Who we are
Whatcom News is an imprint of Whatcom Marketing LLC. Our website address is: https://whatcom-news.com.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it:
Contact Form
Data Used: 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. The IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.
Google Analytics
This feature is only available to sites on the Security and Complete plans.
Data Used: Please refer to the appropriate Google Analytics documentation for the specific type of data it collects. This feature simultaneously and having all purchase tracking explicitly enabled, purchase events will send Google Analytics the following information: order number, product id and name, product category, total cost, and quantity of items purchased. 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. For sites running WooCommerce-powered stores, some additional events are also sent to Google Analytics: shopping cart additions and removals, product listing views and clicks, product detail views, and purchases. Tracking for each specific WooCommerce event needs to be enabled by the site owner.
Advertising Partners Privacy Policies
Third-party ad servers or ad networks uses technologies like cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons that are used in their respective advertisements and links that appear on Whatcom-News.com, which are sent directly to users’ browser. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. These technologies are used to measure the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns and/or to personalize the advertising content that you see on websites that you visit.
Whatcom News has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers. Your use of any third-party websites is at your own risk.
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. 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 whether or not it was classified as spam by Akismet.
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.
Payments
Data Used: To facilitate new signup and renewals, the following is sent to Stripe (governed by Stripe TOS): Name, Credit Card number, CVV, Expiry date. Note – the credit card details are not stored by us – this data is collected and stored by Stripe. WordPress.com systems are fully PCI compliant.
Activity Tracked: We plan to store anonymized analytics about which step in the purchase process was reached for the purpose of improving the user experience. Cookies may be stored to implement content blocking in the future.
Data Synced (?): We create a new WordPress.com account for the user, or use the account associated with the email customer gives us. An explanation of WordPress.com data used can be found here. History of signups and billing facilitated via this feature is stored on WordPress.com servers for accounting and subsequent renewal purposes. For the purpose of renewing subscription, on our servers we store: Safely encrypted Stripe ID of the credit card connected to subscription, User id that initiated the purchase, Details about the product, Payment history for the subscription, Last 4 digits of the credit card and the brand – what is known in the industry as “safe details”. Also, we connect the ID of the credit card to the WordPress.com user id, which allows for one-click payments on other subscription products sold on WordPress.com network.
Sharing
Data Used: When official sharing buttons are active on the site, each button loads content directly from its service in order to display the button as well as information and tools for the sharing party. As a result, each service can in turn collect information about the sharing party. When a non-official Facebook or a Pinterest sharing button is active on the site, information such as the sharing party’s IP address as well as the page URL will be available for each service, so sharing counts can be displayed next to the button. When sharing content via email, 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.
Pay with PayPal
Data Used: Transaction amount, transaction currency code, product title, product price, product ID, order quantity, PayPal payer ID, and PayPal transaction ID.
Activity Tracked: The PayPal payer ID, transaction ID, and HTTP referrer are sent with a payment completion tracking event that is attached to the site owner.
Data Synced (?): PayPal transaction ID, PayPal transaction status, PayPal product ID, quantity, price, customer email address, currency, and payment button CTA text.
Because payments are processed by PayPal, we recommend reviewing its privacy policy.
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 Playing
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. Video play events will be sent to Google Analytics as well.
Activity Tracked: Video plays.
Website Stats collected by WordPress
Data 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. Important: The site owner does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but he/she 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 for the sole purpose of powering this feature.
Activity 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 used for tracking 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.). The site owner has the ability to force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.
Direct any questions regarding this privacy policy to:
Whatcom News
PO BOX 342
Ferndale, WA 98248-0342 USA
(360) 223-1438