Your privacy is critically important to us. At WTUNY.COM, we have a few fundamental principles:
We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.
Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.
Information We Collect
We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so — for example, to provide our Website’s content, to communicate with you, or to make our Blog and posts better.
We collect this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our blogs, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.
WHO WE ARE
Our website address is: https://wtuny.com.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://wtuny.com/privacy-policy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
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 visit our login page, 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.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Information You Provide to Us
It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:
Basic account information:
- We ask for basic information from you in order to leave your comment. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a WTUNY.COM’s account to provide an email address and password, along with a username or name — and that’s it. You may provide us with more information — like your address and other information you want to share — but we don’t require that information to create a WTUNY.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, if you have a WTUNY.COM’s account, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, like a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that — public — so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
Content information
You might provide us with information about you in draft and published content (a blog post or comment that includes biographic information about you, or any media or files you upload).
Communications with us (hi there!):
You may also provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our Happiness writers about a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter like the one we send through Longreads. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, WTUNY.COM’s comment, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).
Information We Collect Automatically
We also collect some information automatically like most online websites. 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 blog from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (like when you post a photograph with location information) if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.
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 and emails. WTUNY.COM’s uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our blog, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads.
How and Why We Use Information
- To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our blog. For example, by providing automatic update and new information of our blog. Or, for example, by monitoring and analyzing how users interact with our blog so we can create new features that we think our users will enjoy and that will help them with their dogs more efficiently or make our blog easier to use.
- To place and manage ads in our advertising program. For example, to place ads on our users’ page and some of our own page as part of our advertising program, and understand ad performance.
- To fix problems with our blog. For example, by monitoring, debugging, repairing, and preventing issues.
- To customize the user experience. For example, to personalize your experience by serving you relevant notifications and advertisements for our blog, recommending content through our Reader post suggestions, and providing new essays and stories through Longreads for your reading pleasure.
- To communicate with you. For example, by emailing you to ask for your feedback, share tips for getting the most out of our posts, or keep you up to date on WTUNY.COM; texting you to verify your comment; or calling you to share offers and promotions that we think will be of interest to you. If you don’t want to hear from us, you can opt out of marketing communications at any time. (If you opt out, we’ll still send you important updates relating to your account.)
Children’s Privacy
Our Website does not address anyone under the age of 13 (“Children”).
We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 13. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Children has provided us with Personal Data, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected Personal Data from children without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from our servers.
How Long We Keep Information
We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use it — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it.
For example, we keep web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of WTUNY.COM‘s websites, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to WTUNY.COM’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.
As another example, when you delete a post, page, or comment from your WTUNY.COM’s Account, it stays in your Trash folder for thirty days in case you change your mind and would like to restore that content, because starting from scratch is no fun. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.
If you are a job applicant, we will keep your personal data during the application process, and for a certain period thereafter. To determine that period, we take into account a number of factors, like our legal and regulatory obligations (such as equal opportunity obligations) and whether we may need to retain personal data for internal business purposes like analyzing our applicant pool.
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. We monitor our posts 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, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our blog— for example, premium themes that carry an additional charge — may not be accessible. If you are a job applicant, and you choose not to provide certain data elements to us, we may not be able to proceed with the recruitment process.
- Limit access to information on your mobile device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the option to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our AMP site. If you choose to limit this, you may not be able to use certain features, like geotagging for photographs.
- Opt out of marketing communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional communications from us. Just follow the instructions in those communications or let us know. If you opt out of promotional communications, we may still send you other communications, like those about your account and legal notices.
- Set your browser to reject cookies: At this time, WTUNY.COM allow respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Blog. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using WTUNY.COM’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of WTUNY.COM’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
European General Data Protection Regulation (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, 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 also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.
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 under the applicable terms of our website or other agreements with 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 post or comment.
- (2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation.
- (3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person.
- (4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information — for example, to provide and update our posts; to improve our posts so that we can offer you an even better user experience; to safeguard our posts; to communicate with you; to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising; and to understand our user retention and attrition; to monitor and prevent any problems with our posts; and to personalize your experience.
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 European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.
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’ll 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).
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’re in California, to know the categories of personal information we collect, the categories of business or commercial purpose for collecting and using it, the categories of sources from which the information came, 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 of the sale or sharing of personal information;
- Receive a copy of your information in a readily portable format; and
- Not receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your rights.
Contacting Us About These Rights
You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to “How to Reach Us” to, well, find out how to reach us.
When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.
Appeals Process for Rights Requests Denials
In some circumstances we may deny your request to exercise one of these rights. For example, if we cannot verify that you are the account owner we may deny your request to access the personal information associated with your account. As another example, if we are legally required to maintain a copy of your personal information we may deny your request to delete your personal information.
In the event that we deny your request, we will communicate this fact to you in writing. You may appeal our decision by responding in writing to our denial email and stating that you would like to appeal. All appeals will be reviewed by an internal expert who was not involved in your original request. In the event that your appeal is also denied this information will be communicated to you in writing. Please note that the appeal process does not apply to job applicants.
If your appeal is denied, in some US states (Colorado, Connecticut, and Virginia) you may refer the denied appeal to the state attorney general if you believe the denial is in conflict with your legal rights. The process for how to do this will be communicated to you in writing at the same time we send you our decision about your appeal.
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 contact us through our web form or via email. These are the fastest ways to get a response to your inquiry, but you can also contact us by telephone at 1-877-273-3049.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Who we share your data with
If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email. we do not share your IP address or E-mail with anyone.
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 can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, 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 can also 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.
Where your data is sent
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
