Privacy, Comments, Data Collection and All That Jazz
Asshole is as asshole does
Hermit.Monster is The Hermit’s personal website. Ergo, what The Hermit says goes. Comments, followers etc may be moderated and blocked, removed, or otherwise dealt with as The Hermit sees fit. The general rule of thumb is to be excellent to each other, and don’t be a dick. If you want to be an asshole on the internet, go do it somewhere else. Don’t make me banhammer you.
The compulsory big scary copyright notice
The Hermit does not use other people’s content without their permission and always gives proper attribution (unless the origin is unknown, in which case it will be labelled as such). If you spot something that is incorrect, please let The Hermit know so it can be fixed!
Everything on this website is © The Hermit and Hermit.Monster, 2024 (and any contributors). Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
TL;DR: The Hermit doesn’t steal other people’s stuff. Please do not steal the Hermit’s stuff. If you want to use something you’ve seen here, just ask.
Come to the dark side, we have cookies!
The Hermit is absolutely not interested in tracking you all over the internet. That’s creepy. The only information collected here is what is genuinely necessary to run the site, and what that is depends on what you want to do here.
The site is built on WordPress which needs certain functional cookies in order to work, has analytics and anti-spam features, and enables handy stuff such as plugins, comments and forms.
Analytics often collect way more info than needed (ugh). That’s not happening here. Hermit.Monster finds it useful to know how many people are reading a post/page, and interesting to see which part of the world they’re from, but uses basic anon analytics only and fully respects “Do Not Track”.
The Hermit uses ad blockers and anti-tracking wotsits religiously, so needless to say, is not interested in harvesting or selling anyone’s data. Yuck. Info will only be shared as genuinely required for tech support or law enforcement (not planning on ever invoking that) purposes.
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. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. The same applies to any forms.
If you leave a comment you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so you don’t have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
Comments and their 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 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.
If you want to subscribe to the newsletter (a fortnightly or so roundup of posts), you can do so via the form on the About page. It requires an email address. That’s it. Not even a name. It’s a double opt-in, you can unsubscribe at any time, and your email will absolutely not be used for anything else.
If you upload images here, you should avoid uploading ones with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Site visitors can download and extract any location data from images on the site.
Finally, if you’re using things like gravatar, following via your WordPress account, interacting with embedded content from elsewhere, or clicking a link to another site, the privacy/data policies of those services apply.
If you have actually read all of this, have a cookie. A real one. An acceptable alternative is a piece of cheese.
HALP
In the extremely unlikely event of a privacy/data breach, The Hermit will let anyone affected know ASAP, as well as what we’re doing about it.
If you have any questions about privacy, data collection, content on this site, or anything else you can contact The Hermit via email: hermitmonster at proton dot me. Please be aware that The Hermit is not online 24/7 so replies may not be instant. There is zero tolerance for harassment and spammers will be blocked.