Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Sections

Your privacy is critically important to us. At SimpleStuffMatters.com, we have a few fundamental principles:

  • We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
  • We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
  • We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
  • We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:

  • Our websites (including SimpleStuffMatters.com, AGirlAGuyAndAMountain.com and AGirlAGuyAndAnIsland.com);
  • Any other product and service that are available on or through our websites.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, mobile applications and other products and services collectively as “Services.”

Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy.

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Creative Commons Sharealike License

This policy is based on Automattic’s privacy policy, under the Creative Commons Sharealike License. You find the original version on github.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

  • Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for an account to provide a username and email address–and that’s it. You may provide us with more information–like your name–but we don’t require that information to create an account.
  • Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, such as a photo or a description. Your public profile information is just that–public–so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
  • Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us, you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.
  • Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about you in draft and published content. For example, if you write a blog post that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet if you choose to publish the post publicly. This might be obvious to you…but it’s not to everyone!
  • Credentials: Depending on the Services you use, you may provide us with credentials for your website (like SSH, FTP, and SFTP username and password).
  • Communications With Us (Hi There!): You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with us about a support question, or post in our public forums.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

  • Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services.
  • Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that users perform on a site using WordPress.com or Jetpack services–in other words, who did what, when and to what thing on a site (e.g., [username] deleted “[title of post]” at [time/date]). We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you.
  • Location Information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions.
  • Interactions with Other Users’ Sites: We collect some information about your interactions with other users’ sites while you are logged in to your account with us, such as your “Likes” and the fact that you commented on a particular post, so that we can, for example, recommend posts we think may interest you.
  • Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. SimpleStuffMatters.com uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.

How And Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

  • To provide our Services–for example, to set up and maintain your account;
  • To further develop and improve our Services–for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy;
  • To monitor and analyse trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
  • To measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition;
  • To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of SimpleStuffMatters.com and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
  • To communicate with you, for example through an email, to solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on SimpleStuffMatters.com
  • To personalise your experience using our Services, provide content recommendations, target our marketing messages to groups of our users (for example, those who have a particular interest or have been our user for a certain length of time), and serve relevant advertisements.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

  • Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
  • Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you, those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g. by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), and companies that make products available on our websites, who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them. Other vendors are listed in our more specific policies (e.g. our Cookie Policy).
  • Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request.
  • To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of SimpleStuffMatters.com, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.
  • Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that SimpleStuffMatters.com goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.
  • With Your Consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties with which you authorise us to do so.
  • Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.
  • Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public, are all available to others–and we hope you get a lot of views!

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of SimpleStuffMatters.com’s websites, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 90 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyse traffic to SimpleStuffMatters.com  and investigate issues if something goes wrong.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorised access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

  • Limit the Information that You Provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services–for example, paid, premium themes–may not be accessible.
  • Limit Access to Information On Your Mobile Device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the ability to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you do so, you may not be able to use certain features (like adding a location to a photograph, for example).
  • Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.
  • Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, SimpleStuffMatters.com does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using SimpleStuffMatters.com’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of SimpleStuffMatters.com may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
  • Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services 🙁 🙁 🙁 :(, you can close yourSimpleStuffMatters.com account. Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above–for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

  • Request access to your personal data;
  • Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
  • Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
  • Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
  • Request portability of your personal data.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us.

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please contact us.

Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others

Ads appearing on any of our Services may be delivered by advertising networks. Other parties may also provide analytics services via our Services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognise your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyse and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver advertisements that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by SimpleStuffMatters.com and does not cover the collection of information by any third party advertisers or analytics providers.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, SimpleStuffMatters.com may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. SimpleStuffMatters.com encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice, or sending you a notification through email on our web site). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

That’s it! Thanks for reading.