Privacy and Legal Disclosure
First off, who we are, and that’s H. J. Buell, which you’re hopefully aware of. With our introductions out of the way, let’s get into the legalese of this cumbersome website necessity known as a privacy policy.
Privacy policies are like parachute guarantees. They’re useless until you need them, and then, if they don’t work, you’re out of luck. In fact, most privacy policies are little more than double standards that are rarely observed, and even less frequently enforced. Our Brave New World has little need of them, it seems.
Because of that, we’ve decided not to collect any information at all from site visitors. Instead, we created a website where you can view content, and supported it with a variety of social media. This way your privacy is never at risk, because you aren’t required to share anything with us. In other words, since you’re never in the airplane, you won’t need a parachute – or a guarantee.
That said, we do use third party tools to enhance your visits, see which posts are being clicked on the most, or just improve the overall site experience. Some of the services and tools we use are, in which case we’re grateful for your use of the link. We don’t use Google Adsense, but just in case, we’ve thrown a link to them in here too.
But other things we do use are tools help us make the site better for our visitors. These include things like Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools. Since we’re not programmers or lawyers, we can’t really tell you exactly how any of them work, or what data they collect, but your use of this site is subject to the best practices of these companies.
In other words, even though we use these services ourselves, we can’t vouch for these companies outside of our own experiences with them. We encourage you to review their respective privacy policies if you have any concerns. We’re pretty sure most of them collect user information, and just like no one hands out parachutes on commercial airliners, that’s just the way the internet works.
Our job is writing, so that’s what we’re focused on – bringing you interesting content that’s worth reading, and hopefully sharing. The rest of this privacy policy is just here because the lawyers said it needed to be. You can skip it if you’re like us. If not, read on – just make sure to pause often so your eyes don’t bleed.
Lastly, some of this privacy policy is a bit repetitious. That’s not our fault (looking at you lawyers, politicians, and regulatory bodies). So when you see repetition, we hate it too. The short version of this privacy policy is that we’re genuine and have honest goals and intentions. We don’t want to involve ourselves in your private matters, and we don’t want you in ours. That simple. Enjoy the read!
General
Your privacy is important to us. This privacy policy is intended to give you confidence in the privacy and security of the personal information we obtain from you whether you are purchasing books from H. J. Buell, reading about product reviews, or simply browsing the site. Even though we don’t collect your personal information, some of the third-party applications and sites we use may. Please note that we are not responsible for any use of your personal information you provide to third-party applications or websites that may be accessed via any links or products on this or other websites. We recommend that you review the privacy policy of any third-party applications or websites if you have concerns. One such example is purchasing the books of H. J. Buell through third party vendors or sponsors.
Collection of Information
When you order books from H. J. Buell, or other products or items on our websites, you may be asked for personally identifiable information such as your name, address, date of birth, email address, or telephone number. By providing this information you consent to it being used in the manner described in this policy, or the governing policy of the site you provide that information to. In most cases you may withdraw this consent at any time by emailing or sending a letter to the sites in question at the information listed in their privacy policies. Cookie information, pages you have visited, and your IP address may also be recorded by third parties from your browser as set out in this policy.
Use of Performance Data
H. J. Buell may use site performance data provided to us by third parties, including performance statistics. We may use such performance data in any way, including, but not limited to, using, editing, altering, reproducing, publishing and/or distributing the performance data for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, provided that such performance data is stripped of all personally identifiable information.
Use of Personal Information
In some cases, we may use your personal information to allow us to process your book orders that require personalized details, autographs, notes, or other specific requests you may make and we may agree to. In addition to this, we also may occasionally send you details or updates on our future publications, holiday cards, or other offers that we think may be of interest to you. If you do not wish to receive such information, please let us know, and we’ll make sure you don’t receive any further correspondence from us.
Disclosure of Information
In certain cases, we may provide information about you to our employees and agents in order to administer any accounts, products, or services provided to you by H. J. Buell, such as filling a book order if processed by us, or handling a web site, domain, or hosting inquiry. We will not disclose your personal information to any third party unless you have consented to such disclosure, or where we are required to do so by law.
Should you breach our terms and conditions or terms of use as concerns specific products, or if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, you agree that we may disclose your information to a relevant authority. This may include exchanging information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction. Any disclosure of personal information will be strictly controlled and made fully in accordance with current U.S. or other applicable law.
Additionally, there are times where we may post a reference, comment, or other post to a service or other item we have used or found to be useful. In such cases these items will have an affiliate link, and a description of the offering, what we liked about it, and why we have posted that information. This is solely intended to be a value added service, with the affiliate link listed as a small compensation in return for the time and effort we put into testing and reviewing a particular product or service.
Your use of such links may require you to provide information to a merchant or vendor, subject to their policies. While we don’t list links to affiliates that are known to be untrustworthy, we do encourage you to be aware of third party privacy policies.
Cookies
Cookies are small data files that a website you visit may save on your computer or handheld device that usually includes an anonymous unique identifier. Our website does not use cookies to track your personal information. Some of the advertisements or external links may use cookies for user authentication, keeping track of your preferences, promotional campaigns, or tracking audience size and traffic patterns, and in certain other cases. For our email campaigns, we may include small graphic images to determine whether the messages were opened and the links were viewed, but again they don’t tell us who opened them, just that they were opened or read (that way we know if it’s worth sending out a newsletter once a week or once a year).
Third-party advertisers may also create and access cookies, which will be subject to their privacy policies – we accept no responsibility or liability for the use of such third parties’ cookies. If you do not wish cookies to be placed on your PC or handheld device, they can be disabled in your web browser. The option to do so is normally found in your browser’s “security settings” section. Please note that permanently disabling cookies in your browser may hinder your use of other websites and interactive services.
Also, even though we don’t allow comments, but to make sure we get all of the legal boxes checked…
We hen 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.
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 visit our login page, 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.
Security
All security on our websites is treated seriously. Where applicable, we undertake security steps, including use of SSL technology on our back-end systems, for any customer account information and to protect data transmissions. However, this is not a guarantee that such data transmissions cannot be accessed, altered, or deleted due to firewall or other security software failures. If you have concerns about security, please email us using the contact form on our main page. Keep in mind that because we don’t collect your information, the only thing we are likely to have is your email address – and only then because you contacted us.
Policy Changes
Changes in this policy will be posted on our websites. You are advised to check our websites regularly to view our most recent privacy policy. For more information how these policies are applied across the internet, and more importantly, how they concern you, we recommend the following Book on Privacy.
Or you can just visit the author page of H. J. Buell on Amazon and read more of his writing.
Oh yes, we almost forgot. If you need to send us an email, please use our contact form.
My job is to keep the writing informative and entertaining for you, which includes affiliate links to books and movies I enjoyed. Hopefully you’ll find them interesting, and experience the same joys I did.