Berkshire's Privacy Policy - Berkshire Publishing

Privacy is the right to be left alone, and we value privacy enormously. Your privacy, as a customer or author or colleague, is vitally important here at Berkshire Publishing, and this page sets out Berkshire’s Privacy Policy revised as of 25 May 2018. We have long made it a rule that we will not sell, rent, or give your name or address to anyone. It has always been easy to use the links at the bottom of our emails to unsubscribe to any (or all) of our mailings.

Feel free to unsubscribe or to ask to have your name and data removed from our contact list (you can always rejoin!). We hope, however, you’ll stick with us, join in the discussion, and help make the world a better place. Our tagline is “Knowledge for our common future” and we depend on you to help us stay the course.

Here is Berkshire’s Privacy Policy, which explains how we protect and manage personal contact data.

Questions? Drop a line directly to the CEO, Karen Christensen: karen@berkshirepublishing.com.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Orders

Customers can choose to save profile information for quicker orders in future. Order data is archived for reference. Berkshire Publishing never saves credit card information.

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: https://automattic.com/privacy/. 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, 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.). 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

Berkshire Publishing uses Google analytics to track website visits.

Whom we share your data with

Berkshire Publishing does not sell or rent data.

How we use your data

Data Protection law says that we can use personal data only if we have a proper reason to do so. This includes sharing it with anyone outside Berkshire Publishing. Here are the legally acceptable reasons:

When you consent to our use of your personal data
When we need it in order to fulfill a contract we have with you
When we have a related legal duty
When it is in our legitimate interest

A legitimate interest is when we have a reasonable business or commercial reason to use your information (for example, to determine how many of our contributors live outside the United States, or what universities they are affiliated with). But even then, it must not unfairly go against what is right and best for you. If we rely on our legitimate interest, we will tell you what that is.

As always, we will be glad to remove you from any or all email information or marketing lists, and in every mass email we send there is at least one (sometimes more) links to unsubscribe or change your subscription options (you can, for example, tell us not to email more than every month, or quarter, or year).

If you receive a personal email asking you, for example, to contribute to a new publication and prefer not to receive such inquiries, please just REPLY and say something like, “Don’t invite me.” Our system has a setting that we can use to ensure that you do not receive further invitations.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment or message through the contact form, 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 and customers that register on our website, 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.