Your privacy is critically important to us. At Puppet Post, 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 store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
- 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.
Who We Are and What This Policy Covers
This policy represents the Atlanta Puppetry Guild (web hosting sponsor of Puppet Post) and the Puppet Post administrators and moderators. It covers all usage of the Puppet Post mailing list and website, which throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to collectively as “Services.” Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.
This document is adapted from Automattic's WordPress Privacy Policy, which has been made available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license.
Information We Collect
We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better. We collect information in two ways: if and when you provide information to us, and automatically through operating our Services. 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 Puppet Post 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 a Puppet Post account.
- Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about you in published content (such as for your posts to the mailing list). For example, if you write a mailing list post that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the mailing list or its archives. This might be obvious to you…but it’s not to everyone!
- Communications With Us (Hi There!): You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our moderators, etc.
Information We Collect Automatically
We also collect some information automatically:
- Log Information: 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, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services–for example, when you make posts to our mailing list or make changes to your mailing list account settings.
- Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services, such as statistics collected and stored by the Mailman software that powers the Puppet Post mailing list. We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.
- 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 Services from certain geographic regions.
- 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. Puppet Post uses cookies and other technologies to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness.
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 deliver mailing list messages to you based on your personal preferences;
- To further develop and improve our Services–for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy;
- To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
- 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 Puppet Post and others, which may result in us declining the use of our Services;
- To communicate with you, for example through an email, to solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date on our products; and
- To personalize your experience using 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 under our Terms of Service 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 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 improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or (5) You have given us your consent--for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on.
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:
- Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, 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 subsidiaries, employees, 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 or your site. This group includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you like email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, those that assist us with our marketing efforts (e.g. by providing tools for identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns), those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers), 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 Puppet Post, 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.
- 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 or one of our feedback mechanisms), 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. While access to the Puppet Post mailing list requires one to sign up for an account, being that anyone can sign up, the list is a public form, and anything you post to it has been shared publicly by you. 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. Anything you post to the Puppet Post mailing list is saved indefinitely in the mailing list archives. Unfortunately, our Internet Service Provider does not give us access to remove anything from the list archives, so we must by necessity deny any request for removal of information that is in the archives.
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, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services may not be accessible.
- Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.
- Set Your Browser to Reject Cookies: At this time, Puppet Post does not respond to “do not track” signals across all of our Services. However, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies before using Puppet Post’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Puppet Post’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.
- Close Your Account: While we’d be very sad to see you go, if you no longer want to use our Services :( :( :( :(, you can close your Puppet Post account by unsubscribing from the mailing list. 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, anything you have posted to the Puppet Post mailing list, or 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.
Your Rights
If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “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 usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would 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. EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.
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.
Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)
Services Provided by Others
Other parties may also provide analytics services or other services via our Services. These other service providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver advertisements that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by Puppet Post and does not cover the collection of information by any third party service providers.
Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Puppet Post may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Puppet Post encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or the Puppet Post mailing list, or sending you a notification through email). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.
That’s it! Thanks for reading.