Who We Are?
Professor Gaggle takes his job as Chief Privacy Officer very seriously, right up until someone brings up cookies, at which point he gets distracted and eats one. This page covers what happens to your info when you visit gaggleofnouns.com.
Comments
When you leave a comment, we collect what’s in the comment form, plus your IP address and browser user agent string. Standard stuff, mostly used to catch spam before it catches you.
We may also send an anonymized hash of your email to Gravatar to check if you’re using their service (their privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/). Once your comment’s approved, your profile photo is visible next to it, so maybe don’t comment mid-bathrobe.
Contact Forms
If you message us through the contact form, we collect your name, email, and whatever you tell us. It’s used only to reply to you, and we don’t hand it off to third parties.
Attach a file, and we’ll hang onto that too, just for the purpose you sent it.
Media
Uploading images? Strip the location data (EXIF GPS) first, unless you want the internet to know exactly which owl-watching spot you were standing in. Anyone can pull location data out of images left on the site.
Cookies
Leave a comment and opt in, and we’ll save your name, email, and website in a cookie for a year so you don’t have to retype it next time.
Visit our login page and we set a short-lived, no-personal-data test cookie to see if your browser accepts cookies at all.
Log in, and we set cookies for your session (2 days) and display preferences (1 year). Choosing “Remember Me” stretches that to 2 weeks. Log out, and those cookies go with you.
Publish or edit a post, and one more cookie tracks the post ID for a day. No personal data involved.
Embedded Content
Some pages embed content from other sites (videos, images, etc.). Those embeds behave exactly like visiting that other site directly.
That means they can collect their own data, drop their own cookies, and track your interaction, especially if you’re already logged into that service. That’s on them, not us.
Who We Share Your Data With
Short answer: nobody we’re selling or renting it to. Comments may run through an automated spam filter. That’s about it.
How Long We Keep Your Data
Comments and their metadata stick around indefinitely, mainly so we can auto-approve your future comments instead of making you wait in a moderation queue every time.
If you ever register an account, your profile info is stored and fully editable by you, except your username (that one’s permanent, choose wisely). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
Contact form submissions are kept only as long as needed to respond, then deleted or archived securely.
Your Rights Over Your Data
If you’ve got an account or left comments, you can request an export of your personal data, or ask us to erase it, with the exception of anything we’re legally required to keep for administrative or security reasons.
Where Your Data Goes
Comments may pass through an automated spam detection service. Contact form messages land securely in our inbox and nowhere else.