Legal

Legal on a Personal Site? Well, why not.

Here’s the low down, I use Google Analytics to track visitors stats. Also, this site uses cookies to store data on your computer to help improve your experience on this site. Any information you enter on this site will remain your intellectual property, however you give me a royalty free license to store and display the information you provide for the functionality of the site (e.g. comments). If you provide a email address to the site, we will take all possible security precautions to protect it – however do to limitations of security technologies your email address may be compromised. If your personal information becomes compromised, we will make an announcement on the front page of this site. By any chance that any data is compromised on this, you agree that you may not take any legal recourse against the owner of this site, hosting company, and/or creators of the WordPress Software.

Who we are

Hello, this is the personal website of Chris Holbrook (henceforth referred to as: Mad9Scientist, Mad9Scientist.com or the website). The thoughts and opinion posted on this site are my own and do not reflect the opinions or position of my employer(s).

Our website address is: http://mad9scientist.com.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

In order to have a functional website on the Internet in 2018, we will collect information from either from user/visitors of the site and/or the author(s) of the site. Below is a discussion of the information collected and the processing of that information.

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. Information used for spam comment detection is shared with Automattic’s Akismet Service, which Akismet has there own Privacy Policy.

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

Any Media (Photos, Graphics, Icons, Videos, Audio, etc) that you upload to the site, you have the license(s) and/or right(s) to post/share the Media on the Internet. In turn you grant the website a worldwide royalty free license to display that media to you and other visitors of the website.

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 have a contact form to allow visitors to contact the site owner. This contact form is provided by a third-party (Wufoo/SurveyMonkey), when you use this form you are submitting your information to this third-party service, which will in turn send an electronic mail (email) to the site owner.

The information you submit using this form (Name, Email, Phone, Comment, etc) will only be used for customer service use (e.g. contacting the submitter about the raised issue), however will not use this information for marketing purpose. In short, if you use our contact form, you will not be automatically signed up for a news letter.

Any and all information submitted via this form will be kept for a minimum of one year from receipt, however it may be kept indefinitely due to backups and mail providers services.

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.

We also use Google Analytics to track user visitors statistics. This may include but is not limited to: Geographical Location, Internet Service Provider, Device Information and specifications, pages browsed on site, length of visit, bounce rates, returning visits. Google Analytics will place a cookie in browser to allow the tracking of some or all this information. You may opt out of Google Analytics tracking either by blocking the cookies and script or by installing the Google Analytics Opt Out Plugin in your browser.

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

We use Google Analytics and WordPress Jetpack service for site analytics.

The WordPress Jetpack service is goverened by the Automattic’s Privacy Policy.

Who we share your data with

We share data with only a handful of third-party service providers, below is a list these providers and the service(s) or reason(s) we are sharing data with them, also provide is link to the service provider’s privacy policy when possible.

Service Provider	Services Provided	Privacy Policy
Mad Scientist Technologies	Website Hosting. Collecting information for security protection.	https://madscitech.com/about/privacy/
Google	Email Hosting Service for domain	https://privacy.google.com/
Digital Ocean, DNS	Provides DNS Look for the domain	https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/privacy/
Automattic/WordPress – Jetpack	CDN and Jetpack Services	https://automattic.com/privacy/
Google Analytics	Website Stats	https://policies.google.com/privacy
Wufoo/SurveyMoneky	Contact Form	https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/legal/privacy-policy/

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.

Google Analytics data and Information submitted via the contact form is retained indefinitely at this time.

DNS information is retained only long enough to complete your DNS requests.

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.

Since we are located in the United States, all data flows to US servers and services. To the best of our abilities, our services providers have agreed to protect user data in accordance with GDPR.

Your contact information

If you have questions or concerns about our privacy policy, you can contact us via our contact form.

Additional information

How we protect your data

We take industry best practices to protect users’ personal data. We store users passwords in a cryptographically hash format (Not MD5) to protect passwords at rest. We provide SSL/TLS protection on the entire domain. We have implemented DKIM and DMARC on our email, to prevent spoofing our emails. We also limit the amount of personal information collected from users.

What data breach procedures we have in place

If a data breach does occur, we will post a notice on the front page of the site, and if possible, contact affected individuals by email within seventy-two hours after the discovery of the breach.

Last Updated: May 23, 2018