1.0 Our core beliefs regarding user privacy and data protection
- User privacy and data protection are human rights
- We have a duty of care to the people within our data
- Data is a liability, it should only be collected and processed when absolutely necessary
- We loathe spam as much as you do!
- We will never sell, rent or otherwise distribute or make public your personal information
2.0 Relevant legislation
Along with our business and internal computer systems, this website is designed to comply with the following national and international legislation with regards to data protection and user privacy:
- UK Data Protection Act 1988 (DPA)
- EU Data Protection Directive 1995 (DPD)
- EU General Data Protection Regulation 2018 (GDPR)
- Australian Privacy Act 1988 (APA)
This site’s compliance with the above legislation, all of which are stringent in nature, means that this site is likely compliant with the data protection and user privacy legislation set out by many other countries and territories as well. If you are unsure about whether this site is compliant with your own country of residences’ specific data protection and user privacy legislation you should contact our data protection officer (details of whom can be found in section 9.0) for clarification.
3.0 Personal information that this website collects and why we collect it
This website collects and uses personal information for the following reasons:
3.1 Site visitation tracking
Like most websites, this site uses Google Analytics (GA) to track user interaction. We use this data to determine the number of people using our site, to better understand how they find and use our web pages and to see their journey through the website.
Although GA records data such as your geographical location, device, internet browser and operating system, none of this information personally identifies you to us. GA also records your computer’s IP address which could be used to personally identify you but Google do not grant us access to this. We consider Google to be a third party data processor (see section 6.0 below).
GA makes use of cookies, details of which can be found on Google’s developer guides. FYI our website uses the analytics.js implementation of GA.
Disabling cookies on your internet browser will stop GA from tracking any part of your visit to pages within this website.
In addition to Google Analytics, this website may collect* information (already held in the public domain) attributed to the IP address of the computer or device that is being used to access it. The information is supplied to us from Whoisvisiting.com. Whoisvisiting.com is a service offered by Whoisdata Limited. The Whoisvisiting system does not use your IP address to identify you, the individual, in any way. No cookies are used by the Whoisvisiting system.
* The Whoisvisiting system will only lookup information when a static IP address is being used. Differences between a static and dynamic IP address.
More information about how Whoisvisiting uses IP addresses.
3.2 Our blog
Should you choose to add a comment to any posts that we have published on our blog, the name and email address you enter with your comment will be saved to this website’s database, along with your computer’s IP address and the time and date that you submitted the comment. This information is only used to identify you as a contributor to the comment section of the respective blog post and is not passed on to any of the third party data processors detailed below. Only your name will be shown on the public-facing website although if the supplied email address is linked to a Gravatar account, your Gravatar photo will also be displayed.
Your comment and it’s associated personal data will remain on this site until we see fit to either 1.) remove the comment or 2.) remove the blog post. Should you wish to have the comment and it’s associated personal data deleted, please email us here using the email address that you commented with.
If you are under 16 years of age you MUST obtain parental consent before posting a comment on our blog.
NOTE: You should avoid entering personally identifiable information to the actual comment field of any blog post comments that you submit on this website.
3.3 Contact forms and email links
Should you choose to contact us using the contact form on our Contact Me page or an email link like this one, none of the data that you supply will be stored by this website or passed to / be processed by any of the third party data processors defined in section 6.0. Instead the data will be collated into an email and sent to us over the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). Our own SMTP servers are protected by TLS (sometimes known as SSL) meaning that the email content is encrypted using SHA-2, 256-bit cryptography before being sent across the internet. The email content is then decrypted by our local computers and devices. However, not all mail servers are secured in such a way. Therefore, we would suggest that you always consider email as an insecure medium and not include personal, confidential or otherwise sensitive information within an email.
3.4 WooCommerce
Our online storefront is run by a plugin called WooCommerce.
As a company that works with users in the EU, Automattic and all of its sites, including WooCommerce.com, also need to be compliant with GDPR.
They have published Automattic and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that shares information about the regulation and their plans for implementing them for Automattic’s products and services. In short, they are currently working to add features to enhance user choice and bring more transparency to their practices around the collection, storage, and use of your data. We expect that Automattic products and services will be in compliance with GDPR requirements by May 2018.
By using our online store and the WooCommerce plugin, we collect personally identifiable information about you including your name, home and/or shipping address, contact information like a phone number and/or email address, payment information, and any other information that you might leave in comment fields. It is important to note that our website is protected by Let’s Encrypt 256-bit SSL, which means that any information you enter is encrypted before being sent to our server. You can view our SSL certificate at any time by visiting our website, clicking the green “lock” icon in the address bar, clicking on “More Information”, and viewing our certificate.
4.0 How we store your personal information
As detailed in section 3.2 above, if you submit a comment to a blog post published on this website some personal information will be stored within this website’s database. This is currently the only occasion where personal data will be stored on this website. This data is currently stored in an identifiable fashion; a limitation of the content management system that this website is build on (WordPress). In the near future we aim to change the storage of this data to a pseudonymous fashion meaning that the data would require additional processing using a separately stored ‘key’ before it could be used to identify an individual.
Pseudonymisation is a recent requirement of the GDPR which many web application developers are currently working to fully implement. We are committed to keeping it as a high priority and will implement it on this website as soon as we are able to.
5.0 About this website’s server
This website is hosted by A2 Hosting within a US data centre located near Ann Arbor, MI.
A2 Hosting’s data center is SSAE16 certified. Physical data center security measures include:
- Gated parking lot with security key entry
- Security key needed to enter data center
- Security key needed to access fully enclosed locked server rack
- Video surveillence
Full details of A2’s data center can be found here.
All traffic (transferral of files) between this website and your browser is encrypted and delivered over HTTPS.
6.0 Our third party data processors
We use a number of third parties to process personal data on our behalf. These third parties have been carefully chosen and all of them comply with the legislation set out in section 2.0. All of these third parties are based in the USA and are EU-U.S Privacy Shield compliant.
- Google (Privacy policy)
- Gravatar (Privacy policy)
7.0 Data Breaches
We will report any unlawful data breach of this website’s database or the database(s) of any of our third party data processors to any and all relevant persons and authorities within 72 hours of the breach if it is apparent that personal data stored in an identifiable manner has been stolen.
8.0 Data Controller
The data controller of this website is: Uniquely Sakura, 22 East Walnut Street, Selinsgrove, PA 17870.
9.0 Data Protection Officer
Cheryl DeSiena – Owner, Uniquely Sakura
22 East Walnut Street
Selinsgrove, PA 17870
(570) 374-7474
UniquelySakura@gmail.com
10.0 Changes to our privacy policy
This privacy policy may change from time to time inline with legislation or industry developments. We will not explicitly inform our clients or website users of these changes. Instead, we recommend that you check this page occasionally for any policy changes. Specific policy changes and updates are mentioned in the change log below.
