Privacy Policy

Who I am

My website address is: http://tendingmygarden.com.

My name is Theresa and I share my almost 41 years of gardening knowledge with readers of TendingMyGarden.com

You may contact me at Theresa@tendingmygarden.com

My site’s content management system is Word Press.

What personal data is collected

When you subscribe to my posts and/or emails your name and email will show on my subscriber list. It is the only information about you that I personally have access to.

I guard your privacy and do not share or rent your name or email address.

No one has access to this information but me and the service delivering the email.

Visitors who have opted in to my emails can opt out of receiving these emails at any time by clicking the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of my messages. All information (your name and email) will then be deleted from my subscriber list.

If you make a purchase I will keep your address (along with your name) on file indefinitely on my computer. Since purchases are through PayPal, their privacy policy will apply as well and can be checked on their website.

Google Analytics

I use Google Analytics for WordPress.
This gives me analytic information such as how many people read my site, what posts are read the most, and where readers are in the world. It helps me to improve your experience of tendingmygarden.com.

Locations in the world are obtained through the IP address but all data received does NOT personally identify an individual.

Information is obtained by the use of cookies. By continuing to use and benefit from my website, consent to place these cookies will be assumed and cookies will be placed.

Comments:

What personal data Word Press (content management system) collects and why WP collects it:

When readers have left a comment in the past their name and email address (and naturally theIP address) was stored in a “cookie” in the commenter’s browser automatically. With the new law, Word Press has added a checkbox where a user must opt in to have the cookie stored so they’ll be recognized next time.

These cookies will last for one year.

(At this writing, I don’t see this information when I put up the site as a visitor and am trying to get that fixed.)

If you use a Gravatar (profile picture) in the comments an anonymized (made anonymous) “string” is created from your email address and may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. Then, after your comment is approved, your profile picture is visible.

(The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.)
How long your data is retained

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely.
What rights you have over your data

If you have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data the site holds 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.

Note, that I’ve never done this, so it might take me a while to figure out how to do it. I’m assuming the personal data would be your name, email and your comment because that’s all I’ve ever seen on my site.
Spam detection

All visitor comments are checked through Akismet, the automated spam detection service. This is done for me automatically so I won’t have hundreds of spam comments.

Akismet (the spam detection service) states that they “collect information about visitors who comment on Sites that use our Akismet anti-spam service. The information we collect depends on how the User sets up Akismet for the Site, but typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself).”
Media

Although readers don’t upload images to my website, I occasionally receive pictures from readers that I will write about and use on TMG.

In the process of trying to understand the “new rules” I read that if images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included are used, a visitor to the site could download and extract the location data from the images. Then I Googled to see what EXIF GPS was and learned that almost all photos taken with digital cameras, smartphones and tablets have this type of data embedded.
Embedded content from other websites

The only way I can think of that this applies to my site is when I give you links to other articles or websites.

And although I feel sure it’s obvious, I’m suppose to let you know that if you go to another website via a link on TMG, their privacy policy will apply rather than mine.