Privacy Policy

JAMESCOCKROFT.COM (“JAMES”) respects the right to privacy of its readers and is committed to protecting the information collected through this website and associated platforms.

This privacy policy explains how JAMES collects, stores, and uses the information you provide when you access, engage with, or log-in to the website and any other platforms and services operated and managed directly by JAMES. Read this page for specific Terms of Use and the JAMES Cookie Policy (mmmmm Cookie) which you also accept when you use JAMES.

As far as possible, I’ve tried to keep the technical terminology to a minimum. You’re welcome.

This is important:

BY USING, REGISTERING OR OTHERWISE ACCESSING ANY SERVICES PROVIDED BY JAMES, YOU AGREE TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY and THE ASSOCIATED TERMS OF USE.

THIS MEANS YOU PROVIDE EXPLICIT AND INFORMED CONSENT TO A CONTRACT WHICH INCLUDES THE COLLECTION, USE AND PROCESSING OF YOUR DATA AS DESCRIBED BELOW.

IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY, PLEASE DO NOT VISIT, USE, REGISTER TO OR OTHERWISE ACCESS ANY SERVICES PROVIDED BY JAMES.

Now to the fun part.

The following sections discuss what kind of data JAMES collects, how it’s used and what you can do to protect the information you share online.

TRACKING TECHNOLOGIES

Like the vast majority of websites today, JAMES and any partners used to deliver associated services such as newsletters, advertising, survey forms, and the like, use cookies and/or similar technologies to analyze trends, track users’ use of the website, administer the website, and gather basic demographic information about its readership.

In particular, JAMES employs WordPress.com, Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, and Cloudflare. You should read and understand their privacy policies to understand how your use of JAMES may be tracked and analyzed by these services.

In general, the type of data available to JAMES looks something like:

“Today, X number of people visited jamescockroft.com and viewed Y number of pages. The average time spent reading an article was Z minutes. Most of the people who read article A came from country B using a tablet device”

You can control the use of cookies and other website analytics tools in your web browser. JAMES honors your Do Not Track preferences in your browser. Aside from usage information, JAMES also gathers certain technical information automatically in its server logs. This data may be used to block spam bots and other agents attempting to compromise the security of the JAMES.

This data generally includes your IP (Internet Protocol) address, web browser type, ISP (Internet Service Provider), the web pages you came from, operating system, date/time of your visit, and/or click data. This data is anonymized at the source and used to analyze trends and administer the website.

COLLECTION AND USE OF PERSONAL INFORMATION

Depending on what you do when you visit or use JAMES, the platforms used to deliver the service may ask to collect your name, email address and social media details – but only with your explicit consent.

For example:

  • …when you sign up for a newsletter: your name, email address and subscription preference will be requested
  • …when you leave a comment on the website, you are required to leave your email address to leave that comment.

SHARING YOUR INFORMATION

JAMES may share your information with third parties in order to provide additional services to readers.

These companies are authorised to only use the information you provide as necessary to provide these services to us. The primary example of this is Automattic (the company behind: WordPress, on which JAMES is built; Akismet, a spam fighting tool; and Jetpack, a plugin that provides some handy functionality).

PERSONAL INFORMATION: ACCESS, RETENTION AND CHOICE

If you want to know what (if any) information about you is stored by JAMES, just use the form at the foot of this page to receive a complete breakdown.

ADVERTISING

JAMES does not advertise. You’re welcome. Should this change, James will update this Privacy Policy.

LEGAL COMPLIANCE

In certain situations, JAMES may be required to disclose personal data in response to lawful requests by public authorities, which could include a requirement to meet national/international security or law enforcement requirements.

SECURITY

The security of your personal information is very important. JAMES follows generally accepted standards to protect the personal information submitted, both during transmission and once it is received.

If you have any questions about the security of your personal information, please send an email to james@jamescockroft.com and include “personal information security” in the subject line.

TERMS OF USE

By using JAMES you acknowledge and accept these Terms of Use.

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

This policy will be updated periodically to reflect the way your information is collected and handled, or when new services/partners are used who make use of it. Updates will be sent out to readers who have a newsletter subscription, and they will also be reflected on this page.

QUESTIONS AND DATA REQUESTS

If you have any questions or feedback on this privacy policy please email james@jamescockroft.com

If you would like to modify your preferences or remove your consent, please follow this link:

[gdpr_preferences text=”Privacy Preferences”]

ANNEX 1: AUTOMATTIC

JAMES is built on WordPress, and uses plugins and other technology under the Automattic family. You should familiarize yourself with Automattic’s privacy policy. Specific information on known ways these services interact with you are below.

Jetpack

Carousel – provides the pretty galleries and all throughout the site.

James thinks he has explicitly enabled image view stats tracking for the Carousel on JAMES.

Data Used: 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.

Activity Tracked: Image views.

Gravatar Hovercards – if you leave a comment, and are logged into WordPress.com, you might see your Gravatar instead of some random 8bit character.

Data Used: This feature will send a hash of the user’s email address (if logged in to the site or WordPress.com — or if they submitted a comment on the site using their email address that is attached to an active Gravatar profile) to the Gravatar service (also owned by Automattic) in order to retrieve their profile image.

Infinite Scroll – Infinite Scroll is not currently enabled on this blog, but it might be one day, so this is here just in case.

Data Used: In order to record page views via WordPress.com Stats (which must be enabled for page view tracking here to work) with additional loads, the following information is used: 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.

Activity Tracked: Page views will be tracked with each additional load (i.e. when you scroll down to the bottom of the page and a new set of posts loads automatically). If the site owner has enabled Google Analytics to work with this feature, a page view event will also be sent to the appropriate Google Analytics account with each additional load.

Likes – if you’re logged into WordPress.com, you’ll see a fancy like button at the bottom of posts. If you see it, please use it. If you don’t see it, this doesn’t apply to you.

Data Used: In order to process a post like action, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID (on which the post was liked), post ID (of the post that was liked), user agent, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: Post likes.

Sharing – The fancy share buttons on each post, the ones that nobody ever uses, but if you did, well, all this could happen: forewarned is forearmed:

Data Used: When sharing content via email (this option is only available if Akismet is active on the site), 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 (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed.

WordPress.com Stats – Stats help James see what visitors like to read, and might influence what gets posted on JAMES (see also: Google Analytics)

Data Used: 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 he/she 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, 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.). JAMES forces Jetpack to honor the Do Not Track settings in your browser. It hurts James’s ability to see what visitor read, but he also respects your anonymity. Do unto others, and all.