Privacy Policy

Here’s the Deal…

Personal privacy is a very important issue for me. I am particularly concerned about the invasions of our privacy by the government along with the collaboration between the government and Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook (or Meta, now that Mark Zuckerberg envisions us all hanging out in virtual reality radiating our brains and eyeballs with electromagnetic frequencies).

As a website owner, while the government incessantly invades our privacy, I am told that I have a legal obligation to put this Privacy Policy page here to explain your privacy rights. It doesn’t help that websites typically fulfill this obligation by putting up an explanation written by lawyers, thus ensuring that nobody can understand it.

I am also told that the EU has jurisdiction over me to dictate that I must place a distracting banner on my website proclaiming my privacy policy to visitors. Because of this proclaimed authority over me, I am supposed to have a technically complicated setup, which would cost me time and money to get into place to function as demanded, to enable you to accept or reject “cookies”.

I do not live under the political jurisdiction of the EU. My home state is Michigan, and the EU has no authority here. I am concerned that website owners everywhere are being coerced under the threat of legal prosecution to place Privacy Policy statements on their websites acceding the legitimacy of the EU’s assumption of authority over us all.

I do not consent. I do not accede. I also don’t need to explain your rights to you. You know you’re your rights already, or at least you should because, after all, understanding your rights is your responsibility. It is not my responsibility as a website owner and publisher to explain your rights to you.

At the same time, I certainly do respect your privacy and want you to understand the situation and how my website uses cookies, so I’m just going to engage in civil disobedience by bucking the system’s expectations of me and explaining it to you to the best of my own understanding and using plain English. (If you want to understand the matter beyond the limitations of my own knowledge, you should do your own research or consult an expert in the technology or legal complexities surrounding internet privacy concerns.)

Simply stated, this website’s use of cookies is necessary for me to be able to deliver this website and the empowering knowledge contained within to you. By using this website, you are agreeing to my privacy policy and terms of use. If you do not agree, do not use this website.

You can view the terms of use here:

https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/about/terms-of-use/

If you do not like how I use cookies or otherwise collects user data, you are of course free not to visit my site. You can always clear your browser’s cookies, which is good to do from time to time anyhow. (I’ll explain how to do this below in case you don’t already know.)

Hopefully, everyone using the internet here in the 21st century knows that when you visit a website, it may store something called a “cookie” in your browser.

I don’t know why it’s called that, but a cookie is just a file containing a character string that serves as an identifier, which is sent by a web server to a web browser. The browser stores the identifier and sends it back to the server each time a visitor requests to load a webpage from the server. Cookies are categorized as either “persistent” or “session”. A persistent cookie, as the name implies, will be stored by the browser and remain valid until a set expiration date. A session cookie will expire when the web browser is closed.

Cookies do not typically contain any personally identifying information. However, if personal information about a user is stored by a website on its server, it may be linked to cookie identifiers. As an example, a street address might be linked to an IP address.

How to Manage Your Browser’s Cookies

I’ll provide the steps to clear your browser’s cookies in Brave, but other browsers will be similar.

In Brave, click the three-lined “hamburger” icon in the upper right to open the menu, hover over “More tools”, and select “Clear browsing data”. You can select your browsing history, cookies, and cached images and files.

Browsing history is a nice feature. I use it frequently. Sometimes, I want to quickly find a website I had recently visited but closed, and an easy way to do it is to consult my browser history. I clear this once in a while both to declutter and to protect my privacy in case of a security breach. To avoid my search history being stored by Google, I use Brave or DuckDuckGo search engines.

Image and file caching is also useful. It helps to load frequently visited websites faster. Those seconds add up over time to represent lost productivity, and who likes waiting for a webpage to load? Sometimes, though, the cache might be outdated, so that a webpage does not load properly. To fix that common problem, you can clear your image and file cache. Clearing this cache occasionally is also a good habit to get into.

In addition to deleting cookies and other data, you can typically control whether or not to allow cookies in your browser settings. To learn more about your web browser’s privacy functions, view the privacy settings or visit the browser website’s help center or knowledgebase. Just keep in mind that if you block cookies, it may have a negative impact on your user experience, including prohibiting certain beneficial features of a website from being available to you.

How Cookies Can Be Used by Websites

Although there is potential for abuse by malevolent actors who don’t respect privacy rights, cookies are also useful and sometimes necessary for websites to deliver to us the things that we want from them. Here are a few examples of how cookies can be used beneficially:

  • Authentication: Cookies can be used to identify you helpfully when you visit a website, such as enabling you the option of viewing webpages that are accessible only to logged-in users without having to reenter your login credentials every visit. After you clear your cookies, you will have to log in again to any websites where you have an account.
  • Status: Cookies can also help websites determine whether you are logged in.
  • Personalization: Cookies can be used to store information about your individual preferences and otherwise to personalize the website experience for you.
  • Security: Cookies can be used as an element of security measures, including to protect user accounts, such as by preventing fraudulent use of login credentials. As an example, a server might block anyone trying to log in from a foreign IP address from gaining access to an account.
  • Advertising: We have all seen those ads that “follow” you around the internet. You visit some brand’s website, and then after navigating to some other website that displays advertisements, you see an ad from the brand you had visited earlier. This is called “remarketing” and is achieved with cookies. While sometimes viewed as creepy, this can be beneficial to the user. The reason this method is used is because it works. People might appreciate the reminder to purchase a product that would help them be more productive, for example. And would you rather be bombarded with irrelevant ads or see offers for products or services that might actually be useful to you?
  • Analysis: Cookies are a critical tool for website owners to be able to analyze visitor traffic, which is in turn critical for being able to better meet visitor demand for information, goods, or services.

As you can see, cookies are not inherently a bad thing. They are a useful tool that can benefit us in numerous ways. My website uses cookies in ways that help me to deliver the information, goods, or services that my website visitors demand of me. 

How My Website Uses Cookies and User Data

A typical Privacy Policy page will explain in legalese how the website uses cookies in a very generic way, which is because they are generic. They are written up by lawyers considering typical use cases, and so, depending on the purposes and aims of the websites, the language across websites is substantively the same. Because they are generic, they typically aren’t all that useful for understanding exactly how a website is using cookies.

I can do better than that by just telling you specifically how my website presently uses cookies or might foreseeably use cookies in the future.

Website Analytics

To be able to better deliver to my readers the type of information they are looking for, I need to be able to analyze traffic to my website. For example, if I know which types of articles receive higher numbers of visitors, I can shift the focus of my work toward delivering more of that type of information to my readers.

I use Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity to analyze traffic to my website. To use these services requires me to insert a snippet of code into my webpages. That code enables analytic tools to collect the data that I need.

Analytics tools use cookies to gather certain information about the use of my website. I can view this data in my analytics account, including to estimate the following:

  • How many users visited my website within a specified time frame.
  • The proportion of first-time visitors compared to returning visitors.
  • The number of users who are apparently accessing my site from a given country or city.
  • Where visitors are coming from, e.g., from clicking links in my email newsletters, links from social media, links from other websites referring to my content, links from internet search engine results, or directly accessing my site such as by typing the web address into the browser.
  • Which pages of my site receive the highest amounts of traffic
  • The proportion of website traffic that comes from either desktop, tablet, or mobile devices.
  • The proportion of traffic associated with use of a given browser, such as Safari, Chrome, Firefox, or Edge.

None of the data collected by the analytics tools I use can be used by me to personally identify any individual users.

To learn more about Google’s privacy policy, visit:

https://policies.google.com/privacy

To learn more about Microsoft’s privacy policy, visit:

https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement

Active Campaign

One of the benefits I provide to people who visit my website is the option to subscribe to my email newsletters. Using one of the opt-in forms on my site, users may exchange their name and email address with me to obtain access to the empowering knowledge I deliver in my newsletters. To do so, I use an email service provider called Active Campaign.

I only send my email newsletters to email address that have been specifically opted-in to receive them. I do not import email addresses otherwise obtained into my Active Campaign account. I do not share or sell the personal information I obtain from subscribers to any third parties. I use this information strictly to provide the service being demanded, i.e., to deliver my newsletters to subscribers.

Users can easily unsubscribe from my newsletters with a single click of an “unsubscribe” link contained in the footer of each of my newsletter emails.

I can also associate the subscriber profile with other information provided to me by users. For example, if a subscriber buys one of my books from my site’s shop using their subscription email, provided that the same email was used for both purposes, my system can sync information about the transaction with their subscriber profile. This enables me to do things like making a book offer only to subscribers who haven’t already purchased it from me.

The links that I place in my email newsletters are each converted into tracking links by Active Campaign. These are intermediary links between the newsletter email and the target webpage that enable me to acquire data on subscriber engagement, such as estimated proportions of subscribers who open a newsletter email or who click on a link in the email.

Whereas I use analytics tools to analyze general website traffic, I have also installed a code snippet on my website that enables me to analyze traffic specifically associated with my newsletter subscribers.

For example, I have used this functionality to send a more personalized “thank you” email to subscribers who are redirected to a generic “thank you” page on my site after having made a donation to support my work. Provided that the user has cookies enabled, the code snippet provided by Active Campaign enables me to have a visit to the URL of the “thank you” webpage automatically trigger the sending of the personalized “thank you” email greeting the donor by their first name.

I’ll discuss how I use data obtained from use of my online shop more below. To learn more about Active Campaign’s privacy policy, visit:

https://www.activecampaign.com/legal/privacy-policy

WordPress

My website runs on self-hosted WordPress, which is a very popular open-source content management system (CMS). WordPress enables me to enable visitors the option of creating a user account. User accounts can be assigned various privileges and access, such as the default levels of Subscriber, Author, Editor, or Administrator. I may collect certain personal information from users who create an account on my website. At a minimum, this would include the user’s email address. A username is also required but does not necessarily have to be the same as the user’s real name. The name and email associated with an account can be changed, but the username cannot. Logged-in users can manage their own passwords, which I am not able to view, along with any other personal information that might be used for the purposes of the account.

WooCommerce, MemberPress, and GiveWP

I sell items like my books directly to readers through a shop on my website that is powered by WooCommerce, which is a popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce utilizes the WordPress user account functionality to enable users to create a customer account.

I also have a membership program, for which I use the WordPress plugin MemberPress, which similarly utilizes and expands upon the WordPress account functionality.

Additionally, I accept donations, and to do that I use the WordPress plugin GiveWP, which has highly advanced functionality compared to most other options, which makes things easier for me and saves me a lot of time.

Webshop customers with an account can log in to view their order history; to access download links for digital products; manage billing and shipping addresses; and manage account details including name, display name (for leaving comments and reviews as a logged-in user), email address, and password. I am not able to view the passwords set by other users. If a user forgets their password, they can use the password reset option on the login page to receive a password reset email.

Users with a website membership similarly can log in to view their membership profile, payment history and information, subscription information, and content access.

Donors may also have a donor profile that they can log in to to view payment history and manage automatically recurring donations.

The checkout processes for my shop, membership program, and donation form require payment method (i.e., credit card) information to be entered. I do not have access to any payment method information entered, and that data is not stored on my website’s server.

If there is an option during checkout to store payment method information for future use, again, that data is not stored on my website’s server.

My website’s server is Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant, which is a security standard for websites that collect sensitive data like payment method information. However, my web server does not collect such information. Rather, that data passes securely to the payment gateway(s) that my website uses, which at the time of this privacy policy update are Stripe and PayPal.

To learn more about Stripe’s privacy policy, click here:

https://stripe.com/privacy

To learn more about PayPal’s privacy policy, click here:

https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/privacy/privacyhub

Obviously, whether or not a customer has created an account on my website, I need to collect certain information from customers to be able to deliver the requested goods, services, and website functionality. Customer information that may be stored on my site’s server includes:

  • Name
  • Email address
  • Password
  • Billing address
  • Shipping address
  • Phone number

When a customer places an order from my website’s shop, transactional emails will be sent to the customer’s email address for purposes strictly related to the order, such as an order confirmation email.

Facebook

Many of my readers are, like me, concerned about Facebook’s censorship of truthful information and the risk the site poses to their privacy. I have often seen people express a concern that Facebook is tracking them across the internet. What this concern relates to is what is known as the Facebook “pixel” that website owners can install on their sites to enable them to track and analyze website traffic from Facebook.

The pixel is just a code snippet that enables Facebook to plant a cookie in the browser of the website’s visitors. The pixel is primarily used for being able to track the performance of Facebook ads. For example, it enables the advertiser to set a page view of an order confirmation page as the “conversion” outcome, so that if a Facebook user sees the ad, clicks to view the offer, and places an order, in the Facebook ad reports area, the advertiser can see the conversion rate metric, along with other metrics like ad impressions and the click-through rate. To learn more about Facebook’s privacy policy, click here:

https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update

I have in the past experimented with using Facebook ads and so have had the Facebook pixel installed on my website. At the time of this privacy policy update, it has been a long time since I used Facebook advertising, and I do not and have not for a long time had the pixel installed on my site. I may at some point utilize Facebook ads, at which time I would install the pixel on my site to be able to ensure that my money was being well spent getting my offer in front of the right audience and effectively communicating the message of how my offer can help them.

This site may use the Facebook API for purposes such as enabling users to log in with their Facebook account to post comments on articles or to submit a testimonial including their Facebook profile image.

Affiliates

One of the ways I am able to maintain my independence as a journalist is by earning revenue as an affiliate partner with other providers of informational content, goods, or services. To learn more, click here:

https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/about/affiliate-promotions/

My affiliate links may be included in my email newsletters or at various locations on my website. In addition to products I sell directly to my website users, like my books, products in my web shop may include my affiliate links to other websites. Among these may be Amazon.com, the terms of whose affiliate program require me to place this notice here on my privacy policy page:

JeremyRHammond.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Your purchases through the site’s affiliate links will help support its mission at no extra cost to you.

Comments

Visitors to my website can leave comments on articles. To leave a comment requires some form of registration or account login. At a minimum, users are required to provide a name, which is displayed publicly but does not have to one’s real name, and a valid email address, which is not displayed publicly but is viewable by me or anyone else to whom I might appoint the role of website administrator or comments moderator. Commenters may also, at their option, display their own website’s URL.

When registering to leave a comment, there is a checkbox option to save the login details for next time, which makes commenting more convenient by not having to enter that information again. This functionality requires a cookie to be placed in the user’s browser.

A user may comment as a guest as described above. Alternatively, if a user has an account with my website, they may log into that account on my site for the purpose of leaving a comment. The commenting system I am currently using, Thrive Comments, also enables users to sign in using their Facebook or Google account, which is another convenience that makes registration quick and easy for users who are already logged into their Facebook or Google account. To learn more about Facebook’s and Google’s privacy policy, respectively, click here:

https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update

https://policies.google.com/privacy

Use of the comments section of my website provides me with the registered user’s email address and IP address, which is required for the purpose of comment moderation.

Users wishing to leave a comment on my website, like any visitors to my website, are required to abide by my website’s terms of use, including the specific terms provided for participating in the comments section. To view my terms of use, click here:

https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/about/terms-of-use/

My rules are intended to maintain an environment conducive to respectful and fruitful discussion. Violations of my terms may result in users having their comments deleted and their commenting privileges revoked, which is achieved within comments system by including the IP address or email address of the user in a list of banned users.

Data Deletion

If you have any personal data stored on this website’s server as described above, such as name, email, or mailing address associated with your user or a customer account, you may contact me to request deletion of the data. Account deletion is irreversible. For contact information, see the “Contact Me” section below.

Changes to My Privacy Policy

I may change this privacy policy from time to time. The effective date is posted at the bottom of the policy.

Contact Me

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or the practices of my website or wish to request data deletion, you can contact me here:

https://www.jeremyrhammond.com/contact/

My business mailing address is:

Worldview Media, LLC

P.O. Box 181

Cross Village, MI 49723

Effective Date

April 14, 2023

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