Privacy Policy

Who we are

We are Boxes and Arrows, LLC an online publication focused on the design community. Our website address is: http://boxesandarrows.com.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Authors

When someone from Boxes and Arrows contacts you to solicit an article, it is, of course, because we think you have something to say. How we contact you is mostly based on information you have made publicly available, such as a LinkedIn profile, an industry-related Slack channel profile, and the like. Occasionally, another author will refer you to us and, in doing so, share your contact information with us.

On the other hand, if you contact us, you are voluntarily revealing your information to us.

Our publishing platform is WordPress. If you write an article for Boxes and Arrows, we create an author account for you in WordPress and ask you which email address and user name you would like to associate with that WordPress account.

Two items are required for an author account.

  • User name: This cannot be changed, but does not need to relate to publicly-identifiable information, such as your name. For example, your real name could be Arya Stark, but your username could be LittleAssassin.
  • Email: Email is required but changeable by you.

Information collected but optional for an author account is below. This information serves to give the reader a fuller understanding of you as an author but, again, is optional.

  • First name: Arya
  • Last name: Stark
  • Nick name: This can be the same as your user name if you wish or something else, like DeadlyDaughter.
  • Display name publicly as: A set of options for identifying you publicly on the site. This can be your user name, first name, last name, nick name, first last name, or last first name. The choice is yours. If you do not choose to provide optional information, your article will appear under your set user name.
  • LittleAssassin
  • Arya
  • Stark
  • DeadlyDaughter
  • Arya Stark
  • Stark Arya
  • Web site
  • AIM
  • YahooIM
  • Jabber/Google Talk
  • Google+
  • Twitter handle
  • Facebook profile URL
  • Bio (a text field)
  • Profile picture (via Gravatar)
  • Author image
  • About me page

Once you have an author account, you may edit your personal information at any time by signing in. If you have forgotten your credentials there is a password recovery link available via the login page.

Unless you publish your own contact information in your bio, Boxes and Arrows readers do not have a way of contacting you via information they see on our site. Your name on the site links to a page showing articles you have written.

How we use this information

We are publishers. The articles we publish are written by you, the author.

To publish an article, we need to associate it with an author — with you. We use the information we collect as part of the publishing process. We require an email address to contact you in the event questions arise about your article and to follow up with you on subsequent story ideas. The only people with access to your personal information as described above are the Boxes and Arrows publishers and you.

Comments

If you comment on an article published in Boxes and Arrows, you are required to provide:

 

  • Name
  • Email

 

You may optionally provide:

  • A comment
  • A URL

 

  • An option to save your name, email, and site in this browser for the next time you comment
  • An option to be notified of follow-up comments via email
  • An option to be notified of new posts via email

Also collected as part of the comment are the date and time your comment was submitted, if your comment was in reply to another one, and your IP address.

How we use this information

The date, time, and in-response-to information is used to organize comments chronologically with the original post.

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.

Contact Form

If you provide feedback to the Boxes and Arrows publishers via the “Contact us” form, you are required to provide:

  • Name
  • Email
  • Subject (from a list of options)
  • A comment

Feedback appears only to the publishers and only within the WordPress admin panels. It is not published publicly.

When we read your feedback, we also see the date and time your comment was submitted and your IP address.

How we use this information

All of the above information gives us context for your feedback. We use your email address to reply to the feedback, if a reply is warranted. Once feedback is addressed, the feedback entry in WordPress is deleted.

Data Used: If Akismet is enabled on the site, the contact form submission data — IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message — is submitted to the Akismet service (also owned by Automattic) for the sole purpose of spam checking. The actual submission data is stored in the database of the site on which it was submitted and is emailed directly to the owner of the form (i.e. the site author who published the page on which the contact form resides). This email will include the submitter’s IP address, timestamp, name, email address, website, and message.

Data Synced (?): Post and post meta data associated with a user’s contact form submission. If Akismet is enabled on the site, the IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.

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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Google Analytics

This feature is only available to sites on the Premium and Professional plans.

Data Used: Please refer to the appropriate Google Analytics documentation for the specific type of data it collects. Google Analytics does offer IP anonymization, which can be enabled by the site owner.

Activity Tracked: This feature sends page view events (and potentially video play events) over to Google Analytics for consumption.

Who we share your data with

Activity Log

This feature only records activities of a site’s registered users, and the retention duration of activity data will depend on the site’s plan and activity type.

Data Used: To deliver this functionality and record activities around site management, the following information is captured: user email address, user role, user login, user display name, WordPress.com and local user IDs, the activity to be recorded, the WordPress.com-connected site ID of the site on which the activity takes place, the site’s Jetpack version, and the timestamp of the activity. Some activities may also include the actor’s IP address (login attempts, for example) and user agent.

Activity Tracked: Login attempts/actions, post and page update and publish actions, comment/pingback submission and management actions, plugin and theme management actions, widget updates, user management actions, and the modification of other various site settings and options. Retention duration of activity data depends on the site’s plan and activity type. See the complete list of currently-recorded activities (along with retention information).

Data Synced (?): Successful and failed login attempts, which will include the actor’s IP address and user agent.

Comment Likes

This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: In order to process a comment like, the following information is used: WordPress.com user ID/username (you must be logged in to use this feature), the local site-specific user ID (if the user is signed in to the site on which the like occurred), and a true/false data point that tells us if the user liked a specific comment. If you perform a like action from one of our mobile apps, some additional information is used to track the activity: IP address, user agent, timestamp of event, blog ID, browser language, country code, and device info.

Activity Tracked: Comment likes.

Gravatar Hovercards

Data Used: This feature will send a hash of the user’s email address (if logged in to the site or WordPress.com — or if they submitted a comment on the site using their email address that is attached to an active Gravatar profile) to the Gravatar service (also owned by Automattic) in order to retrieve their profile image.

Jetpack Comments

Data Used: Commenter’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided via the comment form), timestamp, and IP address. Additionally, a jetpack.wordpress.com IFrame receives the following data: WordPress.com blog ID attached to the site, ID of the post on which the comment is being submitted, commenter’s local user ID (if available), commenter’s local username (if available), commenter’s site URL (if available), MD5 hash of the commenter’s email address (if available), and the comment content. If Akismet (also owned by Automattic) is enabled on the site, the following information is sent to the service for the sole purpose of spam checking: commenter’s name, email address, site URL, IP address, and user agent.

Activity Tracked: The comment author’s name, email address, and site URL (if provided during the comment submission) are stored in cookies. Learn more about these cookies.

Data Synced (?): All data and metadata (see above) associated with comments. This includes the status of the comment and, if Akismet is enabled on the site, whether or not it was classified as spam by Akismet.

Likes

This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: In order to process a post like action, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID (on which the post was liked), post ID (of the post that was liked), user agent, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: Post likes.

Mobile Theme

Data Used: A visitor’s preference on viewing the mobile version of a site.

Activity Tracked: A cookie (akm_mobile) is stored for 3.5 days to remember whether or not a visitor of the site wishes to view its mobile version. Learn more about this cookie.

Notifications

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Some visitor-related information or activity may be sent to the site owner via this feature. This may include: email address, WordPress.com username, site URL, email address, comment content, follow actions, etc.

Activity Tracked: Sending notifications (i.e. when we send a notification to a particular user), opening notifications (i.e. when a user opens a notification that they receive), performing an action from within the notification panel (e.g. liking a comment or marking a comment as spam), and clicking on any link from within the notification panel/interface.

Protect

Data Used: In order to check login activity and potentially block fraudulent attempts, the following information is used: attempting user’s IP address, attempting user’s email address/username (i.e. according to the value they were attempting to use during the login process), and all IP-related HTTP headers attached to the attempting user.

Activity Tracked: Failed login attempts (these include IP address and user agent). We also set a cookie (jpp_math_pass) for 1 day to remember if/when a user has successfully completed a math captcha to prove that they’re a real human. Learn more about this cookie.

Data Synced (?): Failed login attempts, which contain the user’s IP address, attempted username or email address, and user agent information.

Search

Data Used: Any of the visitor-chosen search filters and query data in order to process a search request on the WordPress.com servers.

Sharing

Data Used: When sharing content via email (this option is only available if Akismet is active on the site), the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if the user is logged in, this information will be pulled directly from their account), IP address (for spam checking), user agent (for spam checking), and email body/content. This content will be sent to Akismet (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed. Additionally, if reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared with that service. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.

Subscriptions

Data Used: To initiate and process subscriptions, the following information is used: subscriber’s email address and the ID of the post or comment (depending on the specific subscription being processed). In the event of a new subscription being initiated, we also collect some basic server data, including all of the subscribing user’s HTTP request headers, the IP address from which the subscribing user is viewing the page, and the URI which was given in order to access the page (REQUEST_URI and DOCUMENT_URI). This server data used for the exclusive purpose of monitoring and preventing abuse and spam.

Activity Tracked: Functionality cookies are set for a duration of 347 days to remember a visitor’s blog and post subscription choices if, in fact, they have an active subscription.

Video Hosting

Data Used: For video play tracking via WordPress.com Stats, the following information is used: viewer’s IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. If Google Analytics is enabled, video play events will be sent there, as well.

Activity Tracked: Video plays.

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

You can reach us via our Contact Us page.

Additional information

How we protect your data

We leverage the data protection offered by WordPress (publishing platform) and WPEngine (hosting).

What data breach procedures we have in place

If we are aware of or notified of a data breach then we will proactively communicate to those users affected via email.  The communication will have all available details of the breach and next steps to try to mitigate risk to our users.