Who we are
Our website address is: https://sonux.net. Sonux.net is a completely private (read: non-commercial) blog about the travel we have done – mostly years, even decades ago. And, as a matter of fact, these days this site is pretty static, but we love to browse through the memories from time to time or to direct friends to information.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
Comments are only allowed for logged in users and by default only for 14 days after a post has been published. And logins are provided by us based on personal knowledge. This has been this way for a very long time already, so comments aren’t really a public functionality any longer.
Nonetheless, for our few friends so lucky to have an account:
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 (see also below a note on the plugin used, Akismet).
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service (by Automattic, their policy) to see if you are using it. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you 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 data from images on the website.
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.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article (which is by default only allowed to us admins), an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). We make rare use of this, but if so then 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 / Jetpack
Sonux.net uses the Jetpack analytics plugin. Please see this separate page about which features Sonux.net uses and which data it might affect.
Who we share your data with / Hosting
The entire blog, including its database, which contains all data we talk about here in this policy, is hosted at Strato, Germany, on German servers. Please find Strato’s privacy policy here (currently, as of MAY-2018 in German only, the English link is broken).
The site is regularly backed up using the free version of the plugin UpdraftPlus (their policy) to our personal Dropbox account (their policy). Only the admin of Sonux.net has access to that Dropbox account. The backup is not encrypted.
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.
For users that register on our website (if any, see above in the Comments section), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
Backups of the entire site are retained for a maximum of 5 weeks.
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. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments are checked through an automated spam detection service, specifically Akismet by Automattic (their policy). A link to a note to site visitors is shown right with the comment box…so please read it before sending in comments. Specifically be informed that
- all entered data,
along with metadata like - your IP address,
- your user agent (the web client application you are using),
- referrer (which page did you come from before reading the page you are commenting on), and
- URL of the page you are commenting on
is sent to the United States for verification and stored there temporarily.
Contact information
Contact the site admin via a mail to sendamailto[at]sonux.net (yea, we really set up a mail address which reads sendamailto, this is no joke).