Privacy Policy and Cookies

Who I am

I am Dale Phurrough. I provide technology consulting, services, and software. My primary website is https://hidale.com/ and you may contact me regarding this privacy policy at privacy@hidale.com.

I reserve the right to update this privacy policy at any time to ensure that it complies with current legal requirements or to reflect changes in our services/products. Your use of our website, services, or products is subject to our current privacy policy. The most current version of our privacy policy can be viewed on this same web page.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

This website provides services and products for which you have the choice to view, use, or purchase. As part of your choice, it is necessary to use technology to provide these services and products.

WordPress is a technology we use to publish this website. If you choose to create an account, we will only collect the data shown on the user profile screen (e.g. name, email, color choices, etc.).

WooCommerce is a store technology we use on our website. We collect information from you during your usage of our store. This information and examples uses are:

Items you have viewed to suggest related items
IP address to estimate your country for any restrictions, estimate taxes/shipping, etc. We use GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind for this estimation. We never send your information to MaxMind (their privacy policy).
Addresses to calculate taxes, estimate shipping, and send you the order
Browser cookies to store items you’ve chosen in your shopping cart

When you purchase an item or service from us, we will ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, payment method, and optional account information like a username and password. We will use this information for purposes like:

Send you information about your account and order
Respond to your requests, including refunds and complaints
Process payments and prevent fraud
Set up your account for our store
Comply with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes
Improve our store offerings

Registering for an account is optional. If you create an account, we will collect and store data like your name, addresses, email, phone number, a username, and a password. This optional account provides you convenience features like a summary of all your orders and automatically completing the checkout information for future orders.

When you acquire a software license from us, we collect your email, first/last name, and your company name so that we know to whom we have granted a license.

Some of our software and services use a license activation technology:

This technology creates a anonymous hardware fingerprint of hardware components within your computer using a one-way cryptographic hash function. This hash can not be feasibly reversed to uniquely identify those components.
One of your names is usually used to create your registration name. This registration name and the license being granted is used to generate your registration key (e.g. dpreg file) through a one-way cryptographic hash function. Your registration name can not be seen or feasibly derived from this registration key.
During the activate/register process you are prompted to enter your registration name and provide your registration key. These and your hardware fingerprint are used to validate your request to activate/register your software license.

Naturally, some information of a general nature is automatically recorded by internet service providers, server hosting providers, our server’s operating system, and our server’s networking software. This information, sometimes called “server log files”, includes data like your IP address, the time you accessed our services, the service and page you accessed, errors that occur, and the type of your web browser. This information is technically necessary to correctly deliver the services, products, and content requested by you and is mandatory when using our services and website. This information is used for service diagnostics and optimization, threat detection, support, and troubleshooting. These logs are kept for 14 days and are not used to personally identify individuals.

Comments, media, support inquires, and other content you give us

When visitors leave comments on our site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, the visitor’s IP address, and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

When you provide an email address with your comment, an anonymized string (called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. You can read the Gravatar privacy policy. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to save your name, email address and website url in cookies for your convenience.

If you contact us by email, we keep your communication for a limited period of time for customer service purposes. We do not use this information for marketing purposes.

If you upload images to our website, do not upload images with embedded location data (e.g. EXIF GPS) included. Other visitors to the website could download and extract location data from these images you publicly provided.

Embedded content from other websites

This site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, share buttons, etc.) from other services. Viewing and interacting with this embedded content from other services can behave in the same way as if you visited these other services. These services may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, or trace your interaction with that embedded content.

Browser cookies

Website cookies are used to ensure proper running of this website and to help us improve your experience when browsing. Your internet browser can be configured to accept or deny cookies. You may also choose your consent preferences using the floating box at the bottom right. If you disable some cookies, it may affect your experience. These are categories of potential cookies:

Who we share your data with

Payments you make to us are through a payment processor. These processors may include traditional banks, internet services like PayPal, credit card companies, etc. These payment processors usually require some of your personal information to accept/process your payment and must give us a limited amount of this information (e.g. order number, payment amount) so we can correctly apply payments to your order. We store a subset of that limited information in our database to facilitate payment tracking, completing your order, refunds, etc. Please check with the payment processor you choose for their privacy policy and how they handle your data.

If you choose one of the payment processors integrated into our store, we will send a small amount of your information (e.g. your order number, purchase total) to them so that we correctly apply payments to your order.

If you had an item physically shipped to you, some of your personal information will be shared with the shipping provider so that they can correctly deliver your item.

Comments, reviews, and posts you give us are checked by an automated spam detection service provided by Akismet having their own Akismet privacy policy.

In general, we only disclose personally identifiable information to third-parties when it is necessary to perform a service or transaction of which you have chosen.

Our website administrators can see and edit most of your personal information like your name, email, addresses, orders, etc. They access it to help fulfill orders, process refunds, and support you. They can not access your credit cards, bank accounts, PayPal account, etc. Those are separate from us and managed by the payment processor you choose.

We may be required to disclose your personal information in response to a lawful request by public authorities, including to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.

We will not rent or sell your personally-identifying data to anyone.

Where we share your data

Our website, service technologies, and part of our email system are built and run on Amazon Web Services. Many of our services have their primary location on the east coast of the USA with backup/distributed services located worldwide. AWS is certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield and is GDPR ready.

A portion of our email system is run by Google as part of G Suite/Gmail. Google provides this service redundantly and worldwide. Google is certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield and is GDPR ready.

Some of our third-party service organizations may be located outside of your home country. By using our website, software, or services, you consent to the transfer of data to them.

Analytics we use

We use Google Analytics to provide us website usage and aggregate customer analytics. You can read Google’s privacy policy and their data practices. We use their reports to understand aggregate user activity in order to improve our website and services. For example, we may learn patterns like the web browsers used or the top countries from which customers visit. We have activated Google’s IP address anonymization.

Some of the cookies described in this privacy policy are set and used by/for Google Analytics. Please read the browser cookies section of this policy to learn more about cookies and how you take control of them.

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 register for an account: the personal information you provide in your user profile is retained indefinitely. You can see, edit, or delete your personal information at any time (except you can not change your username).

We will retain your order information for a minimum of ten years for accounting purposes and tax compliance.

If you acquire a software/service license from us: your billing first/last name, your billing company name, and your billing/shipping country are retained indefinitely so that we know to whom we have legally granted a license.

We generally retain information about you for as long as we need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it. We are sometimes bound by administrative, legal, tax compliance, security, or technology rules to continue retaining it.

Security and how we protect your data

We use modern technologies like WordPress, WooCommerce, Google, Amazon Web Services, HTTPS, TLS, cryptographic, and encryption technologies to provide our services and products. All of these technologies and providers aim to be trustworthy, secure, and professional. We trust them as you do us. We all endeavor to safeguard the confidentiality of your personal data. Please be aware that there is no such thing as perfect security.

We reduce the vulnerability of our services and your data by isolating many of our services from the Internet, reducing the methods and entry points into our services, and keeping our service software up-to-date.
We use active guard technologies to detect, alert, and block intrusions/attacks. Some of these guard technologies will automatically stop these intrusions/attacks. Others alert our administrators to unusual behavior so that they can take appropriate action.
When your data is transmitted between computers, technologies like encrypted HTTPS connections and isolated private networks are used.

If we ever detect a breach into customer’s personal data, we will notify those customers using the email address in our database and post a notice on our website.

What rights you have over your data

You can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you or that you have provided to us. You must have acquired items from our store, submitted content (comments, reviews, etc.), or created an account with us.

You may not be able to change/remove comments, posts, reviews, media, orders, etc. on your own. Instead, you can request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep to provide specific services you request of us or for administrative, legal, tax, security, or technology rules.

This policy was last updated on 8 Jan 2020.