Not So Boring Privacy Policy, Part 2—Information We Store About, and Emails We Send To, Members

In Part 1 I covered cookies and how we track readers, in aggregate but never personally, with them.

Now let’s look at what information we store about members, and what we do with that information.

What We Store

When you become a member we ask for and store the following information:

• Name
• Email address
• Username and password
• Your web site URL if you add that to a comment you make
• The pages on this site only that you visited on the path to paying for membership

What We Do With Your Information

We use this information exclusively to make your membership work, as follows:

• Send you seven emails over the several weeks after you join, explaining how to get the most out of membership.
• Send you a monthly email digest of the content we have published in the last month.
• Optionally, you can get an email every time we publish, but you need to specifically opt-in to get that.
• Send you a notification just before an annual (automated) membership renews, and two further emails if that process fails, usually due to an expired credit card.
• Send you a notification just before a non-automated membership expires.
• If we were to bring out a new product that is linked and applicable to your membership, for example a downloadable eBook (no plans), we would send you an email about that.
• We are required by the Canada Revenue Authority to collect your approximate location, but we only use that as part of our annual sales tax reporting.

What We Don’t Do With Your Information

• We don’t share your information with anyone else.
• We don’t, and won’t, hound you to buy stuff from us or anybody else.

Where We Store Your information:

• On our web server.
• At Mailchimp, our email provider. If you have no life you can read their privacy statement here.
• As we said above, your credit card information is stored at Stripe and/or PayPal. Boring privacy statements here and here.
• We store backups that contain some or all of your information at Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
• Some of your information is on our business computers and backups here at AAC World Headquarters…OK, our cabin in the woods.

Keeping Your Information Safe

You will note in the above that the places we store your information are best in class, and we use two factor authentication (2FA) to access those services—what a pain in the ass that is!

Realistically, the biggest risk to your information getting out (not financial) is probably some bad actor hacking into our site, since it’s the only place of storage that is directly internet facing.

However, we go to a lot of trouble to keep your information safe:

• We have installed the paid version of WordFence, best in class security software, on all of our web sites. Not only does Wordfence harden our site against hackers, and add 2FA for all administrators (Phyllis and me only), it also scans our sites several times a day to look for any hacks.
• We update our site as quickly as practical—gotta test this stuff first—to make sure we have all the latest security patches.

And we are careful with our own computers too:

• Our desktop computers and backups are encrypted and strong password protected.
• Our office may be a cabin in the woods, but it does have an externally monitored alarm system.

So, really, there’s nothing on our site, computers, or backups that’s probably not already out there in the wild, with the exception of the latter two. (If you think your email address is not already compromised, you are either the most security savvy user on the internet…or abusing some serious controlled substances.)

Your Right To Correct Your Information

If you need to correct the information we store about you, you can do that HERE.

Your Right To Access Your Information Stored With Us

Hopefully, one day, all the software and services we use will automate these requests, but that day is not today. So email us with “request for my information” in the subject line, and Phyllis and I will manually pull it all together…while simultaneously sticking pins in a wax effigy…of some privacy commissioner, not of you, of course.

Just kidding, but you would make our lives a lot easier if you would tell us exactly what you want to know, rather than making us dig through everything.

And if you do this to us frequently, or just for the fun of it, we will charge you a reasonable fee, like about a bazillion dollars…seriously, US$50 seems reasonable for repeated requests.

Your Right to Be Forgotten

If you let your membership expire, we keep your information on file and send you the monthly digest of new content (unless you unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of all emails) in case you wish to re-join.

Note that some of your information may remain in our backups for up to five years until said backups are cycled out. And, no, we can’t individually remove you from said backups, simply not practical—we backup every day and retain monthly backups for three years.

Also, our credit card processing and mailing companies have not, at the time of writing, made clear how we can make sure their records are purged of your information. I’m fairly sure that will come soon. When it does, we will do that too.

All that said, Phyllis and I are human and therefore fallible. And given all the different places a snippet of your information could be hiding, I can’t totally guarantee that we will get everything deleted, but we will be diligent and make our best effort.

We Don’t Share

The good news is that we have never, in all our years of doing this, knowingly shared your information with any third party, unlike many web sites, mentioning no names…oh heck, that’s boring…yeah, I’m looking at you Zuck.

Your Agreement

Oh, yeah, one more thing:

And if you are wondering why we don’t have to get your express consent to send you emails, the reason is that all of them are to help you get the best from a product you bought (membership); therefore, adding another annoying check box is not required by the Canada Anti-Spam Act, which we have complied with ever since it became law.

That’s it. If you got this far, you deserve a large adult beverage of your choice. And just imagine what I deserve after writing this…sh…stuff.