Why plain English?

Well, out of respect for your peace of mind, we are opting for complete transparency. But with that said, here’s a rundown on what information we collect, how we protect it and what (if anything) we use it for and do with it–without all the legal speak.

Meanwhile, rest assured, nothing nefarious is going on with any information we collect. Everything is in place to support you with free information to educate you;  lead you to an inquiry on working with us; or re-target visitors in the hopes of those first two points.

Again, CLICK HERE for the Privacy Policy in ‘legal speak’ and the nitty gritty details including information you won’t understand and/or possibly care about. However for the purposes of the every day person, here’s the 411:

Who are we?

Who are we? Honestly we struggle with this on a continual basis (but that is an issue for another day), but trust me when I say that Webs By Amy, LLC works with small businesses, solopreneurs, and Direct Sellers on every aspect of set up, development, and maintenance of a WordPress website and/or blog. We offer premium hosting and exceptional support as well as free blog articles which may contain tutorials. I’ve been struggling with a way cooler way to put that, but that’s it in a nutshell.

We are located in lovely southern Chester County, Pennsylvania (where our local market has dedicated buggy parking for the Amish) at: 1115 Thunder Hill Road, Lincoln University, PA 19352;. We can be contacted via email at support@websbyamy.com.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it:

There are a few ways we collect your personal data including but not limited to: optin form, contact form, on-site chat, support ticket system, and finally clients working with us will submit requested information to aid us in creating a customized website.

Examples of what we ask for and what we do with it:

• Contact Forms: When you fill out a contact form and/or open a support ticket, you will be asked for contact information needed to aid you with your request and contact you back. At a minimum we need your name, email and a reason. We understand that this does NOT add you to our mailing list or authorize us to use this to further solicit you. In fact, for the most part if you don’t do business with us, we pretty much forget you (sorry, no offense!). There are other places on the site to optin to keep in touch.
• New Project Inquiry: The questionnaire containing your name, email, website needs, etc., including your IP address is collected and stored locally on my site (via secure server) as well as printed out for use in comprehending the scope of a project and its potential cost. If a client decides to go forward, it is kept through the end of the project life; if a client does not decide to go forward, it is deleted. This information is not used for any additional promotion reasons, you are not added to our mailing list.
• Chat: You are asked for your name and email to interact with us via our site Chat box, other information such as IP address, browser and operating system is also collected. This is for the purpose of screening out dingbats who are just spamming us from those who have an intelligent question. Again, this information is not shared or sold, it is simply a first line of defense deterrent for persons who badly need a hobby.  
• Subscribe: you can subscribe to receive my articles (blog posts) automatically delivered to your inbox and further you can opt in to my newsletter. I’m a slacker about blogging at this point and I’ve only sent newsletter to my clients so far, but here’s to hoping, right? You can opt out at any time by clicking opt out at the bottom of all correspondence.
• Comments on blog posts— when you leave comments on the site’s articles WordPress collects the data shown in the comments form, and also the your IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. You can use the contact form on this site to request any information that we have collected about you from your interaction with this site and request for it’s removal.
  
• IP Address requirement for server access – for clients on our hosting, your IP address is required to securely access our dedicated server. No one who is not expressly whitelisted is able to access their hosting cPanel. This is a security measure that protects everyone. If you aren’t a hosting client, this doesn’t affect you.

Cookies

Cookies are small text files that your Internet browser downloads and stores on your computer. They are used to improve our website and services. In most cases these are so-called “session cookies” that are deleted once you leave our website. To an extent, however, these cookies also pass along information used to automatically recognize you.

You can disable cookie collection for all sites (not just this one) right from whatever browser you are using. And in the case of WebsByAmy.com, there will be no difference in your user experience, so have at it. You can find how to disable cookie tracking using Google search and typing in : ‘block all cookie collection while browsing’ and you’ll look for the answer by the browser you use (ex., Chrome, Safari, etc.).

Tracking & Cookies (Why and for how long…)

• Google Analytics – We have analytics running on our site. We haven’t figured out the whole analytics thing yet, but real-time analytics are fun to watch (but I digress). Google tracks what pages are being found in searches and what articles are popular and we use it to improve our site (including clean it up when it appears random outdated articles suddenly appear to become popular, grrr…). We’ve taken steps to anonymize your IP address, however, Google does still track information about your browser and operating system. I suspect Google knows a LOT about ALL of us that has nothing to do with our site.
• Facebook Pixel – if you visit the site while logged into Facebook, they are tracking your behavior on the site for the purposes of understanding your interests and will allow us to retarget you if we ever actually get a budget to advertise. Since their Cambridge Analytica nighmare, they’ve been a bit more transparent about letting you remove information specific to this type of interest category tracking directly from your Facebook account. At the time of this writing, use this link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/  That does of course only works until you visit another site, so figure on doing this A LOT (sorry, remember that I’m just the bearer of the news).
• AWSTATS – my hosting includes static tracking software that gives me reports on my traffic broken down in various ways (by gross # of hits, by page, by time, by country, etc.). I pretty much use it to determine history of times of the day that traffic is highest for the best times to post (or to perform maintenance). At this time Awstats includes IP addresses for the top visitors. I’ll update this in the future when it allows for anonymizing the IP address, however there is no other personally identifying information collected. And IP address is ONLY considered personally identifying in the EU.
• Commenting – if you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. It also records your IP address. 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.
• Ticket System Login – 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.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (ex., YouTube videos). Embedded content from this and other websites behave in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website–especially if you are logged in to it.

These websites (again for example, YouTube or Facebook) may collect (face it–they DO 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 (which you probably are…).

Who we share your data with…

We don’t share analytics with anyone. We use this information internally for the purchases of seeing where people are going on our site to determine what is popular and you may wish to see more of.

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. We also use it to block spammers.

For users that register on our website (ex., the support ticket system), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. You can see, edit, or delete your personal information at any time (except you cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Persons who have subscribed to my articles via Feedburner are retained for an indefinite period of time and are only receiving new article notifications, they aren’t added to my new mailing list.

My new subscription form (in my sidebar requires you to choose what you want to be included in (ex., you can optin for articles only or articles and newsletters, etc.) and other information may be asked for to improve your user experience and customize what you are offered. You can opt out at any time.

Other forms on my site (Contact form, Project Inquiry, etc.) are retained only for the amount of time required to support the inquirer and then are deleted.

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. Use my contact form to request this.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Other than that, our mailing list requests are stored in our customer relationship manager which is currently GetResponse. Contact forms and requests for information are emailed directly to us and the content is stored on our server until our business with you is finished.

How we protect your data

For security reasons www.WebsByAmy.com uses SSL encryption procedures via HTTPS. We also have security plugins running and regular security scanning in place.

What data breach procedures we have in place

If there is a breach of security with our site or any of our 3rd party services that affect your information, we will contact you via email directly within 7 days.

What third parties we receive data from

As stated above in more details, the services we use that may collect information about you are:

• Google Analytics
• Facebook Pixel
• TawkTo Chat
• Gravity Forms
• Our payment processors such as: Paypal, Stripe & Braintree (a Paypal company)

These services share this information only with us (okay, we don’t really trust Facebook…).

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

Let’s see… the optin to our articles or newsletters automatically tag you and add you to interest lists based on what you’ve checked off at the time of optin. And you can opt out at any time.

Other form/data collection is sent to us for manual actions (i.e., our contact form, chat box, request for information for website, etc.) and we will use it to interact with you further.

Anything else?

Well, I’m sure I forgot something, so I’ll be updating this. Meanwhile, check out my ‘legal speak’ Privacy Policy here.