About Your Privacy
SPOKE Educational Network, Inc. is strongly committed to protecting your privacy. As a rule, we do not share, rent, trade or sell personal information collected on this site or through other means. Though we make every effort to preserve users’ privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law or when we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our website.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form along with the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Cookies
Cookies are data text files that a website transfers to a visitor’s computer for record-keeping purposes. Cookies allow website operators like SPOKE-Network™ to facilitate and customize your visit by saving your preferences while tracking information about your visit to a website. We use the data collected by cookies to retrieve certain information previously provided by you and to help us provide our visitors with a better experience.
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address, and website using 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 visit a login page on the SPOKE-Network™, 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.
Mailing lists
SPOKE-Network™ does not share, rent, trade or sell our mailing lists to other parties. Those who no longer wish to receive email or postal mail communications from us can have their information removed from our mailing lists by contacting us via email or through the snail-mail address appearing at the bottom of this page.
Embedded content from other websites
Pages and posts on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
SPOKE-Network™ utilizes various tools from different companies on this website, including Google Analytics, to evaluate user behavior for the purpose of better advancing our organizational mission.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a third-party service that gathers, collects and analyzes data about the behavior of visitors to websites. Among other things, the service collects data on which website a data subject has come to a website from (so-called referrers), which subpages of the website were accessed or how often and for how long a subpage was viewed. This web analysis is mainly used to optimize our website.
The operator of the Google Analytics component is Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043-1351, USA.
Google Analytics uses cookies. The information generated by the cookie about your use of this website is usually transmitted to a Google server in the USA and stored there. Google might transfer the personal information collected via this technical procedure to additional third parties.
On behalf of the operator of the website, Google will use this information to evaluate your use of the website, compile reports on website activity and to provide further services related to website and internet use to us. The IP address transferred through your browser to Google Analytics will not be combined with other data held by Google.
In addition, this website may use the Analytics feature UserID to track interaction data. This User ID will be additionally anonymized and encrypted and will not be linked with other data.
You can prevent the storage of cookies by a corresponding setting of your browser software; however, please note that if you do this, you may not be able to use all the features of this website.
You may also prevent the collection of the data generated by cookies and related to your use of the website (including your IP address) by Google as well as the processing of this data by Google by downloading and installing the browser plug-in available through the following link: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en
This browser add-on informs Google Analytics via JavaScript that no data and information about website visits may be transmitted to Google Analytics.
Cookies already set by Google Analytics can be deleted at any time via the Internet browser or other software programs.
Further information and Google‘s applicable privacy regulations can be found at https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en and https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/ The following link provides a further explanation of Google Analytics https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/.
Our website also uses Google Analytics performance reports relating to demographics and interests and reports on Google Display Network impressions. You can disable Google Analytics for display advertising and customize the ads on the Google Display Network by visiting the ad settings at this link: https://adssettings.google.com.
Spam detection
SPOKE-Network™ utilizes the service Akismet to filter spam from the comments, trackbacks, and contact form messages input by visitors to our website. Akismet collects a commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL (along with other information directly provided by the commenter such as their name, username, email address, and the comment itself) in an effort to identify incoming spam and block future spamming attempts.
Data shared with other third parties
We do not share, rent, trade, or sell personal data collected on or through this site with any individuals or entities except when required by law.
Data retention
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This enables us to recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
We also store the personal information that users who register on our website provide in their user profile. Save for the username which cannot be changed, all users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time. Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
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.
1 June 2020