Who we are
Our website address is: blog.thetravelinsider.info, with related sites at thetravelinsider.info and news.thetravelinsider.info. Be sure to visit all three sites!
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 (should you choose to include one) 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
Would you be astonished to learn that any information you fill in on a contact form will be received by us? Gack – the things our lawyers (and EU legislation) want us to say…..
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.
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.
Analytics
Google Analytics and possibly other third-party website analysis programs may be able to track some elements of your visits to this and other sites. We’ve no idea how they do that, and they don’t tell us who you are.
Data Collected to Manage Your Membership
If you become a member, we may collect additional information, depending on the type and level of membership and your chosen method of participating.
At checkout, we will collect your name, email address, username, and password. This information is used to setup your account for our site. If you are redirected to an offsite payment gateway to complete your payment, we may store this information in a temporary session variable to setup your account when you return to our site.
At checkout, we may also collect your billing address and phone number. This information is used to confirm your credit card. The billing address and phone number are saved by our site to prepopulate the checkout form for future purchases and so we can get in touch with you if needed to discuss your order.
At checkout, we may also collect your credit card number, expiration date, and security code. This information is passed to our payment gateway to process your purchase. The last 4 digits of your credit card number and the expiration date are saved by our site to use for reference and to send you an email if your credit card will expire before the next recurring payment.
When logged in, we use cookies to track some of your activity on our site including logins, visits, and page views.
Who we share your data with
No-one.
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 for a varying amount of time, let’s again say “indefinitely”. All users can see, edit, or delete their own 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.
But wait, there’s more.
If you choose to join our email list, or buy products/services from us, then we obviously ask for your email address, but no other information needs to be given to us, other than that necessary if you’re buying something. We will not pester you with unwanted emails, and won’t sell/give your details to anyone else.
Advertisers on our site may be placing and reading cookies in your browser, or using web beacons to collect information. Most web browsers have options to disable/disallow these practices if you wish to ‘opt out’ for any reason.
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this website, other websites, and other forms of media such as mobile apps in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you and to understand how users respond to advertising on our website and other websites. These companies may collect this information using technologies such as cookies and pixels.
If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies (both for this and other websites you might visit), click here.
Our webserver logfile analyser may record information such as the IP addresses you use to reach us, the browser you use, and the referring page that brought you to our site, but as far as we can tell, none of this enables us to uniquely identify you or to do anything much with the information at all, and we don’t publicly publish it in any event. We can’t and don’t track your website usage history.
So your secrets are all safe! At least from us….. 🙂
Note that we may vary this privacy policy from time to time, and if we do, we will revise this page to keep you informed.
Lastly, please note we have no control at all over the content and privacy policies of sites that we link to.
