Posts and Privacy

Firstly, Rules of decorum

We take pride in running a polite and respectful Lounge/Forum and web site.

Our simple rules:

1. No personal attacks, politics or religion. We’re talking tech, not personalities
2. No swearing.  I know that technology makes you want to swear, but we don’t here in the Lounge
3. No politics or religion. This is not the place for either topic
4. Please stay on topic, and be respectful
5. Non-contributing posts will not be published, nor will duplications
6. You will have a better experience if you register, but you can put an unique name and any email address (even if it’s made up) in the Lounge/Forum
7. Any posting is subject to editing or trashing, at the moderators’ sole discretion
8. Before posting a link or question, search the site first
9. Cross forum posts (the same question on more than one site) must be marked as such
10. Posts must respect copyrights & trademarks
11. No advertising, except by explicit prior arrangement
12. Questions are to be posted in the appropriate Lounge forum, not via Direct Messages or by email to Customer Support or any of the AskWoody team
13. Software of dubious origin or from inappropriate distributors, key-gens, or similar, are unacceptable
14. Dissenting opinions welcome – encouraged! – as long as they’re coherent
15. Rules are subject to change from time to time, without prior notice
etc.

Our User Account & General Rules page has the details (opens in a new window)

Privacy

I, personally, take privacy very seriously.

AskWoody Tech LLC will never sell, rent, or lend your email address. We don’t keep payment information, credit card numbers, street addresses, or other personally identifiable information, and your password is salted and hashed and thus protected. Your posts belong to you: If you want to remove something you’ve written, contact Customersupport@AskWoody.com. That’s the basis of our privacy policy. Here’s what the lawyers want me to say:

INFORMATION WE COLLECT

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so – for example, to provide our Services, or to communicate with you.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a AskWoody.com account to provide a username and email address – and that’s it. You may provide us with more information – like your name – but we don’t require that information to create an AskWoody.com account.

Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, or biographical description. Your public profile information is just that – public – so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.

Transaction and Billing Information: If you buy something from us – a subscription, for example – you will provide additional personal and payment information that is required to process the transaction and your payment, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information. Payments are processed directly through our payment processors, including Stripe and PayPal. None of the information, other than your email address, is stored by AskWoody. The credit card processor stores four digits in order to keep the subscription for the year. If you want me to remove you from Stripe, send an email to customersupport@askwoody.com and be patient as I have to do this manually, there’s no automated way to do it.

Content Information: Depending on your use of the website, you may also provide us with information about you in published content. For example, if you write a reply that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet if you choose to publish the post publicly. This information is accessed by search engine bots, and could appear in results presented by various search engines. This might be obvious to you…but it’s not to everyone!

Information We Collect Automatically: We may also collect some information automatically. Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and network information. We collect log information when you use our Services – for example, when you access AskWoody.com. We may also 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 Services from certain geographic regions.

HOW AND WHY WE USE INFORMATION

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

To provide our Services – for example, to set up and maintain your account, or charge you for any of our paid Services;

To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property of AskWoody and others, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

1. The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you or is necessary to administer your account – for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or
2. The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or
3. The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or
4. We have a legitimate interest in using your information – for example, to provide and update our Services, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or
5. You have given us your consent – for example creating an account, subscribing to our newsletters, or posting anonymously.

SHARING INFORMATION

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

AskWoody Employees and Volunteers, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our employees and volunteers, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our employees, volunteers, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.

Third Party Vendors: We may share information about you with third party vendors who need to know information about you in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like payment providers that process your payment information, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, and companies that make products available on our websites (such as the extensions on WooCommerce.com)) who may need information about you in order to, for example, provide technical or other support services to you. We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them.

Legal Requests: 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 to protect the property or rights of AskWoody LLC, third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury, we may disclose information related to the emergency without delay.

Business Transfers: In connection with any merger, sale of company assets, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another company, or in the unlikely event that AskWoody Tech LLC goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would likely be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. If any of these events were to happen, this Privacy Policy would continue to apply to your information and the party receiving your information may continue to use your information, but only consistent with this Privacy Policy.

With Your Consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction.

Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services.

Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email, social media account or Direct Message), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is – you guessed it – disclosed publicly. That means, of course, that information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on this website, and your “Thanks” and comments, are all available to others. For example, the photo that you upload to your associated Gravatar account, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Globally Recognized Avatar (or Gravatar). Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, will display with the comments and “Thanks” that you make on other users’ websites while logged in to your AskWoody.com account. Your Gravatar + public profile information may also display with your comments, “Thanks,” and other interactions on websites that use Gravatar service, if the email address associated with your account is the same.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it – which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information – and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

Limit the Information that You Provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, payment information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services – for example, paid subscriptions – may not be accessible.

Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services, you can request we close your AskWoody.com user account. Your personal information will be deleted from your account, and we may ask your permission to keep content posted, but identified as “anonymous.” Please keep in mind that we may continue to retain your information after closing your account, as described in How Long We Keep Information above – for example, when that information is reasonably needed to comply with (or demonstrate our compliance with) legal obligations such as law enforcement requests, or reasonably needed for our legitimate business interests. Deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
•  Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
•  Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
• Request portability of your personal data.

You can request to access, correct, or delete your personal data by contacting CustomerSupport@Askwoody.com.

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a  government supervisory authority.

Transferring Information

Because AskWoody’s services are worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, other members of our group of companies, or third party data processors.

CONTROLLERS AND RESPONSIBLE COMPANIES

AskWoody Tech LLC is a limited liability company, based in United States of America, and is the controller (or co-controller) of personal information, which means that we are the company responsible for processing that information, based on the particular service and provider of that service. Depending on the Services you use, more than one company may be the controller of your personal data.

Other services are provided by Gravatar, MailChimp, Stripe, PayPal and WordPress along with several WordPress plugin manufacturers, including Akismet, WooCommerce, bbPress, and Wordfence.

AskWoody Tech LLC
3339 East Griffith Way
Fresno, CA  93726

Customer Support: CustomerSupport@AskWoody.com
Susan sb@askwoody.com

Many thanks to @Kirsty