Your privacy is critically important to us. At Allergenfreebody, 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 to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private).
- 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.
What This Policy Covers
This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use our website.
Throughout this Privacy Policy, we’ll refer to our website applications as “Services.” Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have concerning that information.
Allergenfreebody uses Automattic Inc. to manage our site.
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 this information from three sources: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources.
Information You Provide to Us
It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:
- Communications with us (hi there!): You may provide us with information when you respond to surveys, communicate with us about a support question, post a question in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, WordPress.com comment, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).
Purposes for Using Information
We use information about you for the purposes listed below:
- To provide our Services.
- To ensure quality, maintain safety, and improve our Services.
- To market our Services and measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our marketing.
- To protect our Services, our users, and the public.
- To fix problems with our Services.
- To customize the user experience.
- To communicate with you.
How We Share Information
We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelled out below, as well as in the section called Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others:
- Subsidiaries and independent contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries and independent contractors who need the information to help us provide our Services or process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for any personal information that we share with them.
- Third-party vendors: We may share information about you with third-party vendors who need the information in order to provide their services to us, or to provide their services to you. This includes vendors that help us provide our Services to you (like Stripe, which powers WooCommerce Payments, payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, payment providers you use for your own ecommerce operations, fraud prevention services that allow us to analyze fraudulent payment transactions, cloud storage services, postal and email delivery services that help us stay in touch with you, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you, registrars, registries, data escrow services that allow us to provide domain registration services, and your hosting provider if your site is not hosted by Automattic); 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, and by placing ads to market our services); those that help us understand and enhance our Services (like analytics providers); those that make tools to help us run our operations (like programs that help us with task management, scheduling, word processing, email and other communications, and collaboration among our teams); other third-party tools that help us manage operations; and companies that make products available on our websites (like 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. Other vendors are listed in our more specific policies (e.g., our Cookie Policy).
- Legal and regulatory requirements: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request. For more information on how we respond to requests for information about WordPress.com users, please see our Legal Guidelines. Additionally, if you have a domain registered with WordPress.com, we may share your information to comply with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) regulations, rules, or policies. For example, your information relating to your domain registration may be available in the WHOIS database, or we may be required to share your information with ICANN-approved Dispute Resolution Service Providers. Please see our Domain Registrations and Privacy support document for more details.
- 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 Automattic, 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 Automattic 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. For example, we may share your information with third parties when you authorize us to do so, like when you connected your site to a social media service through our Publicize feature.
- Aggregated or de-identified information: We may share information that has been aggregated or de-identified, so that it can no longer reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services, or share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
- Site owners: If you have a WordPress.com account and interact with another site using our Services, your information may be shared with the administrators of the site. For example, if you leave a comment on a site created on WordPress.com or running Jetpack, your IP address and the email address associated with your WordPress.com account may be shared with the administrator(s) of the site where you left the comment. Or if you make a payment (like via the Payments feature) to a site, your public display name, user name, and email address may be shared with the administrator(s) of the site.
- Published support requests: If you send us a request for assistance (for example, via a support email or one of our other feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to clarify or respond to your request, or to help us support other users.
Automattic has a long-standing policy that they do not sell users’ data. They aren’t a data broker, they don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and they don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.
They show ads on some of their users’ sites as well as some of their own, and the revenue they generate lets them offer free access to some of their Services so that money doesn’t become an obstacle to having a voice.
Under a new California law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), some personalized advertising you see online and on their services might be considered a “sale” even though they don’t share information that identifies you personally, like your name or email address, as part of our advertising program.
You have choices about these ads, learn more about them and our ads program.
Information Shared Publicly
Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly.
That means information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on our website, and your “Likes” and comments on other websites are all available to others — and we hope they get a lot of views!
For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Globally Recognized Avatar, or Gravatar — get it? 🙂 Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, displays alongside the comments and “Likes” that you make on other users’ websites while logged in to your WordPress.com account. Your Gravatar and public profile information may also display with your comments, “Likes,” and other interactions on websites that use our Gravatar service, if the email address associated with your account is the same email address you use on the other website.
Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share publicly.
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, Automattic keeps web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of Automattic’s websites, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. They retain the logs for this period too, among other things, analyze traffic to Automattic’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of their websites.
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 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.
- Limit access to information on your mobile device.
- Opt out of marketing communications.
- Set your browser to reject cookies.
Your Rights
If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California 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.
You can find detailed metrics about Automattic’s compliance with these rights in our Privacy Report.
Contacting Automattic 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.
How to Reach Automattic
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.
Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)
Transferring Information
Because Automattic’s Services are offered 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. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above.
Visitors to Our Users’ Websites
We also process information about visitors to our users’ websites, on behalf of our users and in accordance with our user agreements. Please note that our processing of that information on behalf of our users for their websites isn’t covered by this Privacy Policy. We encourage our users to post a privacy policy that accurately describes their practices on data collection, use, and sharing of personal information. If you’d like, you can also read more about the data we collect on behalf of our users in our Privacy Notice.
Users control the content posted on their sites, so any disputes regarding content on a user’s site should be made directly to the site owner, through their “contact us” page, at an email address they provide, or by leaving a comment on the site.
Privacy Policy Changes
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Automattic may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Automattic 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 (like adding a statement to our homepage or the WordPress.com Blog, or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.
© Automattic Inc., purveyors of fine blogging and site-building services since 2005. Thank you for your time.
