Welcome to our Privacy Policy. This may not be the most exciting thing to read on this site, but it is still important. Please make sure that you are comfortable with the information below:
Who we are
12 Short Stories is a writing community founded by Mia Botha. It is supported by Writers Write. You can find more about Mia and Writers Write by visiting www.writerswrite.co.za/
If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy, you may contact us using the information below.
Contact:
https://staging.deadlinesforwriters.com/
Pretoria, Gauteng 0181
South Africa
General info:
Users can visit our site anonymously. The main content, e.g. the stories, is locked and requires login, which is not anonymous.
You will be notified of any Privacy Policy changes:
- On our Privacy Policy Page
Can change your personal information:
- By emailing us
- By logging in to your account
What personal data do we collect and why do we collect it
When registering on our site, you are asked to enter your name, email address, mailing address, phone number or other details to create your profile and help you with your experience.
Credit card information: we use PayPal as a payment portal. The transactions are done on their site and nothing regarding your details, other than the fact that you used PayPal, is saved on this site.
How do we protect your information?
Our website is scanned on a regular basis for security holes and common vulnerabilities in order to make your visit to our site as safe as possible.
We use regular Malware Scanning.
We have an SSL certificate.
When do we collect information?
We collect information from you when you register on our site, post, subscribe to a newsletter or enter information on our site.
How do we use your information?
We may use the information we collect from you when you register, make a purchase, sign up for our newsletter, respond to a survey or marketing communication, surf the website, or use certain other site features in the following ways:
- To personalize your experience and to allow us to deliver the type of content and product offerings in which you are most interested.
- To improve our website in order to better serve you.
- To allow us to better service you in responding to your customer service requests.
- To administer a contest, promotion, survey or other site feature.
- To ask for ratings and reviews of services or products
- To follow up with them after correspondence (live chat, email or phone inquiries)
This is a WordPress site. WordPress does not collect any personal data about visitors, and only collects the data shown on the User Profile screen from registered users however, some plugins do collect personal data.
Comments
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.
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. 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. Read more about the privacy policyof this plugin.
Email policy:
We collect your email address in order to:
- Send information, respond to inquiries, and/or other requests or questions
- Process orders and to send information and updates pertaining to orders.
- Send you additional information related to your product and/or service.
- Market to our mailing list or continue to send emails to our clients.
We agree to the following:
- Not use false or misleading subjects or email addresses.
- Identify the message as an advertisement in some reasonable way.
- Include the physical address of our business or site headquarters.
- Monitor third-party email marketing services for compliance, if one is used.
- Honour opt-out/unsubscribe requests quickly.
- Allow users to unsubscribe by using the link at the bottom of each email.
We use Mailchimp to send newsletters. Read their Privacy Policy.
If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from receiving future emails, you can email us at
write@12shortstories.com and we will promptly remove you from ALL correspondence.
Cookies – How do we know how long the data is stored?
We use cookies for tracking purposes, for example, 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, 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.
You can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent, or you can choose to turn off all cookies. (You do this through your browser settings. Since each browser is a little different, look at your browser’s Help Menu to learn the correct way to modify your cookies.)
You can turn cookies off, but some of the features that make your site experience more efficient may not function properly.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). 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.
Who we share your data with
Partners:
Payment processors: Payments are processed through PayPal and not on the site. Please make sure you are familiar with their Privacy Policy.
Third party service providers: Please follow the links to read their Privacy Policies.
- Mailchimp: We send emails via Mailchimp.
- Paid Membership Pro: This is the profile creation plugin we use.
- Webinar Jam: We use Webinar Jamfor our Short Story School classes.
- At checkout, we will collect your name, email address, username, and password. This information is used to setup your account for our site. If you are redirected to an offsite payment gateway to complete your payment, we may store this information in a temporary session variable to setup your account when you return to our site.
- When logged in, we use cookies to track some of your activity on our site including logins, visits, and page views.
- Buddy Press: Works in conjunction with the above plugin to make the community aspects of the site possible
- Social Media Platforms: If you sign-up or login using a social media platform you grant them access to your information. You can manage this from within the social media platform. We use the Ultimate Social Media PLUS.
- Wordfence: Keeps our site safe.
- MyCREDis for the points system.
- The site is backed-up by Updraft Plus.
- We use the Buddy Boss theme.
- We use wpDiscuz for our comments.
Third-party disclosure:
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your Personally Identifiable Information unless we provide users with advance notice.
This does not include website hosting partners and other parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or serving our users, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential.
We may also release information when its release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect our or others’ rights, property or safety.
However, non-personally identifiable visitor information may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses.
Third-party links:
(We will be introducing Affiliates links in the near future. By their nature these will be tracked.)
Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third-party products or services on our website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We, therefore, have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.
Analytics and Google.
We use Google Analytics on our site. You can opt-out of tracking.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
We use the Google Analytics service to analyze our website visitors. Google uses cookies. The information generated by the cookie about the use of the online product or service by users is generally transferred to a Google server in the USA and stored there. Google will use this information on our behalf to evaluate the use of our online products and services by users, to compile reports on the activities within these online products and services and to provide us with further services associated with the use of these online products and services and the use of the internet. Pseudonymous user profiles can be created from the processed data. We use Google Analytics only with IP anonymization enabled. This means that Google will truncate the IP address of users within Member States of the European Union or in other states that are party to the Agreement on the European Economic Area. Only in exceptional cases will the full IP address be transmitted to a Google server in the USA and truncated there. The IP address transmitted by the user’s browser is not merged with other Google data. Users can prevent cookies from being stored by adjusting the settings to their browser software accordingly. The legal basis for the use of this service is Art. 6 paragraph 1 sentence 1 letter f GDPR. Users can prevent the collection of data generated by cookies by downloading and installing the browser plug-in that is available at the following link: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en. If you visit our website using a mobile device, you can deactivate Google Analytics by clicking on the following link: Click here. A transmission of your data to the USA cannot be excluded. Google is certified under the Privacy Shield Agreement and thus guarantees compliance with European data protection legislation (https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt000000001L5AAI&status=Active).
Google Ads
Google’s advertising requirements can be summed up by Google’s Advertising Principles. They are put in place to provide a positive experience for users.
We use Google AdSense Advertising on our website. Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our users based on previous visits to our site and other sites on the Internet. Users may opt-out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google Ad and Content Network privacy policy.
Manage the ads you see with Ad Settings or with Your Online Choices .
We have implemented the following:
We, along with third-party vendors such as Google, use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookies) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) or other third-party identifiers together to compile data regarding user interactions with ad impressions and other ad service functions as they relate to our website.
Opting out:
Users can set preferences for how Google advertises to you using the Google Ad Settings page. Alternatively, you can opt-out by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative Opt-Out page or by using the Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser add on.
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), 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.
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 be checked through an automated spam detection service as described below.
Akismet
We collect information about visitors who comment on Sites that use our Akismet anti-spam service. The information we collect depends on how the User sets up Akismet for the Site, but typically includes the 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).
Please also refer to the above-mentioned plugins and partners.
Facebook (VISITOR ACTION PIXEL)
We use the “visitor action pixels” from Facebook Inc (1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA, or, if you are based in the EU, Facebook Ireland Ltd., 4 Grand Canal Square, Grand Canal Harbour, Dublin 2, Ireland (“Facebook”)) on our website. This allows user behaviour to be tracked after they have been redirected to the provider’s website by clicking on a Facebook ad. This enables us to measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads for statistical and market research purposes. The data collected in this way is anonymous to us, i.e. we do not see the personal data of individual users. However, this data is stored and processed by Facebook, which is why we are informing you, based on our knowledge of the situation. Facebook may link this information to your Facebook account and also use it for its own promotional purposes, in accordance with Facebook’s Data Usage Policy https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/. You can allow Facebook and its partners to place ads on and off Facebook. A cookie may also be stored on your computer for these purposes. The legal basis for the use of this service is Art. 6 paragraph 1 sentence 1 letter f GDPR. You can object to the collection of your data by Facebook pixel, or to the use of your data for the purpose of displaying Facebook ads by contacting the following address: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=ads. Facebook is certified under the Privacy Shield Agreement and thus guarantees compliance with European data protection legislation (https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt0000000GnywAAC&status=Active).
Our Facebook page and group:
When you visit our Facebook Pages, which we use to represent our company or individual products or services, some of your personal data will be processed. The sole controller responsible for the processing of personal data is Facebook Ireland Ltd (4 Grand Canal Square, Grand Canal Harbour, Dublin 2 Ireland, “Facebook”). Further information about the processing of personal data by Facebook can be found at https://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.
How does the site handle Do Not Track signals?
We honour Do Not Track signals and Do Not Track, plant cookies, or use advertising* when a Do Not Track (DNT) browser mechanism is in place.
*Advertising excludes in-house/onsite embedded advertising.
What data breach procedures we have in place
Should a data breach occur we will take the following responsive action:
We will notify you via email.
We will notify the users via in-site notification.