Privacy Policy

Who we are

The Croydonist is owned by Julia Woollams and Angela Martin. It is a voluntary organisation that is not for profit. Our website address is: https://www.croydonist.co.uk.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your name is visible to the public in the context of your comment. Email addresses do not appear publicly. An individual commenting has the option to save their name and email address, for future usage of the sites comment section within articles.

Media

Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

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.

Analytics

The Croydonist uses Google Analytics to monitor site activity such as how many people visit the site each month, read articles, and how often. Google Analytics works by means of tracking code that is added to the pages of a website. Every user is registered with a unique ID, so that Google Analytics can provide website owners with insight into how many unique visitors there are to the site, for example, and how many users return.

With Google Analytics, one can survey how often any single user has visited the website, what pages they visited, for how long they stayed and how they interacted with the site. Personal details are not stored. Users are anonymous and can only be identified by the user ID.

To get a general picture of what data Google is gathering, you may take a look at Google’s privacy policy.

Who we share your data with

The Croydonist does not share data with any third parties nor does our website provider, WordPress.

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.

If you are an opted-in subscriber to the Croydonist newsletter, we hold your email address (and name, if you added your name in the subscription process) so that we can send you monthly newsletters giving you a round-up of our published articles. Occasionally we may send you a newsletter about something we think you might like to be aware of, such as local events, in addition to our monthly round-ups.

You can unsubscribe from this list or update your subscription preferences at any time using this link or the link at the bottom of our newsletters. Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you are subscribed to our newsletter, 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. Users subscribing to our newsletter will have their email address (and name if supplied in the subscription process) stored in our mailing list database which is hosted by Mailchimp. Mailchimp is an email newsletter provider and does not have rights to use any data stored within the Croydonist’s mailing list for marketing purposes.

Our contact information

To contact the Croydonist please email info@croydonist.co.uk – to unsubscribe from newsletters use this link.

Additional information

How we protect your data

Subscriber email addresses (and names if supplied in the subscription process) are stored in our database with Mailchimp. For details on Mailchimp security, please click here.

What data breach procedures we have in place

Our data is stored with Mailchimp. Should Mailchimp be subject to a breach of security, they will notify us as soon as possible and in turn we will notify our subscribers. For details on security breach measures, please see article 13 in the Mailchimp privacy policy.