes this site. The information collected depends on how Akismet (the plugin) is 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).