Women’s Tennis Blog (www.womenstennisblog.com) understands the importance of protecting your personal information and undertakes to adhere to this privacy policy to ensure your personal information is safeguarded. Your use of this site constitutes an acceptance of the privacy policy presented below.
Overview
In order for us to run Women’s Tennis Blog (www.womenstennisblog.com), it is sometimes necessary for us to collect or process information about you. In general terms, this information will take one or more of the following forms:
- Information that you provide to us directly, such as in the situation where you send us a message via our website;
- Information that is automatically sent to us by your computer’s internet browser when you visit our website, such as your computer’s technical address (or ‘IP address’) or information about which particular internet browser you are using and so on;
- Information about how you use our website or our services, such as which pages you visit, how frequently you visit the site and so forth.
This privacy policy sets out the detail of what information we collect, as well as how that data is used and protected.
Our commitment to data privacy
We are fully committed to maintaining the privacy of any information (‘personal data’) that you provide to us. Furthermore, we commit to ensuring that such data is held securely, used appropriately and only retained for as long as is necessary.
Our systems and services are designed with privacy in mind, and we operate a ‘data minimization’ principle wherever possible – that is to say that we will only ever ask you for the minimum amount of information required to provide our services efficiently; we have no desire to retain (and therefore maintain) any more information than is necessary. We aspire to comply to the fullest extent possible with applicable data protection regulations, in particular the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (‘GDPR’).
Who we are
In terms of your use of this website, we, Women’s Tennis Blog, act in the capacity of Data Controller, and should you have any questions or concerns about the data we hold about you, we can be contacted using the information below:
Data Controller: Women’s Tennis Blog
Email correspondence: marija@womenstennisblog.com
Definition of ‘personal data’
When we refer to ‘personal data’ we mean any information that allows us to identify you personally. Obvious examples include your name, email address, postal address etc. We will always seek to gain your explicit consent to providing this information before we collect it from you, although this may not be the only legal basis on which we collect the data.
Other types of information, such as your computer’s ‘IP’ address or broad geographical location do not, generally, allow us to identify you directly. However, because in their current form, European data privacy regulations are somewhat vague in this regard, we will cover the use of such data here also.
Who we share data with
We operate on a strict ‘need to know’ basis for all data that we work with, and that is particularly true for any personal data. The only people/organizations that are granted access to personal data are:
- Our web hosting technology supplier (currently WP Engine hosting) who provides the physical server infrastructures that our website operates on.
- An automated spam detection service which may check through visitor comments.
We take the security of all personal data seriously. Access to personal data is strictly limited in line with our policy detailed in this ‘who we share data with section’. Access is controlled by individual user accounts, where a strong password policy is enforced.
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.
Types of data collected
Contact form, comments and subscriptions
Users who give their email addresses to us, by subscribing to our newsletter, contacting us through contact form or leaving a comment, can be sure that we will not distribute their email address to third parties without their consent. Email subscribers may unsubscribe anytime, and every email delivered will contain a link which can be used for that purpose.
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. 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 in a moderation queue.
An anonymized 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 profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Technical data (such as ‘IP address’)
When you visit our website, our systems will log a record of your visit in our server logs, and typically this record will include the technical ‘IP’ address that is associated with your device and the browser type and version that you are using.
Such server logs are extremely common practice, and are used to monitor technical resources, monitor high-level server activity, and importantly to detect and prevent malicious or fraudulent activity on our systems. This data can also be used, if required, to diagnose reports of technical issues. The storage of IP addresses allows us to identify patterns of behavior (such as repeated malicious attempts to access a system). IP addresses, in and of themselves, do not allow us in any way to identify you as an individual.
Furthermore, we do not and will not use the content of server access logs to attempt to determine an identifiable individual. We therefore do not consider that data held within server logs falls within the scope of ‘personal data’, and accordingly we do not seek your consent to collect it.
Cookies & ‘similar technologies’
We have included cookies, web beacons and similar technologies into one section because they all perform similar functions even if, from a technical perspective, they work slightly differently.
All of these technologies allow us to better understand how users are using our website. They can also be an essential part of providing certain online functionality. They are all essentially small data files placed on your computer (or other device) that allow us to tell when you have visited a particular page, or performed a particular action (such as clicking a particular button) on our website.
These technologies are used by most websites as they provide useful insight into how the services are being used, they help us improve speed, performance and security, as well as enable us to improve our personalisation of your experience.
Cookies
These are small text files placed in the memory of your browser or device when you visit a website. Cookies allow a website to recognize a particular device or browser.
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.
There are several types of cookies:
- Session cookies expire at the end of your browser session and allow us to link your actions during that particular browser session;
- Persistent cookies are stored on your device in-between browser sessions, allowing us to remember your preferences or actions across multiple sites;
- First-party cookies are set by the site you are visiting;
- Third-party cookies are set by a third party site separate from the site you are visiting.
There are a number of ways that you can influence how cookies are used on your particular device. Most commercial browsers (such as Chrome, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) allow you to set preferences for whether to allow or block website cookies.
They will also provide tools that allow you to remove any cookies that have already been set. Using the ‘Help’ functionality of your browser, or an internet search, will help you to understand how to use these features for your particular browser.
Web beacons
Small graphic images (also known as “pixel tags” or “clear GIFs”) that may be included on our sites and services that typically work in conjunction with cookies to identify our users and user behavior.
Our uses of such technologies fall into the following general categories:
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- Essential. We may use cookies, web beacons, or other similar technologies that are necessary to the operation of our site. This includes technologies that allow you access to our site; that are required to identify irregular site behavior, prevent fraudulent activity and improve security; or that allow you to make use of our functions such as saved search, or similar functions;
- Performance Related. We may use cookies, web beacons, or other similar technologies to assess the performance of our website, including as part of our analytic practices to help us understand how our visitors use our website, determine if you have interacted with our messaging, determine whether you have viewed an item or link, or to improve our website content;
- Marketing Related. We may use first-party or third-party cookies and web beacons to deliver content, including ads relevant to your interests. This includes using technologies to understand the usefulness to you of the advertisements and content that have been delivered to you, such as whether you have clicked on an advertisement. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads on this site based on a user’s prior visits. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to our users based on their visit to our site and/or other sites on the Internet. This is generally used for geotargeting purposes (showing New York tennis courts to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing tennis equipment ads to someone who frequents tennis equipment websites). Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the advertising opt-out page here.
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.
Website analytics
We use Google Analytics to better understand what people look at on our website. When people visit our site, information about their visit (such as which pages they look at, how long they spend on the site and so on) is sent in an anonymous form to Google Analytics (which is controlled by Google). The data contains information about anyone who uses our website from your computer, and there is no way to identify individuals from the data.
We have turned on Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting to understand our demographics and users’ interests. You can opt-out of Google Analytics for Display Advertising and customize Google Display Network ads using the Ads Settings. In addition, you can use the Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-on to disable tracking by Google Analytics. We will use the data provided by Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting to develop the site and content around our users’ interests or to inform our advertisers about the visitor demographics.
As analytics information is not personal data, we do not specifically ask for your prior consent.
Tennis Warehouse Affiliate Disclosure
Tennis Warehouse links on this website are affiliate links, which means that I get paid a small commission if you click on the link or make a purchase using the link, with no additional cost to you. So, if you make a purchase through a Tennis Warehouse affiliate link on this website, you’ll pay the same price whether you use the affiliate link or go directly to the Tennis Warehouse website without using an affiliate link. When you use these affiliate links, you help support this website and the content I share. I sincerely appreciate your support.
