Privacy Policy

Hey, even though this is a personal travel blog that’s aimed at friends and family, I still want to be a good citizen of the interwebs. That means explaining how your use of this website affects your privacy, which is something everyone should be vigilant about.

Who we are

We’re Zamia Ventures, LLC, a Florida limited liability company, but despite the fancy entity name we are just a travel blog. Our website address is: https://www.zamiaventures.com, and the blog resides at https://www.zamiaventures.com/wp.

We recently upgraded our security, so your visits to our site are safer. Mostly this means that our site sports the most sought-after accessory of the season: a green padlock in the address bar.  We earned this symbol by encrypting the connection between our server and your browser, so there is less risk of hackers learning about your dangerous travel blog addiction.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

For the most part, the data we receive is data you choose to give us.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data the commenter puts 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

We don’t encourage visitors to upload images, since they might compete with our own photos and we might not fare well in comparison. Nevertheless, if you do 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 and other information from images on the website if that location data is included.

Contact forms

There’s a contact form on the blog, located here. Guess what? If you fill in your name and email address to make contact with us, we will receive that information, and we may even use it to reply to you.

Subscriptions

We offer a subscription service which sends automatic email notifications when a new post is added to the blog. If you subscribe, we’ll have the email address that you used to subscribe in order to send you the email notifications that you requested. You’ll have the option to unsubscribe on the bottom of every email notice.

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. Come back and comment often so your cookies stay current!

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

Analytics

Like most websites in the world, we use Google Analytics to find out how people are visiting and using our website. You should be aware that Google collects a huge amount of information about everyone who uses the internet, not just the visitors to our site. That information includes technical data relating to your device, browser, or application e.g. IP addresses, MAC addresses, application ID/AdID/IDFA, identifiers from cookies, session navigation history, and similar browsing metadata, and other data generated through applications and browsers, including cookies and similar technologies. It also includes data relating to your precise location, such as information collected from your device’s GPS, or through your interactions with a Bluetooth location beacon, WiFi, or other localization product.

In other words, we can see how many people are reading our site, which pages they visit most frequently, how long they spend on the site, the type of device they are using to access the site, and the approximate location where they are logging in. Admittedly, the main purpose of this is to make sure mom is reading regularly and take her to task if she is not. But everyone else should be aware that this sort of tracking is embedded in pretty much every site on the internet.

The Google Analytics privacy policy can be found here: https://policies.google.com/privacy. You can learn more about how to opt-out of tracking in Google Analytics here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/. Although we do want to know about visits to our site, we also want to protect our readers from more intrusion than is needed. As a result, we’ve turned on the IP Anonymization feature in Google Analytics. You can learn more about this here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en.

Who we share your data with

Except for the analytics information you provide by surfing our site, which is captured by the all-seeing mechanical eye of Google, we don’t share your data with anyone. We only use the information you give us for purposes of the site, such as responding to your comments and contact requests. We will never sell your contact information or other data. That’s tacky and ridiculous.

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.

If you contact us via the contact form with glowing praise for the blog and its content, we’ll keep your email address indefinitely. If you send us mean messages, we will probably delete your email address quickly, but may also keep it indefinitely.

If you leave us a comment and change your mind later, feel free to contact us using the contact form to request removal.

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, which we are happy to do except with respect to any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

This entire site is hosted by GoDaddy on their servers, so anything that happens here can be seen by the fine folks at GoDaddy. Their privacy policy can be found at: https://www.godaddy.com/agreements/showdoc.aspx?pageid=PRIVACY&isc=ISC.

For your comfort and ours, visitor comments are checked through an automated spam detection service. Akismet is continually protecting us all from spam; their privacy policy is here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.

Contact information

If you ever wish to contact us with questions about the site, use the contact form! We really do respond to communications from readers.

Stay safe out there, people! Protect your personal data!