Begin-Anywhere.com Privacy & Cookie Statement
V1.1 Updated 2/9/2020
Overview
In order for us to operate our site and provide our blog to you, it is sometimes necessary for us to collect or process information about you. In general terms, this information will take one or more of the following forms:
- Information that you provide to us directly, such as in the situation where you complete an online form or send us a message via our website;
- Information that is automatically sent to us by your computer’s internet browser when you visit our website, such as your computer’s ‘IP address’ or information about which particular internet browser you are using and so on;
- Information about how you use our website or our services, such as which pages you visit, how frequently you visit the site and so forth.
This privacy policy sets out the detail of what information we collect, as well as how that data is used and protected.
Commitment to Data Privacy
We are committed to maintaining the privacy of any information (‘personal data’) that you provide to us. Furthermore, we commit to ensuring that such data is held securely, used appropriately and only retained for as long as is necessary.
Our blog is designed with privacy in mind, and we will only ever ask you for the minimum amount of information required to provide our services efficiently; we have no desire to retain (and therefore maintain) any more information than is necessary. We aspire to comply with applicable data protection regulations, in particular the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (‘GDPR’) and ePrivacy Directive, where applicable.
Who We Are
In terms of your use of this website, We, Begin-Anywhere.com, act in the capacity of Data Controller, and should you have any questions or concerns about the data we hold about you, we can be contacted using the email: begin-anywhere.hello (a) gmail.com.
Personal Data Defined
When we refer to ‘personal data’ we mean any information that allows us to identify you personally. Obvious examples include your name and email address. We will always seek to gain your explicit consent to providing this information before we collect it from you, although this may not be the only legal basis on which we collect the data.
Other types of information, such as your computer’s ‘IP’ address or broad geographical location do not, generally, allow us to identify you directly. However, because in their current form, European data privacy regulations are somewhat vague in this regard, we will cover the use of such data here also.
Who We Share Data With
We operate on a strict ‘need to know’ basis for all data that we work with, and that is particularly true for any personal data. Begin-Anywhere.com is the only organisation that is granted access to personal data. We use Bluehost as a hosting provided and Google for cloud storage.
How Your Data Is Protected
We take the security of all personal data seriously, and that data is protected in a number of ways:
- Access control: access to personal data is strictly limited in line with our policy detailed in the ‘who we share data with section’ on this page. Access is controlled by individual user accounts, where a strong password policy is enforced
- This website is also secured with SSL encryption, which means that all traffic to and from our servers is encrypted. This applies to our own administrative access to the website as well as that of users of our services.
Access To Your Personal Data
In the situation where you have directly provided personal information to us (such as by completing an online form or contacting us for further information), you have a number of rights regarding the personal data that we hold:
- You have the right to obtain from us confirmation about whether any such data is being held
- You have the right to require that we provide you with whatever data we are holding/processing about you, including the right for that data to be transferred to another data controller
- Even if you have consented to Us processing your personal data, you have the right to withdraw that permission at any time
- You have the right to require us to rectify any incomplete or incorrect information held about you
- You have the right to require us to erase the data held about you (the ‘right to be forgotten’)
In the situation where we collect personal data automatically (such as from your internet browser or via internet Cookies or other similar technologies):
- You have the right to object to the legal basis upon which we are collecting this data, and We have an obligation to consider and respond to that objection
- You have the right to request the prevention of further processing of your data while your objection is considered
- You have the right to make a complaint to the relevant data protection authority
- In most circumstances, you can exercise these rights without paying a fee to us.
Types of Data Collected
Subscribe To Blog
When you subscribe to the blog we’ll ask you for your email address which is required for us to respond to your request. If you do not subscribe, no data will be collected in that regard.
Cookies
Cookies allow us to better understand how users are using our website and other related services. They can also be an essential part of providing certain online functionality. They are all essentially small data files placed on your computer (or other device) that allow us to tell when you have visited a particular page, or performed a particular action (such as clicking a particular button) on our website.
These technologies are used by most websites as they provide useful insight into how the services are being used, as well as improving speed, performance and security, and enabling us to improve our personalisation of your experience.
Cookies are small text files placed in the memory of your browser or device when you visit a website. Cookies allow a website to recognize a particular device or browser.
There are a number of ways that you can influence how cookies are used on your particular device. Most commercial browsers (such as Chrome, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) allow you to set preferences for whether to allow or block website cookies.
They will also provide tools that allow you to remove any cookies that have already been set. Using the ‘Help’ functionality of your browser, or an internet search, will help you to understand how to use these features for your particular browser.
Additionally, we have incorporated specific cookie functionality on our website that allows you to easily indicate when you first visit the site whether or not you are okay with cookies to be set on your device.
For our site to remember your preference for whether to allow cookies or not, it is necessary for us to set cookies for this specific purpose. When you first visit our site, a Cookie Control box will be displayed allowing you to choose whether to allow cookies or not.
If you click on the ‘Close and Accept’ button in the Cookie Control box, we will enable our Analytics cookies.
If you do not positively agree to the use of cookies, we will not set any non-essential cookies.
Jetpack cookie documentation and the Automattic Cookie Policy.
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 is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
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.
Website Analytics
We use Google Analytics to better understand what people look at on our website.
When people visit our site, information about their visit (such as which pages they look at, how long they spend on the site and so on) is sent in an anonymous form to Google Analytics (which is controlled by Google).
The data contains information about anyone who uses our website from your computer, and there is no way to identify individuals from the data.
As analytics information is not personal data, we do not specifically ask for your prior consent.
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.
Technical Data (like IP address):
When you visit our website, our systems will log a record of your visit in our server logs, and typically this record will include the technical ‘IP’ address that is associated with your device and the browser type and version that you are using.
Such server logs are extremely common practice, and are used to monitor technical resources, monitor high-level server activity, and importantly to detect and prevent malicious or fraudulent activity on our systems. This data can also be used, if required, to diagnose reports of technical issues. The storage of IP addresses, allow us to identify patterns of behaviour (such as repeated malicious attempts to access a system).
IP addresses, in and of themselves, do not allow us in any way to identify you as an individual, especially given that it is very common for IP addresses to be dynamically allocated by your service provider, and will therefore often routinely change.
Furthermore, we do not and will not use the content of server access logs to attempt to determine an identifiable individual. We therefore do not consider that data held within server logs within the scope of ‘personal data’, and accordingly we do not seek your consent to collect it.