Privacy Policy

Overview

Tricities Media Group LLC (aka "we", "us", "our", "TMG", and "Tricities Media Group") is a privacy-focused company, and it's our goal to maintain the privacy of our users. When possible, we use solutions that anonymize or avoid the collection of private or sensitive data. This page contains our overall privacy policy and contains information for contacting us to learn more or request data deletion.

Data Collection

What personal data do we collect, and why do we collect it?

Comments

The term "Comment" may include any comments, messages, ratings, and other interactions you take on the site.

When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address, any data provided by your browser or ISP, and your 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.

Contact forms

This site contains contact forms. Data submitted via these forms may be stored locally and transmitted to 3rd parties (including Cloudflare, Slack, and/or Discord). Do not include any personal information because we can not guarantee the security of its storage.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt-in to save 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.

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 3rd parties (including Plausible and Cloudflare) to analyze usage data for analytics purposes. This data may include your IP address, approximate location, and any other data you or your browser provides.

Who do we share your data with?

Data may be transferred to 3rd parties, including but not limited to Meta (Facebook), Google, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Cloudflare, Sentry, Vercel, and Automatic.

Additional Data

This site creates and stores an activity log that captures the IP address, username, email address and tracks user activity (like when a user makes a comment). Information on remote logs cannot be cleared for security purposes.

How long do 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.

If you submit a form on the site the message and metadata are retained indefinitely.

For users that register for an account 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 do 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.

Data Research, Training, and AI

Any data submitted, sent to, or in any way transmitted to TMG may be retained indefinitely for internal or external training and education, data research and analytics, and artificial intelligence or machine learning training and research. By using this site, you agree to give us unlimited unrevokable permission to use your data for internal or commercial purposes.

Where do we send your data?

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Analytics data may be sent to a 3rd party analytics service such as Google and/or Facebook. Your email may be shared with 3rd party email services, including Mailchimp and ConvertKit. Your traffic may be routed through Cloudflare and Vercel.

Additional information

How we protect your data

We have multiple security and encryption methods in place to help protect your data. We utilize Cloudflare to help protect our servers and your data through common web security techniques. Your data and security is ultimately dependent on what your share and what you do. When you're using the internet, look for sites like ours that use HTTPS and have a valid encryption certificate. You can also use browser settings and VPNs to help protect your internet privacy.

What data breach procedures do we have in place?

In the event of a breach, we will attempt to notify those affected and work to secure the data from future breaches.

What third parties do we receive data from?

We may receive data from 3rd parties, including but not limited to Facebook, Google, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Ubersuggest, and Automatic.

Any questions concerning this policy or how your data is handled can be sent to Mackenly Jones through our contact form. Thank you for your cooperation.