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Who we are
Our website address is: http://thebellephant.com.
As literally a one woman sometimes a two person band, we have no interest in misusing any data you provide and are committed to protecting your privacy. We only collect and store data to provide you with the best services possible. Right now, that’s just blogs!
If you want to get in touch about any of the following, drop us an email at shika@thebellephant.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
When visitors like yourself, leave lovely 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. You’d be surprised how many bots try to comment on our posts with special deals for bed posts and other nonsense.
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. 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 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 – we really don’t need to know where you are! Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website so let’s not encourage any stalking.
Contact forms
When you fill in a contact form, you will be asked to provide your name and email address along with your message. We will only use this information to contact you back in reply to your message. Of course, if you decide you no longer want to be contacted back and your message was a spur of the moment mistake just let us know and we’ll stop communications.
Cookies
Cookies are fragments of data sent through the web server and stored in your hard drive. They can’t read the files stored in your computer, nor can they gather information. Cookies are meant to make browsing easier for you by monitoring traffic to see which pages you have visited. This makes it easier for you to download the information the next time you look at our pages. It is possible to block Cookies on your browser. Cookies are however pretty essential in the running of the majority of sites. Blocking them may affect you’re ability to actually access site content – i.e. websites may no longer work.
If you leave a comment on our site you may be able 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 – we like to save you the work. These cookies will last for one year.
Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a your interests gauged by prior visits to other websites. Google’s use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to you on our site based on your visit to our sites and/or other sites on the internet.
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 your data, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content. This includes tracing your interactions with embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics which transmits website traffic data to its servers. It does to not store any data that identifies. It also does not associate your IP with other personal details it holds about you. We use Google Analytics reports to understand what content you really appreciate. This way we can write more about what you like! It also gives us an insight into cool stats about our audience like how many visitors we’ve had.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
What rights you have over your data
You can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you. This includes any data you have provided to us e.g. when you leave a comment. 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.
Use and disclosure of Anonymous Information
All data that is not personal (anonymous) including (but not limited to) questions, comments, ideas and suggestions will be considered non-confidential and owned by us. We will not obtain your consent before posting collected data on our website, or sharing it.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
