Updated March 28, 2020
Who Owns this Site
This blog is the brainchild of Christina D. Frangiosa – an attorney practicing in the Philadelphia area since 1997 – and was launched in April 2009. I have been the principal (and perhaps the sole) author since its inception, and it has followed with me even though I changed my employment several times over the years.
This blog was originally published on Blogger, but I migrated it to WordPress in late 2014 where it currently lives (https://privacyandiplawblog.com) and stopped updating the Blogger site in 2016. You can still see the older posts on Blogger (formatted just the way they were originally intended), but that site is no longer monitored.
Nothing in this blog constitutes legal advice. Instead, it is merely an analysis of some of the issues raised by particular events or statutory developments in the trademark, copyright, privacy, computer & internet law fields. If you have particular concerns that you wish to have addressed, please contact a lawyer directly so that your specific circumstances can be evaluated.
Personal Data Collected and Why
Comments
I have turned off the comments feature on this blog – it is not intended to be interactive. If you have specific comments about my posts or want to engage in a discussion, then please email me at the email address associated with this site: [email protected] or send me an email through the Contact Us page.
To the extent you are able to find any older versions of the comment features previously available on this site (which might be buried in older posts), the following details apply:
Data Used: Commenter’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided via the comment form), timestamp, and IP address. Additionally, a jetpack.wordpress.com IFrame receives the following data: WordPress.com blog ID attached to the site, ID of the post on which the comment is being submitted, commenter’s local user ID (if available), commenter’s local username (if available), commenter’s site URL (if available), MD5 hash of the commenter’s email address (if available), and the comment content. If Akismet (also owned by Automattic) is enabled on the site, the following information is sent to the service for the sole purpose of spam checking: commenter’s name, email address, site URL, IP address, and user agent.
Activity Tracked: The comment author’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided during the comment submission) are stored in cookies. Learn more about these cookies.
Data Synced (?): All data and metadata (see above) associated with comments. This includes the status of the comment and, if Akismet is enabled on the site, whether or not it was classified as spam by Akismet.
Contact Form
There is a Contact Us page on this site, which collects the name and email address you provide, as well as the subject line and any narrative comments you elect to provide. Akismet is enabled on this site – thus, the contact form submission data — IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message — is submitted to the Akismet service (also owned by Automattic) for the sole purpose of spam checking. The actual submission data is stored in the database of the site on which it was submitted and is emailed directly to the owner of the form (i.e. the site author who published the page on which the contact form resides – at [email protected]). This email will include the submitter’s IP address, timestamp, name, email address, website, and message.
Social Media Sharing
When official sharing buttons are active on the site, each button loads content directly from its service in order to display the button as well as information and tools for the sharing party. As a result, each service can in turn collect information about the sharing party. When a non-official Facebook or a Pinterest sharing button is active on the site, information such as the sharing party’s IP address as well as the page URL will be available for each service, so sharing counts can be displayed next to the button. When sharing content via email (this option is only available if Akismet is active on the site), the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if the user is logged in, this information will be pulled directly from their account), IP address (for spam checking), user agent (for spam checking), and email body/content. This content will be sent to Akismet (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed. Additionally, if reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared with that service. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.
Email Subscriptions
You may opt-in to subscribe to this blog by email. To do so, you must provide your email address to which you want future blog posts to be sent. You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking the “Unsubscribe” link in the email you receive.
Data Used: To initiate and process subscriptions, the following information is used: subscriber’s email address and the ID of the post or comment (depending on the specific subscription being processed). In the event of a new subscription being initiated, we also collect some basic server data, including all of the subscribing user’s HTTP request headers, the IP address from which the subscribing user is viewing the page, and the URI which was given in order to access the page (REQUEST_URI and DOCUMENT_URI). This server data used for the exclusive purpose of monitoring and preventing abuse and spam.
Activity Tracked: Functionality cookies are set for a duration of 347 days to remember a visitor’s blog and post subscription choices if, in fact, they have an active subscription.
WordPress.com Stats
Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Important: The site owner does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but he/she cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Stats logs — containing visitor IP addresses and WordPress.com usernames (if available) — are retained by Automattic for 28 days and are used for the sole purpose of powering this feature.
Activity Tracked: Post and page views, video plays (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms, and country. When this module is enabled, Jetpack also tracks performance on each page load that includes the JavaScript file used for tracking stats. This is exclusively for aggregate performance tracking across Jetpack sites in order to make sure that our plugin and code is not causing performance issues. This includes the tracking of page load times and resource loading duration (image files, JavaScript files, CSS files, etc.). The site owner has the ability to force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.
Cookies
This site uses cookies, managed through the Automattic plugin from JetPack (https://automattic.com/cookies).
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 were to visit 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
This site uses Jetpack, Google Analytics and WordPress Analytics. To opt out of analytics tracking, please review these providers’ privacy policies.
By default, the site administrator is informed that WordPress does not collect any analytics data. However, many web hosting accounts collect some anonymous analytics data – for reference, this site is hosted by GoDaddy and you can view their privacy policy here: https://www.godaddy.com/agreements/showdoc.
How long we retain your data
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 indefinitely in a moderation queue.
For users who 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.
What rights you have over your data
If you 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. To the extent the comments are actually visible on this site, please send the site owner an email at [email protected] to request deletion. To the extent you believe you have submitted a comment but cannot see it visibly on this site, see WordPress’s Privacy Policy for more details and the necessary contact information to request its removal.