Introduction

The Owner and administrator(s) of this Website (www.joanastarnes.com) are fully committed to respecting and safeguarding your privacy, and have therefore formulated this Privacy Policy in accordance with the following fundamental principles:

We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you when you visit this Website.
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 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.

Our Privacy Policy was created using the format provided by Automattic, made available under a Creative Commons Sharealike licence, with supporting information from the European Union General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR), made available under the terms of the Commission Decision 2011/833/EU on the reuse of documents from the EU institutions (for more information, please see the EUR-Lex public statement on re-use).

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

This is the author website of Joana Starnes, a site created and operated with services provided by Automattic through WordPress.com. Our Privacy Policy applies to information that we, the Owner and administrator(s) of www.joanastarnes.com, collect about you when you use our Website, and to the ways in which your data are collected and processed by Automattic on our behalf. Below we explain how we collect, use and share information about you, along with the choices you have with respect to that information.

This policy does not cover all the ways in which Automattic collect, use and share data regarding activity on websites created and operated with their services. For data pertaining to website creation and maintenance, please also see https://automattic.com/privacy/. For data pertaining to website visitors, please also see https://automattic.com/privacy-notice/.

For the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Joana Starnes, the Owner of this Website (www.joanastarnes.com), is the “data controller”. If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy and/or the collection and use of your personal data, please contact the Owner through the means specified at the end of this document.

Definitions

Personal Data: any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (“data subject”); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
Usage Data: data collected automatically through the use of this Website;
User: a natural person (“data subject”) visiting and/or interacting with this Website;
Data Controller: the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data;
Data Processor: a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which processes personal data on behalf of the controller;
Recipient: a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or another body, to which the personal data are disclosed, whether a third party or not.
Third party: a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or body other than the data subject, controller, processor and persons who, under the direct authority of the controller or processor, are authorised to process personal data;
Consent of the data subject: any freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous indication of the data subject’s wishes by which he or she, by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to the processing of personal data relating to him or her.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so (for example, to fulfil our commitments to you, communicate with you, improve the quality of our Website or analyse site traffic). We collect this information in two different ways:

directly from you, if and when you interact with us;
automatically through the WordPress products and services used in the creation and operation of this Website.

Please note: This website is aimed at adults. We do not knowingly collect any personal information relating to children. If you are under the age of 18 (or under the age of majority in your jurisdiction of residence), please do not provide us with any of your personal information.

A. Information You Provide to Us

Follower and Subscriber information. When you subscribe to receive notifications of new blogposts, updates, free content, special offers or new releases, you provide name and email address. Notifications are sent to you via WordPress. If you change your mind and no longer wish to receive notifications from us, you can unsubscribe at any time by using the Unsubscribe link found in every notification you receive from us.

Site comments. When you comment to blog posts, you provide name (or username), email address and any data you enter in the Comment field. Your email address is not publicly displayed. It is only your comment and the information you provide to WordPress or Gravatar when you set up your public profile that is visible to other visitors to this Website. Typically, your public profile information includes name (or username) and photo, if available.

Contact Form. When you contact us by filling in the Contact Form, you provide name, email address and any data you enter in the text box of the form (which may include your postal address, if the reason for contacting us is to let us know the means of sending you paperback copies won in giveaways). This information is used strictly for the purpose of communicating with you, fulfilling our commitments to you and addressing your observations, queries and concerns. Your contact information will not be used for marketing purposes.

B. Information We Collect Automatically

Some information is collected automatically through WordPress.com:

Technical Data. We collect information that web browsers, mobile devices and servers typically make available, including the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information.

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 Website from certain geographic regions.

Interactions. We collect some information about your interactions with this Website, such as your ‘Likes’ and the fact that you commented on a particular post, so that WordPress can, for example, recommend posts that 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. This Website uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help track visitors and site usage. For more information about the use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please follow this link to the Cookie Policy applicable to this WordPress Website.

How and Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you for the purposes listed below:

To provide our services;
To process and manage your use of our Website;
To communicate with you when you comment on our Website or contact us via the Contact Form;
To send you notifications of new blogposts, updates, free content, special offers or new releases when you subscribe to receive such notifications. If you no longer wish to receive notifications from us, you can opt out at any time by using the Unsubscribe link found at the end of our notifications;
To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Website;
To protect our Website, our users, and the public (for example, by protecting against malicious, deceptive, fraudulent, or illegal activity; fighting spam; complying with our legal obligations; and protecting the rights and property of the Website owner, of WordPress, Automattic and others);
To fix problems with our Website (for example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues);
To customize the user experience.

Legal Basis for Collecting and Using Information

For our visitors from the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area (EEA): this section addresses our legal grounds for processing information about you under data protection laws in countries that fall under the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR). Our use of your information is based on the grounds that the data controller and/or data processor may lawfully process users’ data if at least one of the following applies:

(1) You have given us your consent; or

(2) The use is necessary in order to fulfil our commitments to you; or

(3) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(4) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another natural person; or

(5) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide our services; to communicate with you; to operate our Website safely and securely; to update and improve our Website so that we can offer you a better user experience; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our Website; to personalize your experience.

Sharing Information

We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are listed below, as well as under Further Details, in the section regarding Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others.

Third parties. We may share Website visitor information with third parties who need to know this information in order to help us provide our services to you. These third parties may include social media advertising platforms such as Facebook or Google Ads. We require third parties to agree to appropriate privacy commitments in order to share information with them.

Legal and regulatory requirements. 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 in order to protect the property or rights of the Owner of this Website, WordPress, Automattic, third parties, or the public at large.

Information Shared Publicly. Information that you choose to make public is disclosed publicly. Thus, your ‘Likes’ and your comments to posts published on this Website may be displayed publicly alongside your WordPress/Gravatar public profile information, which typically includes your name (or username) and photo, if available. Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used (or misused) by others. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly. Please also note that comments are moderated, and any spam or inappropriate content will be deleted. Legitimate comments will remain published at the end of the respective blogpost(s), unless you ask us to delete your comments. This Website also allows you to connect with your social network via social media buttons. When you use those buttons, the social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest) may set cookies on your device, and thus collect data which may be used in accordance with their own privacy policies.

How Long We Keep Information

We discard information about you when it is no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — as described in the section on How and Why We Use Information — and we are not legally required to keep it.

Security

While no online service is completely secure, we firmly endeavour to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so. We maintain appropriate physical and electronic safeguards, and monitor our Website for potential vulnerabilities and attacks. Please bear in mind, however, that the information you may choose to make public through commenting to blogposts on our Website may be visible around the world, and we cannot prevent its use or misuse by others.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain parts of the world, including some US states and countries that fall under the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR), you have certain rights regarding your personal information.

The General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR)

If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights with respect to your personal data, (subject to any exemptions provided by the law):

The right to request access to your personal data: You have the right to obtain from us confirmation as to whether or not we use and process your personal data, and where that is the case, you have the right to obtain from us access to your personal data, along with information regarding the purposes of data collection and processing; the categories of personal data concerned; the recipients or categories of recipient to whom the personal data have been or will be disclosed; where possible, the envisaged period for which the personal data will be stored or, if not possible, the criteria used to determine that period;
The right to request rectification of your personal data: You have the right to obtain from us without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning you, and to have incomplete personal data completed;
The right to request erasure of your personal data (‘the right to be forgotten’): You have the right to obtain from us without undue delay the erasure of personal data concerning you under certain circumstances, including: the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed; you withdraw consent on which the processing is based and there is no other legal ground for the processing; you object to the processing and there are no overriding legitimate grounds for the processing; the personal data have to be erased for compliance with a legal obligation;
The right to request that we restrict our use and processing of your personal data: You have the right to obtain from us restriction of our use and processing of personal data concerning you under certain circumstances, including: while the controller verifies the accuracy of your personal data if the accuracy has been contested by you; pending the verification as to whether the legitimate grounds of the controller override your legitimate grounds for objecting to the processing; the controller no longer needs the personal data for the purposes of the processing, but they are required by you for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims;
The right to object to our use and processing of your personal data: You have the right to object at any time to data processing based on legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party;
The right to withdraw your consent: You have the right to withdraw consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal;
The right to request portability of your personal data: You have the right to receive your personal data from us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance, where the processing is based on consent and carried out by automated means;
The right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

The type of information we collect and the sources of that information are listed in the Information We Collect section above. We collect personal information for the purposes and with the legal basis described in the How and Why We Use Information section, and we share this information as described in the Sharing Information section. We retain this information for the length of time described in our How Long We Keep Information section.

Transferring Information: as this Website is operated with Automattic’s services, which are offered worldwide, the information about you that is processed when you visit and/or interact with our Website in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area (EEA) may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the UK and the EEA who work for Automattic, other members of the Automattic group of companies, or third-party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section. When providing information about you to entities outside the UK and the EEA, appropriate measures are taken in order to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately, as required by applicable law. These measures include Automattic entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with entities based in countries outside the EEA. You can ask us for more information about the steps taken to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

US Privacy Laws

Laws in some US states, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia, require us to provide residents with additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it. You will find that information in this section. (If you are a California resident, please note that this is the Notice at Collection we are required to provide you under California law).

This Website was launched in April 2024, and thus the period of data collection has not yet reached 12 months. If you are a California resident, please note that we might collect the following categories of personal information from users of this Website:

Identifiers (like your name, contact information, and device and online identifiers);
Characteristics protected by law (for example, you might provide your gender or you may choose to voluntarily disclose your race or veteran status);
Internet or other electronic network activity information;
Geolocation data (such as your location based on your IP address);
Audio, electronic, visual or similar information (such as your public profile picture, if you uploaded one);
Inferences we make (such as likelihood of retention or attrition).

The categories of information we collect and the sources of that information are listed in the Information We Collect section above. We collect personal information for the purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section, and we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section. We retain this information for the length of time described in our How Long We Keep Information section.

In some US states you have additional rights, subject to any exemptions provided by your state’s respective law, including the right to:

Request a copy of the specific pieces of information we collect about you and, if you are in California, to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of sources from which the information came, the specific purpose for collecting and using it, and the categories of third parties we share it with;
Request deletion of personal information we collect or maintain;
Request correction of personal information we collect or maintain;
Opt out (you can learn more about how to opt out by clicking the link displayed to users visiting Automattic sites from within the relevant states; also, Automattic respect the GPC browser signal, and will treat it as a valid means of communicating your desire to opt out);
Receive a copy of your information in a readily portable format;
Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights.

We do not collect or process your sensitive (and potentially sensitive) personal information except where it is strictly necessary to provide you with our service, where the processing is not for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you, or for other purposes that do not require an option to limit under California law.

As specified in the Information We Collect section, this Website is aimed at adults. We do not knowingly collect any personal information relating to persons under the age of 18 (or under the age of majority in their jurisdiction of residence).

Further Details

Your Information & Personalized Advertising

Websites created and operated with Automattic products and services use cookies to share certain device identifiers and information about your browsing activities with Automattic’s advertising partners, and those advertising partners may use that information to show you personalized ads. The personal information shared by websites created and operated with Automattic products and services never include data that identifies you personally (like your name and contact information) but may include online identifiers, internet or other network or device activity (such as cookie information, other device identifiers, and IP address) and geolocation data (approximate location information from your IP address). These disclosures may be considered a “sale” or “share” of information under some US state privacy laws. You can opt out by following this link to Advertising on WordPress.com Sites and Sites in the WordAds Program.

Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others

Ads appearing on websites created and operated with Automattic’s services may be delivered by advertising networks. Also, other parties may provide analytics services via Automattic’s services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your interactions with our Website, and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device, to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows Automattic and other companies to, among other things, analyse and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver ads that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note that this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by the Owner of this Website, and does not cover the collection of information by any third-party advertisers or analytics providers.

Privacy Policy Changes

This Privacy Policy is effective as of 4 April 2024. We are regularly reviewing our privacy practices, therefore we may change our Privacy Policy from time to time, and we encourage you to frequently check this page for any amendments. Your further use of our Website after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.

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 follow this link to our Contact Form.