OVERVIEW

In order for us to operate our business and provide our services to You, it is sometimes necessary for us to collect or process information about You. In general terms, this information will take one or more of the following forms:

  1. Information that you provide to us directly, such as in the situation where you complete an online form or send us a message via our website;
  2. Information that is automatically sent to us by Your computer’s internet browser when you visit our website, such as your computer’s technical address (or ‘IP address’) or information about which particular internet browser you are using and so on;
  3. Information about how you use our website or our services, such as which pages you visit, how frequently you visit the site and so forth.

This privacy policy sets out the detail of what information we collect, as well as how that data is used and protected.

OUR COMMITMENT TO DATA PRIVACY

We are fully committed to maintaining the privacy of any information (‘personal data’) that you provide to us. Furthermore, we commit to ensuring that such data is held securely, used appropriately and only retained for as long as is necessary.

Our systems and services are designed with privacy in mind, and we operate a ‘data minimization’ principle wherever possible – that is to say that we will only ever ask you for the minimum amount of information required to provide our services efficiently; we have no desire to retain (and therefore maintain) any more information than is necessary. We aspire to comply to the fullest extent possible with applicable data protection regulations, in particular the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (‘GDPR’) and ePrivacy Directive, where applicable.

WHO WE ARE

In terms of your use of this website, We, ThoughtChange, act in the capacity of Data Controller, and should you have any questions or concerns about the data we hold about you, we can be contacted using the information below:

Data Controller: ThoughtChange
Correspondence email: Linda@thoughtchange.com

Our website address is: https://ThoughtChange.com.

DEFINITION OF ‘PERSONAL DATA’

When we refer to ‘personal data’ we mean any information that allows us to identify you personally. Obvious examples include your name, email address, postal address etc. We will always seek to gain your explicit consent to providing this information before we collect it from you, although this may not be the only legal basis on which we collect the data.

Other types of information, such as your computer’s ‘IP’ address or broad geographical location do not, generally, allow us to identify you directly. However, because in their current form, European data privacy regulations are somewhat vague in this regard, we will cover the use of such data here also.

WHO WE SHARE DATA WITH

We operate on a strict ‘need to know’ basis for all data that we work with, and that is particularly true for any personal data. The only people/organisations that are granted access to personal data are:

  • Our web hosting technology supplier (GoDaddy) who provides the physical server infrastructures that our website(s) operate on. Details here
  • WooCommerce whose services we use for payment collection and processing and for secure email relay regarding products, consultations and courses purchased. Details here
  • MailChimp, whose services we use for secure email relay services. Details here
  • Sucuri Security, whose services we use to audit and malware scan our website. Details here

 

SOCIAL MEDIA

We may use hyperlinks on the Website which will redirect you to a social network if you click on the respective link. However, when you click on a social plug-in, such as Facebook’s “Like” button, Pinterest’s “Save” button or the Google+, that particular social network’s plugin will be activated and your browser will directly connect to that provider’s servers.

This Privacy Policy does not apply to these features. Your engagement and interactions with these features are covered by the privacy policy and other policies of each social media platform.

If you do not use these buttons, none of your data will be sent to the respective social network’s plugin provider. So for example, when you click on the Facebook’s “Like” button on the Website, Facebook will receive your IP address, the browser version and screen resolution, and the operating system of the device you have used to access the Website. Settings regarding privacy protection can be found on the websites of these social networks and are not within our control.

Any comments or interactions you have with us via social media, may be seen by other people.

We also use the service of YouTube to host and share videos.  Privacy Details here

And Share This, a plugin we use to enable share buttons. Privacy Details here

 

WHAT PERSONAL DATA WE COLLECT AND WHY WE COLLECT IT

 

Website contact forms

When you complete one of the contact forms on our website, we will ask you for a number of pieces of personal information, such as your name, email address and other contact details. This is obviously required for us to respond to your request.

Any personal information beyond contact details are only used for the express purpose of an initial private session with Linda Lang.

No information will ever be used for marketing purposes.

If you do not use or submit an online form on the website, no data will be collected in that regard.

Communication

We will communicate with you primarily in the form of emails.You can opt out of receiving these communications by changing your settings on the Site and/or clicking the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of each email. Please note that even if you unsubscribe or opt-out, we may still send you Site and Services related communications (e.g., emails related to your account or the Site).

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 spam detection.

An anonymized 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. 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.

Third-party cookies are set by a third-party site separate from the site you are visiting.

There are a number of ways that you can influence how cookies are used on your particular device. Most commercial browsers (such as Chrome, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) allow you to set preferences for whether to allow or block website cookies.

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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Website Analytics

To improve your experience on our site, we may use ‘cookies’.  Cookies are an industry standard and most major web sites use them.  A cookie is a small text file that our site may place on your computer as a tool to remember your preferences.  You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser.

We use Google Analytics to better understand what people look at on our website.  When people visit our site, information about their visit, such as which pages they look at, how long they spend on the site and so on, is sent in an anonymous form to Google Analytics which is controlled by Google Inc. based in California, USA and transferred to a Google server there.

The data contains information about anyone who uses our website from your computer, and there is no way to identify individuals from the data. We use reports provided by Google Analytics to help us understand website traffic and webpage usage.

We ensure that no personally identifiable information is ever contained within the data sent to our analytics providers, and we also perform a process which partially obscures your IP address information.

As analytics information is not personal data, we do not specifically ask for your prior consent.

Google Analytics Details Here

Technical data (such as ‘IP address’)

When you visit our website, our systems will log a record of your visit in our server logs, and typically this record will include the technical ‘IP’ address that is associated with your device and the browser type and version that you are using.

Such server logs are extremely common practice, and are used to monitor technical resources, monitor high-level server activity, and importantly to detect and prevent malicious or fraudulent activity on our systems. This data can also be used, if required, to diagnose reports of technical issues. The storage of IP addresses, allow us to identify patterns of behaviour (such as repeated malicious attempts to access a system).

IP addresses, in and of themselves, do not allow us in any way to identify you as an individual, especially given that it is very common for IP addresses to be dynamically allocated by your service provider, and will therefore often routinely change.

Furthermore, we do not and will not use the content of server access logs to attempt to determine an identifiable individual. We therefore do not consider that data held within server logs falls within the scope of ‘personal data’, and accordingly we do not seek your consent to collect it.

HOW LONG WE RETAIN YOUR DATA

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also 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). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

We keep contact form entries for six months, analytics records for a year, and customer purchase records for ten years. We do not store credit card numbers.

WHAT RIGHTS YOU HAVE OVER YOUR DATA

If you have an account on this site, 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.

ACCESS TO YOUR PERSONAL DATA

In the situation where you have directly provided personal information to us (such as by completing an online form or contacting us for further information), you have a number of rights regarding the personal data that we hold:

  • You have the right to obtain from us confirmation about whether any such data is being held;
  • You have the right to require that we provide you with whatever data we are holding/processing about you, including the right for that data to be transferred to another data controller;
  • Even if you have consented to Us processing your personal data, you have the right to withdraw that permission at any time;
  • You have the right to require us to rectify any incomplete or incorrect information held about you;
  • You have the right to require us to erase the data held about you (the ‘right to be forgotten’);

In the situation where we collect personal data automatically (such as from your internet browser or via internet Cookies or other similar technologies):

  • You have the right to object to the legal basis upon which we are collecting this data, and We have an obligation to consider and respond to that objection;
  • You have the right to request the prevention of further processing of your data while your objection is considered;
  • You have the right to make a complaint to the relevant data protection authority
  • In most circumstances, you can exercise these rights without paying a fee to us.

 

CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY

This Privacy Policy may be updated from time to time for any reason. You can come back to this page and review our Privacy Policy at anytime and we will change the “Last Updated” date below. You should consult this Privacy Policy regularly for any changes.

Questions: Please email us at Linda@thoughtchange.com

This Policy was last revised:  May 24, 2018