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Sparky’s Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: http://sparkymag.com

Sparkymag.com is a content creator and collector and we have a policy of NOT featuring direct advertising on our site, however some content from other sites will contain adverts and promotions and may display on our site by default. Any interaction via our site pages with external site pages is as if you were viewing and interacting with those sites directly, always check before you share any sensitive or personal data with those sites or their embedded content

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 – not necessarily your personal details, with the embedded content, if you have an account with, and are logged in to that other embedded website link or content.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

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 detect spam, and protect both our visitors and ourselves from spam and unwanted access.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it and if you have a Gravatar (profile picture) registered . The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public but only 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 have an account and you log in to this site, 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.

Analytics

We tend NOT to do analytics of any kind as our website is an organically social site and we are not interested in unnaturally ‘growing’ our audience other than word of mouth and occasional newsletters, anything we send to our subscribers will only relate to Sparky and Sparkymag.com  and we will NOT share any subscriber details with any other site, individual, company or organisation. Subscribers and Social Club members can interact with each other as ‘friends’ and can ‘unfriend’ or add ‘friends’ on request. Otherwise privacy is protected behind self-assigned usernames and passwords, IP addresses may be recorded to facilitate quicker repeat access, but remain hidden in systems.

Who we share your data with?

We do not share anyone’s personal data with anybody and anything outside of sparkymag.com.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata may be retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue. We regularly delete older irrelevant or inappropriate comments permanently, and this includes posts or comments that provide sensitive information or too many details that may make the commentor vunerable.

For users that register on our website (if any), we only 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). The Sparkymag.com website administrators can also see, edit and delete that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this website 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 we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

Contact forms and your user data

We only collect your name, email address and your query which is sent to us via secure email and we may add your name and email address to our subscribers’ list – the contact form on this site will ask you if you wish to be added to the SparkyMag subscribers’ list and we only send out an occasional newsletter – around once a month if at all.

Additional information

How we protect your data

We will constantly assess our position in relation to privacy and in protecting our users and subscribers data. We do not collect or distribute any data relating to our users or subscribers without direct permission, and at this point see no need for commercial site security as our interactions with users are protected by the systems we use to ‘publish’ the content. But please protect yourself by NOT sharing personal information without checking the authenticity of the websites, blogs and pages you visit.

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

We do nothing with your user data outside of this website and its newsletter, other than to deliver it to you securely.