Your privacy is critically important to us on the Columbia University Frankenstein AI Project. At the project, we have a few fundamental principles:
- We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
- We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
- We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
- We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
- We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.
- All work is done to enhance the understand of AI and creative inquiry.
Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.
Howdy! We are the folks behind a variety of products and services designed to allow anyone–from bloggers, to photographers, small business owners, and enterprises–to build and manage a website to share with the world. Our mission is to democratize publishing. We believe in powering the open Internet with code that is open source and are proud to say that the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL. Unlike most other services, because our GPL code is public, you can actually download and take a look at that code to see how it works. This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:
- Our mobile applications
- Our other products and services that are available on or through our websites (including WordPress.com plans, WordPress.com VIP, Jetpack, the WooCommerce Services Extension, Gravatar, the IntenseDebate comment management system, and Akismet plans); and
- Other users’ websites that use our Services, while you are logged in to your account with us.
Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, mobile applications and other products and services collectively as “Services.” And if you’d like to learn more about which Automattic company is the controller of information about you, take a look at the section below on Controllers and Responsible Companies. Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy. Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.
We’ve decided to make this Privacy Policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. You can grab a copy of this Privacy Policy and other legal documents on Github. You’re more than welcome to copy it, adapt it, and repurpose it for your own use. Just make sure to revise the language so that your policy reflects your actual practices. Also, if you do use the policy we’d appreciate a credit and link to Automattic somewhere on your site.
We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better. We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.
- Any all all participant information with FrankensteinAI project
We also collect some information automatically:
- Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services–for example, when you create or make changes to your website on WordPress.com.
- Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services. For example, we collect information about the actions that site administrators and users perform on a site using our WordPress.com or Jetpack services–in other words, who did what, when and to what thing on a site (e.g., [WordPress.com username] deleted “[title of post]” at [time/date]). As another example, our WooCommerce Usage Tracker tracks information like your email address, WooCommerce settings, PHP settings, and other features for your site, along with information about your online store, such as the aggregate number of orders and customers. We also collect information about what happens when you use our Services (e.g., page views, support document searches at en.support.wordpress.com, features enabled for your website, interactions with our Admin Bar and other parts of our Services) along with information about your device (e.g., screen size, name of cellular network, and mobile device manufacturer). We use this information to, for example, provide our Services to you, as well as get insights on how people use our Services, so we can make our Services better.
- Location Information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions. We may also collect information about your precise location via our mobile apps (when, for example, you post a photograph with location information) if you allow us to do so through your mobile device operating system’s permissions.
- Stored Information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile app. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a really amazing photograph of the sunrise to your website.
- Interactions with Other Users’ Sites: We collect some information about your interactions with other users’ sites while you are logged in to your account with us, such as your “Likes” and the fact that you commented on a particular post, so that we can, for example, recommend posts we think may interest you. As another example, for Intense Debate users, we collect information about the comments you make while logged in to your account, and use that information to, for example, tally up statistics about your comments (check them out in your dashboard!) and provide the information about your comments in your Intense Debate public profile.
- Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. Automattic uses cookies and other technologies like pixel tags to help us identify and track visitors, usage, and access preferences for our Services, as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies, please see our Cookie Policy.
We may also get information about you from other sources. For example, if you create or log into your WordPress.com account through another service (like Google) or if you connect your website or account to a social media service (like Twitter) through our Publicize feature, we will receive information from that service (such as your username, basic profile information, and friends list) via the authorization procedures used by that service. The information we receive depends on which services you authorize and any options that are available. We may also get information, such as a mailing address, from third party services about individuals who are not yet our users (…but we hope will be!), which we may use, for example, for marketing and advertising purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our services.
Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly. That means, of course, that information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on your website, and your “Likes” and comments on other websites, are all available to others–and we hope you get a lot of views! For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Globally Recognized Avatar, or Gravatar--get it? :). Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, will display with the comments and “Likes” that you make on other users’ websites while logged in to your WordPress.com account. Your Gravatar + public profile information may also display with your comments, “Likes,” and other interactions on websites that use our Gravatar service, if the email address associated with your account with us is the same as the email address that you use on the other website. We also provide a “Firehose” stream of public data (like posts and comments) from sites that use our Services to provide that data to Firehose subscribers, who may view and analyze the content (all subject to our Terms of Service), but do not have rights to re-publish it, publicly. Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties. Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.
We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it--which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information--and we are not legally required to continue to keep it. For example, we keep the web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of Automattic’s websites, such as the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period of time in order to, among other things, analyze traffic to Automattic’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites. As another example, when you delete a post, page, or comment from your WordPress.com site, it stays in your Trash folder for thirty days just in case you change your mind and would like restore that content--because starting again from scratch is no fun, at all. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.
While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks. To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to enable our advanced security settings, like Two Step Authentication.
If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:
- Request access to your personal data;
- Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
- Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
- Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
- Request portability of your personal data.
You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us. EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.
Ads appearing on any of our Services may be delivered by advertising networks. Other parties may also provide analytics services via our Services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver advertisements that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by Automattic and does not cover the collection of information by any third party advertisers or analytics providers.
If you’d like to use third party plugins, WooCommerce extensions that enable services provided by third parties, or other third party software, please keep in mind that when you interact with them you may provide information about yourself (or your site visitors) to those third parties. We don’t own or control these third parties and they have their own rules about collection, use and sharing of information, which you should review.
We also process information about visitors to our users’ websites, on behalf of our users and in accordance with our user agreements. Please note that our processing of that information on behalf of our users for their websites isn’t covered by this Privacy Policy. We encourage our users to post a privacy policy that accurately describes their practices on data collection, use, and sharing of personal information. If you’d like, you can also read more about the data we collect on behalf of our users in our Privacy Notice.
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Automattic may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Automattic encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or the WordPress.com Blog, or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy. That’s it! Thanks for reading.