Privacy

Updated 9 November 2021

Website address: https://www.witchesmassbay.com

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

The owner of Witches of Massachusetts Bay (“the website”) only has access to personally identifying information if you voluntarily give it to us through features on this website or by email. For example, if you comment on a blog post or use the contact form, you’re asked to provide a name and email address. Comments and contact us forms are always on an opt-in basis.

(“We” refers to the site owner or a service.) We use the information we collect when you make a comment, use the contact forms, surf the website, or use certain other site features to keep the website secure, to improve the website and user experience, and to respond to your requests.

We also collect aggregate data about visitors (browser type, language preference, referring site, date and time of visit, etc.), through services such as Jetpack, Google Analytics, or WordPress that track this information for us, and retain it in log form. This information isn’t linked to anything personally identifiable.

Services

Akismet, Jetpack, Gravatar, and WordPress are all services of Automattic Inc., 132 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 USA. Review Automattic’s privacy policies for more information.

Google Analytics is a service of Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 USA. Review Google’s privacy policies for more information.

This website uses SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remain private and integral.

We use MailChimp as our marketing automation platform. This service is separate from our website and allows you to subscribe to receive occasional emails from the website owner. MailChimp is part of the Rocket Science Group LLC. Review MailChimp’s privacy policy for more information.

Bookshop and affiliate links

This website contains a Bookshop and affiliate links. If you shop in my storefront or click on any affiliate links to purchase a book, Bookshop.org sends a small percentage of that sale to us. That referral fee comes out of their pocket, not yours. We do not have any endorsements, sponsorships, and the like for creating and maintaining this website. All other links are to resources that we’ve found along the research trail. Bookshop.org supports local bookstores. Review Bookshop.org’s privacy policy for more information.

Comments

The Comments feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.

When you leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form. Jetpack collects the commenter’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided via the comment form), timestamp, and IP address. Additionally, a jetpack.wordpress.com IFrame receives the following data: WordPress.com blog ID attached to the site, ID of the post on which the comment is being submitted, commenter’s local user ID (if available), commenter’s local username (if available), commenter’s site URL (if available), MD5 hash of the commenter’s email address (if available), and the comment content. The following information is sent to the Akismet service for the sole purpose of spam checking: commenter’s name, email address, site URL, IP address, and user agent.

The comment author’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided during the comment submission) are stored in cookies. Learn more about these cookies below.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service if you are using it. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Likes

This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.

In order to process a page, post, or comment like, your WordPress.com user ID/username, the local site-specific user ID, and a true/false data point that tells us if you liked a specific comment. If you perform a like action from one of our mobile apps, some additional information is used to track the activity: IP address, user agent, timestamp of event, blog ID, browser language, country code, and device info.

Contact forms

Akismet is enabled on this site, so the contact form submission data—IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message—is submitted to the Akismet service 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 owner of the form (i.e., the site author who published the page on which the contact form resides). This email will include the submitter’s IP address, timestamp, name, email address, website, and message.

Cookies

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.

Events Manager

We use Google services to generate maps and provide autocompletion when searching for events by location, which may collect data via your browser in accordance to Google’s privacy policy. We collect and store information you submit to us about events (and corresponding locations) you would like to publish on our site. We may use cookies to temporarily store information about a booking in progress (if available) as well as any error/confirmation messages while submitting or managing your events and locations.

Embedded content from other websites

Pages and posts 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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

Pageview events (and potentially video play events) are sent to Google Analytics for consumption.

WordPress.com stats use IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Important: The site owner does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but 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 in order 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.). The site owner has the ability to force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.

Notifications

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are logged in to WordPress.com.

Sending notifications (i.e., when we send a notification to a particular user), opening notifications (i.e., when a user opens a notification that they receive), performing an action from within the notification panel (e.g., liking a comment or marking a comment as spam), and clicking on any link from within the notification panel/interface.

Data used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Some visitor-related information or activity may be sent to the site owner via this feature. This may include email address, WordPress.com username, site URL, email address, comment content, follow actions, etc.

Website protection

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. For failed login attempts, we also set a cookie (jpp_math_pass) for 1 day.

Search

Any of the visitor-chosen search filters and query data in order to process a search request on the WordPress.com servers.

Sharing

When sharing content via email, the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if the user is logged in, this information will be pulled directly from their account), IP address (for spam checking), user agent (for spam checking), and email body/content. This content will be sent to Akismet so that a spam check can be performed. Additionally, if reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared with that service.

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 also can see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this website, 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 also can 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.

Do we disclose any information to outside parties?

We do not sell, rent, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our website or conducting our business, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We also may release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law. However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.

Third-party links

Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third-party products or services on our website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. Therefore, we have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.

Your consent

By using our site, you consent to our privacy policy.

Changes to our Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page.

Contacting us

If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us.