Use of collected personal data

Comments

When you leave a comment on our website, not only the data entered in the comment form, but also your IP address and browser user agent are collected to help us detect unwanted comments.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also known as a hash) may be sent to the Gravatar service to check whether you are using the service. The Gravatar service’s privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After your comment has been validated, your profile picture will be publicly visible next to your comment.

Media

If you are a registered user and you upload images to the website, we advise you to avoid uploading images containing EXIF data of GPS coordinates. Visitors to your website can download and extract location data from these images.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site, you will be asked to save your name, email address and website in cookies. This is only for your convenience so that you don’t have to enter this information if you post another comment later. These cookies expire after one year.

If you go to the login page, a temporary cookie will be created to determine if your browser accepts cookies. It does not contain any personal data and will be deleted automatically when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will set a number of cookies to store your login information and screen preferences. The lifetime of a login cookie is two days, the lifetime of a screen option cookie is one year. If you check “Remember me”, your login cookie will be retained for a fortnight. If you log out of your account, the login cookie will be deleted.

By editing or publishing a post, an additional cookie will be stored in your browser. This cookie does not include any personal data. It simply indicates the ID of the publication you just edited. It expires after one day.

Embedded content from other sites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles…). Embedded content from other sites behaves in the same way as if the visitor were on that other site.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed third party tracking tools, track your interactions with these embedded contents if you have an account logged on their website.

How long your data is stored

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This allows us to automatically recognise and approve subsequent comments instead of leaving them in the moderation queue.

For users who register on our site (where possible), we also store the personal data specified in their profile. All users can view, edit or delete their personal information at any time (with the exception of their username). Site managers can also view and modify this information.

The rights you have over your data

If you have an account or have left comments on the site, you can request to receive a file containing all the personal data we hold about you, including that which you have provided to us. You may also request the deletion of your personal data. This does not include data stored for administrative, legal or security purposes.

Transmission of your personal data

Visitors’ comments can be checked using an automated spam detection service.