At The Family History Writing Studio (“the website”), we have two fundamental principles that we follow when it comes to your privacy:

• We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it.
• We don’t share your personal information with anyone except in accordance with law.

Information we collect

The owner of the website (see the signature block below) is the sole owner of the information collected on this site. We only have access to personally-identifying information if you voluntarily give it to us directly or by email. For example, if you comment on the blog, you’re asked to provide a name and email address, and to sign up as a student. You also have to provide an email address to receive blog posts via email and to get an answer if you use the contact forms. This is always on an opt-in basis: you can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information.

We use the information we collect when you make a comment, subscribe to receive blog posts by email, use the contact forms, surf the website, or use certain other site features in the following ways:

• To manage the website and your account
• To provide advanced website features to you and others
• To understand your needs to help us improve the website and our classes and courses
• To improve search results
• To understand website usage to allow us to improve our marketing or the way we do business
• To send you emails

We make every effort to keep your information safe. Your payment information is protected through a third party payment company Stripe; your credit card information is not stored on this website. Please be advised that although we make every effort to keep our systems secure, sometimes things happen. Keep your details private at all times; do not share them with anybody.  This means that even if (in the very unlikely event) someone broke into our systems, your payment details would not be available for them to steal.

We don’t and won’t sell or rent your information to anyone, and we won’t share any of your information with any third party outside of our organization. (That includes our web hosting company and any web developer whose help we might need with a problem on the website. Our spam-blocking service, Akismet, gets temporary access to blog comments to prevent spam. Our blog-to-email service, Aweber, see its privacy policy here and uses your information solely to manage your email subscription. We will disclose personal-identifying information if we’re ever required to do so by law; that hasn’t ever happened to date.

We also collect aggregate data about visitors (browser type, language preference, referring site, date and time of visit and the like), through services like Jetpack or WordPress that track this information for us, and retain it in log form. This information isn’t linked to anything personally identifiable, but we don’t sell or rent any of it to anyone either.

Note that Akismet, Jetpack and WordPress are all services of Automattic, Inc., 132 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94107, and you can review Automattic’s privacy policies for more information.

Protecting your information

The website is scanned on a regular basis for security holes and known vulnerabilities in order to make your visit to our site as safe as possible.

Your rights to your information

International privacy rules give you rights over personally-identifying information collected for website purposes, including the right to withdraw any consent previously given; the right to review data that’s been collected; the right to correct or update your data; the right to have any portable information transferred to another data controller; and the right to have any personally-identifying information erased. Feel free to contact us by email if you want to to exercise any of these rights and don’t see a way to do so by simply clicking a link.

Third-party links

This website, through its many blog posts, has a lot of links to other websites. We’re not responsible for their content or their privacy practices. If you click through to another website, be sure to read its privacy policies before using that other website. We’re also not responsible if any content from this website is republished elsewhere without our permission.

Use of Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. The website doesn’t use cookies for tracking purposes, but does use the cookies that are part of the WordPress blogging platform to:

• Understand and save your preferences for future visits.
• Let you share blog posts with social networks like Facebook or Twitter.
• Compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interactions.

You can change your browser settings to warn you each time a cookie is being sent, or you can turn off all cookies. That may impact some ways the site works for you (you can’t post a comment if you turn off cookies, for example), but you’ll still be able to read the website content.

Privacy Policy Changes

This Privacy Policy may change from time to time in the website’s sole discretion. You should check this page often for any changes. Your use of the website after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

For more information

If you need more information or have questions about this privacy policy, or want to exercise your rights over your personally-identifying information, please contact us by email.

Lynn Palermo
The Armchair Genealogist
March 4, 2022

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