Privacy Policy

As of January 20 , 2020 – please check back regularly for updates

General information and policies

We are committed to respecting and protecting your privacy. To that end, we have prepared this Privacy Policy to disclose and describe our information gathering and dissemination practices for this website.  We reserve the right to modify or update this Privacy Policy at any time without notice.

This Privacy Policy should be read in conjunction with our Terms & Conditions.

In general, you may visit this website without identifying yourself or revealing any personal information. Some portions of this website may require you to give us personally identifiable information, which is information that enables us to identify you, such as your name, IP address, or email, or other personal information. If you opt to provide us personal information, we may use it for purposes such as verifying your identity, sending you information, making the site easier for you to use by not having to enter information more than once, helping you quickly find services or information on the website, and helping us create content most relevant to you.

Under no circumstances are we interested in any data by minors. We expect users who provide us with personal information on this website to be of legal age as defined in their respective countries. If you are not of legal age, please do not leave comments or contact us, as this information might be stored as described below.

At this point, there is nothing to buy, sell, or trade on our website. No specific personal information like credit card / payment information, delivery address, payment addresses is being asked for or collected. No personal data is being sold to or traded with anybody. There is no advertising on this site with the exception of potential links to Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or other venues to buy books of the various authors who contribute to this blog. Please see here for the privacy policy of Barnes & Noble and Amazon, respectively.

Our website is built with WordPress, the theme (layout) comes from Meks. Neither the core WP functionality nor the WP theme collect any data or track anything to the best of our knowledge. Our WordPress site, like all WordPress sites, uses so-called plug-ins. A WordPress Plugin is a program or a set of one or more functions written in the PHP scripting language that adds a specific set of features or services to the WordPress site. It helps ensure that the website functions properly, basic user activity is measured to make the site more relevant, and functionality like Comments can be provided. Some plug-ins use cookies and / or store personal information when provided.

We encourage our readers to enhance their own privacy by using VPNs and browsers that do not retain Internet surfing information. When you comment on our blog, we don’t care whether you use your real or a fake name. We only care about that you are not a bot or spammer and use a real email address (which will not be displayed); for that reason we use Akismet (see below) to protect our site.

We are only a small group of part-time contributors that likes to make the world a better place by providing thought-provoking info to readers. Please bear with us if we missed anything in our privacy policy. Unlike global social media companies or big merchants, we don’t have an army of lawyers or IT specialists. The website does not generate revenues for us. If you see something that’s odd or missing, don’t sue us, just let us know, please. We will try to fix it.

Cookies – an overview

Portions of this website use cookies to keep track of your visit, or to deliver content specific to your interests. A “cookie” is a small amount of data transferred to your browser and read by the Web server that placed it there, recording your preferences and previously entered information. A cookie cannot retrieve any other data from your hard drive, pass on computer viruses, or capture your email address. Currently, web sites use cookies to enhance the user’s visit; in general, cookies can securely store a user’s ID and password, personalize home pages, identify which parts of a site have been visited.

When you visit our site the first time, you have a choice to accept all cookies (both strictly-necessary / essential cookies and non-essential /performance / functional cookies) by clicking “Yes”.  Non-essential cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site. A good example for a performance cookies are WordPress.com Stats or Google Analytics. Performance cookies help us to know which pages are the most and least popular and see how visitors move around the site. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. Necessary cookies cannot be disabled; these are cookies being used when you fill out contact forms, leave comments, or otherwise engage more deeply with the website. If you don’t agree with our cookie policy, you should not visit this website (also see our tips above for surfing the web anonymously as much as possible).

Some of the Third Party Sites that you may link to through this website (e.g., social media sites) may use cookies; however, we have no access to or control over these cookies. We advise you to check Third Party Sites cookie policies, as appropriate.

You can also configure your browser to show and reject cookies. Moreover, programs like CC Cleaner allow you to regularly clean your device by deleting all cookies and other debris resulting from your web surfing. We encourage you to do so.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

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. 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

We use Contact Form 7 and Flamingo to allow you to contact us straight from this site instead of using email. These plugins help us collect and stores submission data collected through contact forms, which may include the submitters’ personal information, in the database on the server that hosts our website. We only collect the minimum info necessary to serve you – we will never ask for any info regarding religion, race, age, political orientation, income, health, sexual orientation, social security / tax ID numbers, home address, and similar private info.

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 up to a year.

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 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 into that website.

Analytics

This website uses the Jetpack WP plug-in that comes with WordPress.com Stats functionality to monitor our web traffic and help us modify and optimize our site. Jetpack is offered by Automattic. With regard to Jetpack, we like to disclose the following according to Automattic:

The following data might be used: 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.

Data Visibility and Retention:  Any piece of data explicitly identifying a specific user (IP address, WordPress.com ID, WordPress.com username, etc.) is not visible to us, the site owner when using this feature. For example, we as site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but we cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Stats logs — containing visitor IP addresses and WordPress.com usernames (if available) — are retained by Automattic for 28 days and are used only for the purpose of powering this feature.

The following activities might be tracked: post and page views, video plays (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms, and country. When this module is enabled, Jetpack also tracks performance on each page load that includes the Javascript file we use for Stats. This is exclusively for aggregate performance tracking across Jetpack sites in order to make sure that our plugin and code is not causing performance issues. This includes the tracking of page load times and resource loading duration (image files, Javascript files, CSS files, etc.).

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 the automated spam detection service Akismet. The information we collect typically includes the commentator’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commentator such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself). You can read the company’s privacy policy here and on every site where you leave comments on.

When you use the Social Media buttons and third-party links on our website to like, comment, view, or share posts and content with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Youtube, etc., you are establishing a connection between this site and them. We have no control over their respective privacy and data protection policies. You should assume that they like to track you and store your data as much as possible. Please refer to the privacy policies of any company your are sharing information with.

Where your data is stored and how it is transmitted

Our hosting company and its servers are in the US. It is a leading and highly rated provider for WordPress and other hosting and Internet related services. We have no reason to doubt that our host provider has sufficient security in place to maintain and guard any data. If you are from outside the US, you accept that your data is stored and transmitted to/from the US. You also need to assume that the US government has access to and is monitoring all data stored in and transmitted to/from the US.  Don’t blame us for that. Your government is likely doing the same.

As you can see from the web address https://goglobalbehappy.com in  your browser, we are using the SSL protocol. Otherwise you would only see http instead of https.

Contact information

Our website address is: https://goglobalbehappy.com. This website is operated by Michael Froehls, Las Vegas, NV, USA. You can reach us via the Contact link on this page, or by writing to michael@goglobalbehappy.com