This policy should be read in conjunction with our Terms of Service and Advertising Policy. Please see sections 15 & 16 of our Terms of Service for jurisdiction and full contact information.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
We may process Personal Data in any of the following cases:
- You have given your consent for one or more specific purposes as described below;
- The provision of such Data is necessary to carry out contractual obligations;
- Processing is necessary for legal compliance.
Comments
When you leave a comment on this website we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also your IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymised string created from your e-mail address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. After approval of your comment, your associated Gravatar profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. We use Gravatar for this purpose.
Story Submissions
We collect contact details (name and email address) for transactional purposes and social media information for promotional purposes (should your submission be successful), as well as IP address to help us with spam and abuse. Unless you opt to receive further information from us, we will contact you only in regards to your submission. We use Paperform to collect information and either Tinyletter or our in-house newsletter software (using Mailgun for delivery) to contact you with publication and promotion information. We may use the Gravatar service (see Comments above for further details) to display your avatar image associated with your email address to help promote you as an author. Oh, and we send a follow-up survey to authors after publication, using SurveyMonkey.
Contact forms
We collect contact details (name and email address) for transactional purposes, as well as IP address to help us with spam and abuse. Unless you opt to receive further information from us, we will contact you only in regards to your submission. We use Paperform for this purpose.
Newsletters
If you wish to opt in to our newsletter, we collect your first name and email address, as well as IP address to help us with spam and abuse. We also ask you what information you’d like to receive from us. There are ‘unsubscribe’ and ‘change preferences’ links in the footer of every email we send out. We use Tinyletter or in-house software to send our newsletters and Mailgun for email delivery.
Analytics and IP address
We use anonymised IP tracking to record your visits to this website and see what content is popular and how people use this website. We use Google Analytics for this purpose and you may opt out here. We do record the IP address and user agent of all website actions (e.g. leaving a comment, making a purchase, unauthorised logins) to help us protect our website against spammers and hackers. Our social media sharing solution does not use cookies, tracking scripts, or store any user data.
Donations and Patreon
Should you wish to add to our tip jar, we use Stripe for payment processing and no credit card or user information touches our server. We use Stripe for this purpose. We embed a Patreon badge on our website to help us ask for donations.
Events
We use a third party service, Eventbrite, to offer tickets to our local workshops, or an in-house solution using Stripe (see ‘Donations’ section, above). We may use Facebook and Twitter advertising to drive sales and if so, our sales page will contain code for us to track how successful our ads are. Information on opting out can be found on Twitter and Facebook.
Other Data Considerations
We host this website on Namecheap servers and use Cloudflare to help us serve this website to you quickly. We backup this website in encrypted form to Amazon S3 servers in the EU, and the database to Google servers. We use a combination of Zapier, Google sheets and Airtable to help us track our submissions, Patreon supporters and conduct our business. We process information on a Windows 10 PC or laptop, and back files up to Onedrive. We also use Jetpack to protect our website against unauthorised access.
Cookies
Okay, so cookies should be delicious but these ones are a bit dry and crispy. There may even be a bit of sofa fluff stuck on, if you’re really unlucky.
EscapedInk.com uses cookies for functionality, to remember settings during and between your visits and help us make the site better.
- Cookie banner: if you click okay, it leaves a cookie so you don’t see the message again unless you delete your browser cookies. Clever, huh?
- Google analytics (anonymised IP): We don’t know who you are, but we like that you’re visiting. We get information such as what pages you’ve visited and the order you clicked on things. It helps us make the site better as well as giving us an ego boost. We have enabled Demographics and Interest Reports, which requires Google’s Advertising features and this may set additional cookies.
- Comments: click the box for the browser to remember your details, and it’ll remember the name, email address (and if relevant) website URL that you typed in… these cookies last for one year.
- Popups: if we use a popup to show you something particularly awesome and you click the ‘close’ link, we’ll use a cookie so we don’t bug you by showing you the same thing too often.
- Country code: When you visit EscapedInk, we may set a cookie that records the country you’re visiting from. It helps us send you to the right website for links wherever possible, rather than you roll your eyes and ask why you’re in the US and being sent to a UK site. The cookie disappears when you close your browser.
- Voting: when you give a story a star rating, we set a cookie to remember that setting.
- Remember me: anytime you choose to tick a ‘remember me’ box, a cookie will be set. For example, if you leave a comment on our site you may opt in to saving your name, e-mail 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 we’ve forgotten anything, please contact us to let us know.
If you want to turn cookies off or delete them, use your favourite search engine and you’ll find the right instructions for your browser. It may stop websites from working as you expect or mean you have to type in your information again.
We do not collect and personally identifiable permission without your express consent and do not pass it on unless legally required to.
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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Who we share your data with
We do not share your data other than with the services described above and for the purposes described. We may use additional personnel to help us provide services on this website (e.g. administration, editing or marketing).
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. 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 retain contact and submission information indefinitely, so we can respond more quickly to enquiries, administer copyright issues and carry out our business.
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. Our website is hosted on servers in the US and a copy of the publicly accessible site may be used worldwide for speed of access to the end user. This copy will not include Personal Data other than your website address, social media accounts and name as provided by yourself.
Additional information
How we protect your data
We take appropriate security measures to prevent unauthorised access, disclosure or modification to any data collected. We administer Escaped Ink through Windows 10 PCs, laptop or Android-based smartphone. All technology is password protected and has active virus scanners in place, as well as scheduled anti-virus and anti-malware scans. This website uses an SSL certificate to encrypt your data and can be verified by the padlock in the address bar of your browser.
Policy last updated: 18 May 2019
Changelog:
03 May 2019 – add in conversion tracking information to Events section
18 May 2019 – added Mailchimp to newsletter section
18 Sept 2019 – moved relevant services in ‘other data considerations’ to better placement; removed unused services and added in new services; clarified IP address use.
