Spire Express respects your privacy and we are committed to protecting it. Spireexpress.com provides this Privacy Statement to inform you of our Privacy Policy and practices and about the way your information is collected online and how that information is used. We make this notice readily available on our home page and at the bottom of every spireexpress.com web page.
Who we are
Our website address is: https://www.spireexpress.com. The company behind the website is Miletus, Inc. 477 Congress Street, Floor 5, Portland, ME 04101.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Contact Form
On our contact form, we collect name and email address. Additionally, there are optional fields for Address and Phone Number. We collect these data in order to appropriately respond to your questions regarding our services.
User Registration
If a user registers an account in order to comment on a blog post, we capture name and email as part of the user registration process. This is necessary to some extent to control spam on our blog. There are additional fields on the user screen which are not mandatory, but are used to make the experience more social and interactive.
Avatar
- 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.
- These data are stored in the wordpress user database. A user may edit any of the data in his/her profile at any time. However, the username is not editable since it is associated with the corresponding posts in WordPress.
Data Storage & Backups
The contact form data are stored in a mysql database, used by the wordpress plugin CFDB7. These data (both from the contact database and user database) are backed up daily to a local encrypted hard drive. It is also backed up to a encrypted google drive. The local drive maintains the database for up to one year. The google drive only contains 1-4 copies typically.
Cookies
WordPress 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 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.
Google Analytics Cookies
Spireexpress.com uses the Adwords features of Google Analytics for Display Advertisers. We use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookie) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) together to inform, optimize, and serve ads based on your past visits to our Site. This means that vendors including Google will display promotional matrial on other sites you visit across the internet.
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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
- We use Google Analytics’ 3rd-party audience data such as age, gender, and interests to better understand the behavior of our customers and work with companies that collect information about your online activities to provide advertising targeted to suit your interests and preferences… These companies also use automated technologies to collect information when you click on our ads, which helps track and manage the effectiveness of our marketing efforts.
- You may opt out of the automated collection of information by third-party ad networks for the purpose of delivering advertisements tailored to your interests, by visiting the consumer opt-out page for the Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising at www.aboutads.info/choices/ and edit or opt-out your Google Display Netowrk ads’ preferences at www.google.com/ads/preferences/
Who we share your data with
Primary storage for your data is on myhosting.com VPS services and/or Digital Ocean cloud services. Backup data is stored on google drive and local encrypted hard drive.
How long we retain your data
- Daily backups are pruned weekly (7); weekly backups are pruned monthly (4), and monthly backups (12) are pruned yearly. Given that, user data is stored in several daily, weekly, and monthly backups, for at most 24 months. Beginning 1/1/2020 the data will be purged monthly from the live database, on or near the beginning of the month. Going forward, the majority of contact form data will be found in fewer places. Username data (wordpress user) will however persist as noted below.
- 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. An email to production@spireexpress.com will initiate that process. Related posts will be attributed to a null user unless the posts are required to be deleted as well. Requests to delete user data or posts will be handled in a timely fashion, within 30 days of request.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. Backups may be handled by a third party in some cases. (We use BackupSheep).
Contact information
Our Data Protection Officer is Mike Conant, email address production@spireexpress.com
How we protect your data
Our offline data storage is on encrypted drives.