The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

Privacy Policy—Information We Store About, and Emails We Send To, Non-Members

Applicability

This privacy policy applies to those of you who sign up for our Get To Know Us emails but have not yet joined as members.

What We Store

  • Your email address.
  • Your first name, but only if you decide to enter it.
  • A record of which emails from us you have opened and what links in those emails you have clicked on.
  • Where you physically were when you subscribed.

What We Do With Your Information

So that you can get to know us and evaluate membership, we will send the following information:

  • Three emails explaining how to get the most from our free content, including the 10 free Online Book chapters.
  • A short description of each new article we publish.
  • A monthly digest of new articles.
  • Three emails explaining what members get.
  • We run reports to measure what emails are most popular.

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

  • At Mailchimp, our email provider. If you have no life you can read their privacy statement 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.
  • On our web server.

Keeping Your Information Safe

You will note in the above that the places we store your information are generally considered 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 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:

  • Our web sites are on a separate area from any other company’s, which significantly improves security over the shared servers that most small web sites use.
  • 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 have set up a special separate testing server for any support technicians that need access to our software, that has no subscriber information on it.
  • 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.

Being Realistic

Before we move on, a key point in all of this: there’s nothing on our site, computers, or backups that’s probably not already out there in the wild. (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 by clicking a link at the bottom of any, and every, email you receive from us.

Your Right To Access Your Information Stored With Us

You can also see exactly what we have on file by clicking the same link.

Your Right to Be Forgotten

You can unsubscribe from our emails at any time by clicking on the “unsubscribe” link on any and every email we send you.

However, when you do that Mailchimp keeps your email address on file. Nothing sinister here. The reason is this makes sure that we can’t, inadvertently, re-subscribe you.

And, at the time of writing, I can’t find any way for you to delete all of your information from Mailchimp.

That said, if you really want that done, send us an email with “forget me” in the subject line and we will lean on Mailchimp to get that done and also delete your information from our web server.

Note that some of your information may remain in our backups for up to two years until said backups are cycled out. And, no, we can’t individually remove you from said backups, simply not practical.

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.

These last two points bring to the fore an important reality. Any company that guarantees, without any caveats, to totally and immediately forget your information, is almost certainly bullshitting you.

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:

When you subscribe to get to know us, and double opt in, you are specifically agreeing to these terms.

Cookies

You should also read our Cookies policy.