Privacy Policy

Plain English

Our website address is: https://dharma.online.

You can contact us anytime with concerns regarding privacy, data security, or any other questions, comments, or feedback at alaya@dharma.online. Please let us know at any time if you wish your data deleted.

We hate spam. We don’t much care for intrusive advertising. We aren’t too comfortable with constantly being watched as we go about our lives. And we have a certain limited understanding about karma. So of course we try to not do unto others (that’s you) what we don’t want to experience ourselves.

On the other handwe are running a website. In the 21st century. Which means we are using available technology. As up-to-date as possible, in order to ensure both actual functioning and security. That means cookies will be used. That means IP-addresses will be checked. (Cookies are stored in the browser you are using, and on your own device. You can completely disable cookies in your browser settings. However, doing that might break any number of sites, so do that at your own risk. In most browsers you can limit access to cookies to the site that has created them, which may be a good idea anyway.)

And in order to be able to learn and develop, we are using google analytics, which will transmit anonymized usage data to google’s servers. We have to assume that google are afraid enough of the huge penalties possible under GDPR to keep their noses clean. Maybe cleaner than they have so far.

For the time being we’ve removed all social media sharing functions because it’s not quite clear how much data is being sent to Facebook & co without anyone noticing. We still hope you will share, and of course you can use your browsers’ built-in sharing features. We may bring back the integrated sharing at a later time once it is clearer what it entails.

If you use a contact form to contact us, we will of course retain your data and use it to correspond with you.

If you use a comment form, anything you enter there will be stored and used, but only within the context of this website. We may use the information to contact you directly if necessary. And of course we may need to process inputs in order to prevent spam and attacks on our site.

If you register for a membership, of course your data needs to be stored, and we need to process your data in a way that enables us to get in touch with you. For that we may use third-party mailing list services like MailChimp.com, who are themselves GDPR compliant.

If you buy something or subscribe to a paid service, etc., we are of course saving the relevant data and will use it to get in touch with you as needed.

That’s about the size of it. Below is some more legalese as variously recommended. The text below hasn’t been customized for this site (as we hardly have enough budget to keep the lights on), so it may be much wider in scope and partially irrelevant. Please kindly read It in the spirit of the above.

And of course, contact us any time with any feedback, questions, comments, complaints, etc..

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 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.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. 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.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

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

Your IP-Address along with pages you visit etc., is shared with google analytics in order to gather statistical information about user behavior, so we can improve our website over time.

Social Media Sharing

If you explicitly use any of the social media sharing functions on this website, the data necessary to enable that sharing will be shared with the social media service you select.

Who we share your data with

Beyond the automatic sharing of analytics and social media sharing data and the other items described above we do not share your data with third parties.

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 in a moderation queue.

For users that 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 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.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

We do not store or share your contact information beyond the scope described above.

How we protect your data

We are using best-practice Internet security, both on the hosting level (cPanel brute force protection) and on the wordpress level (Wordfence) in order to keep all data on this site safe, including yours.