This notice is for this website; www.OffEscalator.com, owned by Off the Escalator Enterprises (an LLC registered in Colorado, USA). This notice governs the privacy of our website users. It explains how we control, process, handle and protect your personal data while browsing or using this website, including your rights under current laws and regulations.
The Legalese
Definitions:
- “I” or “The Website” refers to Off the Escalator Enterprises LLC
- “You” or “the user” refers to the user of the website
- GDPR means General Data Protection Act.
Processing of your personal data
Under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) we do gather some digital personal information about you, and control and process that information. We also partner with select service providers that process some of your personal information (such as for payment and shipping for books purchased directly via this website.)
Lawful basis: Consent
The reason we use this basis: You gave us consent to use your data when you bought or negotiated to buy a book from my website. Or when you checked a box to give permission to join our mailing list, take our survey, or otherwise interact with us.
We process your information in the following ways: To send you a book , allow you to take a survey, and keep you updated with special offers and news about our books or other offerings.
Data retention period: We will continue to process information associated with your purchases or completed surveys indefinitely. We will continue to process information associated with your visits to our website until 26 months after your most recent visit.
Sharing your information: For information that we directly gather or access, we do not share that information with any third parties. For information that our data processing partners gather, please see their respective privacy policies (listed below)
Why we use this legal basis: I need to pay my taxes correctly. For tax inspections, I must maintain a list of customers with name, address, and purchases (which I get from my payment processor Paypal). I must retain tax-related data for six years.
Your Rights
Under the GDPR, your rights regarding our data from you are as follows:
- the right to be informed
- the right of access
- the right to rectification
- the right to erasure*
- the right to restrict processing
- the right to data portability
- the right to object
- the right not to be subject to automated decision-making including profiling
* Erasure includes only stored data, such as your email address. It does not include information that you voluntarily supplies to us via survey responses, interviews, special requests, or other materials for which we have gathered your explicit consent that we may quote at any time in our publications (including posts to this website) as we see fit, with agreed-upon attribution.
Data Processing Partners:
Links here go to each partner’s privacy policies or other privacy-related links.
Google Analytics (website analytics): We passively gather limited anonymized information about your via Google Analytics. Specifically, we know what country you’re visiting from (unless you’re using tools to mask your location), but we do not have access to your IP address via Google Analytics.
Monster Insights (additional website analytics): We have installed and activated their EU compliance addon.
Akismet: spam comment detection software
Mailchimp (email newsletter): We gather email subscriptions primarily via Mailchimp forms, which is an opt-in method. We also explicitly offer the option for survey participants to consent to join our mailing list, through a box that they must check. We do not automatically add anyone’s email address to our mailing list. We may send a one-time invitation to join our mailing list to people who take our surveys, purchase our books, etc. Signing up is always the subscriber’s choice.
SurveyMonkey (online surveys): We use this tools to conduct original research used in our books and other publications. We do not use Surveymonkey’s tool to automatically collect IP addresses or emails
Createspace (print on demand): When you order an unsigned copy of our print books via Amazon, that order is filled by Createspace (which is owned by Amazon)
Amazon: Sales channel for unsigned copies of our print books. We receive no user information from Amazon about who buys our books or views our product listings.
Kindle ebooks: Amazon does have some visibility into how much of each Kindle ebook you reads, what you highlight and annotate in those books, etc. We have only limited aggregate insight into that data, not data on individual ebook readers.
E-Junkie: Provider of our online shopping cart for direct purchases of signed books.
Paypal: Provider of our payment processing when you purchase a book via this website’s shopping cart. Applies to all transactions, credit card and Paypal account.
What personal data we collect, and why we collect it
Website Comments
Each time a visitor leaves a comment on this site, we collect the data shown in the comments form. We also gather the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string, to help us detect spam comments.
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.
If you use the Gravatar service, when you comment here an anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to Gravatar. (See Gravatar’s privacy policy.) After we approve your comment, your Gravatar profile picture will be displayed to the public, in the context of your comment.
If you have left comments on this website, 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.
Cookies
As is common for WordPress websites, 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.
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.
How we may quote you
The Off the Escalator books, as well as our other products and promotional content, include many direct quotes from a variety of sources.
Surveys: Our biggest source of quotes are from the surveys that we offer (via SurveyMonkey). In all of our surveys, participants must specifically grant permission for us to quote from their responses in any content that we publish. We respect participants’ stated preferences for how they should be identified (information also gathered in our surveys). We ask for this permission up front, and if it is denied we disqualify that participant from completing our survey.
Forums, Social Media and Private Communication: Occasionally we will see a post or comment in an online discussion, or receive a private communication (such as an email message, that illustrates or illuminates a theme we are covering. We always ask the original author of that post, message or comment for permission to quote it, as well as how they would like their statement to be attributed. We always get that permission in writing before deciding whether/how to use that quote.
Published sources: Occasionally we showcase direct quotes from content or publicaitons available to the general public: books, websites, research reports, public blog posts, podcasts, etc. Or we may include embedded media available to the general public, such as YouTube videos. We publish this content under the Fair Use provision of the US Copyright Act.
Sponsored links, affiliate tracking & commissions
Our website may contain sponsored and affiliate links on some pages. These are served via, Amazon Affiliates, or through our own means.
Clicking on any adverts, sponsored or affiliate links may track your actions by using a cookie that our partner saves to your device. Your actions are usually recorded as a referral from our website by this cookie. We might earn a very small commission from the advertiser or advertising partner, at no cost to you, whether you make a purchase on their website or not.
We use affiliate links and sponsored partner content to help generate an income from the website, which allows us to continue our work and provide you with the best overall experience and valued information.
Email marketing messages & subscription
Under the GDPR, as specified in the legalese above, we use the consent lawful basis for anyone subscribing to our newsletter or marketing mailing list. We only collect certain data about you, as detailed in the “Processing of your personal data” above. Any email marketing messages we send are handled via Mailchimp (privacy policy linked above).
We only send our e-mail newsletter to people who have requested this via our embedded Mailchimp signup form, or who activelyelect this option on one of our surveys.
We may invite people who contact us via other means, or who purchase our books directly via OffEscalator.com, to join our mailing list — but we will not add them without permission.
Mailchimp collects this data about you:
- Email address
- Subscription time & date
You can opt out of receiving emails or ask to see the data we hold for you, or request we remove your data at any time by the following methods:
- Unsubscribe at the bottom of the email
- Contact us at aggie@offescalator.com
UPDATED MAY 2018