Privacy Policy

General Overview

Do you like reading super interesting things like a website’s privacy policy? Cool, me neither. Feel free to skip it.

While I stand firmly in favor of protected privacy, it is not without a certain wry amusement I note the irony of having spent over a decade receiving email awash with thinly veiled innuendo, outright sexual propositions, and more unsolicited dick pics than I care to remember, to now write a summary of my fervent assurance I will not misuse whatever data my readers dein to share with me during their time on this site.

I ain’t gonna do shit with your data, because I don’t give even a single fuck.

This page exists because I was legally compelled to create and post it.

Rules and regulations may change, but my opinion on your privacy never has and never will. I don’t respect it more today than I did yesterday or last week. My interaction with your data will also be unchanged.

I am not going to do anything malicious or unsavory with your data. I submit to you as proof of this that I never have, despite nearly a decade of having had ample opportunity to do so.

Lest I lead you to believe my unchanging position stems from vast stores of virtue, allow me to clarify that these are not the attitudes of an ethicist, but a nihilist.

My refusal, therefore, to misuse or abuse your data is grounded less in an aversion to the iniquity and moral turpitude inherent in such acts and more in the sloth endemic to overwhelming apathy.

Put another way: I ain’t gonna do shit with your data, because I don’t give even a single fuck.

But, rules is rules, so here’s a breakdown of all the shit I’m NOT going to do with your data.

Who We Are

Firstly, let us note that henceforth all references made with regard to the Site and the Company are in the plural. Not because the size of our staff necessitates it, but rather because the use of the Royal We doth suit Our sensibilities.

Now.

Our website address is http://johnromaniello.com.

Evidently, it is necessary to specify that.

What Data We Collect and Why We Collect It

The below sections outline the conditions under which specific pieces of data are collected and give a general overview of how and why it is collected.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, as is the IP address and browser user agent string. This is all done to help detect and prevent spam.

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.

Contact Forms

Data Used: We use a third-party plugin called Akismet to prevent spam. As this is enabled, the contact form submission data (IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message) is submitted to the Akismet service (also owned by Automattic) for the sole purpose of spam checking. The actual submission data is stored in the database of the site on which it was submitted and is emailed directly to the site. This email will include the submitter’s IP address, timestamp, name, email address, website, and message.

Data Synced (?): Post and post metadata associated with a user’s contact form submission. As Akismet is enabled, the IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files that are used to store small pieces of information. The cookies are stored on your device when the website is loaded on your browser. These cookies help us make the website function properly, make the website more secure, provide better user experience, and understand how the website performs and to analyze what works and where it needs improvement.

We cookies first-party and third-party cookies for several purposes. The first-party cookies are mostly necessary for the website to function the right way, and they do not collect any of your personally identifiable data.

The third-party cookies used on our websites are used mainly for understanding how the website performs, how you interact with our website, keeping our services secure, providing advertisements that are relevant to you, and all in all providing you with a better and improved user experience and help speed up your future interactions with our website.

When you leave a comment, you may opt-in to save 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.

Essential: Some cookies are essential for you to be able to experience the full functionality of our site. They allow us to maintain user sessions and prevent any security threats. They do not collect or store any personal information. For example, these cookies allow you to log-in to your account and add products to your basket and checkout securely.

Statistics: These cookies store information like the number of visitors to the website, the number of unique visitors, which pages of the website have been visited, the source of the visit, etc. These data help us understand and analyze how well the website performs and where it needs improvement.

Marketing: Our website displays advertisements. These cookies are used to personalize the advertisements that we show to you so that they are meaningful to you. These cookies also help us keep track of the efficiency of these ad campaigns.

The information stored in these cookies may also be used by the third-party ad providers to show you ads on other websites on the browser as well.

Functional: These are the cookies that help certain non-essential functionalities on our website. These functionalities include embedding content like videos or sharing content on the website on social media platforms.

Preferences: These cookies help us store your settings and browsing preferences like language preferences so that you have a better and efficient experience on future visits to the website.

Should you decide to change your preferences later through your browsing session, you can click on the “Privacy & Cookie Policy” tab on your screen. This will display the consent notice again enabling you to change your preferences or withdraw your consent entirely.

In addition to this, different browsers provide different methods to block and delete cookies used by websites. You can change the settings of your browser to block/delete the cookies. To find out more about how to manage and delete cookies, visit wikipedia.org, www.allaboutcookies.org.

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 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.

Payments

For all of our products sold directly through the site, payment processing is handled by PayPal.

Data Used: Transaction amount, transaction currency code, product title, product price, product ID, order quantity, PayPal payer ID, and PayPal transaction ID.

Activity Tracked: The PayPal payer ID, transaction ID, and HTTP referrer are sent with a payment completion tracking event.

Data Synced (?): PayPal transaction ID, PayPal transaction status, PayPal product ID, quantity, price, customer email address, currency, and payment button CTA text.

Because payments are processed by PayPal, we recommend reviewing its privacy policy.

WordPress.com Stats

Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, a timestamp of the event, browser language, country code.

Please note that this site does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, we can see that a specific post has 285 views, but we cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Stats logs — containing visitor IP addresses and WordPress.com usernames (if available) — are retained by Automattic for 28 days and are used for the sole purpose of powering this feature.

Activity Tracked: Post and page views, video plays (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms and country. When this module is enabled, Jetpack also tracks performance on each page load that includes the Javascript file used for tracking stats. This is exclusively for aggregate performance tracking across Jetpack sites to make sure that our plugin and code is not causing performance issues. This includes the tracking of page load times and resource loading duration (image files, Javascript files, CSS files, etc.).

Google Analytics

Data Used: Please refer to the appropriate Google Analytics documentation for the specific type of data it collects. As this site uses WooCommerce (also owned by Automattic) and having all purchase tracking explicitly enabled, purchase events will send Google Analytics the following information: order number, product id and name, product category, total cost, and quantity of items purchased. Though Google Analytics does offer IP anonymization, we do not currently have that enabled.

Activity Tracked: This feature sends pageview events (and potentially video play events) over to Google Analytics for consumption.  Resultant of our usage of WooCommerse, some additional events are also sent to Google Analytics, such as shopping cart additions and removals, product listing views and clicks, product detail views, and purchases.

Mobile Theme

Data Used: A visitor’s preference for viewing the mobile version of the site.

Activity Tracked: A cookie (akm_mobile) is stored for 3.5 days to remember whether or not a visitor of the site wishes to view its mobile version. Learn more about this cookie.

Protect

Data Used: In order to check login activity and potentially block fraudulent attempts, the following information is used: attempting user’s IP address, attempting user’s email address/username (i.e. according to the value they were attempting to use during the login process), and all IP-related HTTP headers attached to the attempting user.

Activity Tracked: Failed login attempts (these include the IP address and user agent). We also set a cookie (jpp_math_pass) for 1 day to remember if/when a user has successfully completed a math captcha to prove that they’re a real human.

Data Synced (?): Failed login attempts, which contain the user’s IP address, attempted username or email address, and user agent information.

With Whom We Share Your Data

Absolutely fucking no one. With the exception of the cases listed above–wherein data you submit through our site using third-party service or plugin may be automatically collected by that service–none of your data is shared with any person or company.

Where We Send Your Data

Absolutely fucking nowhere. With the exception of the cases listed above–wherein data you submit through our site using third-party service or plugin may be automatically collected by that service–none of your data is sent anywhere.

Example: Your comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service, but we don’t do anything with it on our end.

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. All users can see, edit, or delete their 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.

Okay. That should satisfy all the legal shit.

I’m assuming less than 1% of people who come to this site will ever read this. So, if that’s you, cool. You’re so thorough. Be proud.