Data Protection and privacy statement (May 2018)
Parkswatchscotland is a blog, not an organisation as such, run by Nick Kempe (the data controller), who is committed to promoting critical debate and analysis of our National Parks. It stores limited personal data (names and emails) of people who wish to subscribe by email or contribute to the blog, whether as an author of blog posts or commentator on posts. This data is stored and used for the purposes of running the blog and is not shared with any other organisation or individual except in very limited circumstances with your express permission.
Data held on people subscribing by email
If you wish to subscribe to the parkswatchscotland by email your are asked for your name as well as email. The email subscription service is operated by Mailchimp and allows you to unsubscribe at any time. Mailchimp will not share the data they hold – name, email and date of subscription – with anyone else and have confirmed that in their view they meet the requirements of EC and UK data protection law https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/.
If you unsubscribe your name is removed completely by Mailchimp but their default setting is that your email is retained in an “unsubscribers” list which, under the free subscription parkswatchscotland uses, can only be removed “manually”. Parkswatchscotland has no need to retain this information and will aim to delete this “archived” data every three months.
Data held on contributors to the blog
Parkswatchscotland welcomes contributions to the blog, either in the form of posts or comments. In order to promote transparency and prevent the type of abusive and destructive commentary that sometimes take place on social media, Parkswatchscotland requires that if you wish to contribute or comment on a post you provide your name and email. In addition, the first time you comment, the comment will be moderated before being published.
This personal information, which includes the IP address of your email, along with your comment is then held on the parkswatchscotland data base (which uses WordPress and is hosted by eHost). Only your name and content of your comment/post will appear publicly.
Parkswatchscotland may use your email address to contact you to discuss an issue raised in or by your comment or very occasionally, because someone else has asked to be put in contact with you directly – we will always ask your permission before doing this. Your email will not be shared for any other purposes.
If you are not a subscriber or an author, when you comment you should receive an email asking if you wish to subscribe to parkswatchscotland. There is no need for you to subscribe in order for your comment to be published. However, should you choose to do so, this will enable you to make comments on posts in future without further prior approval. (This is done through cookies which parkswatchscotland uses to identify subscribers who have had a comment approved previously).
Cookies
Parkswatchscotland, through WordPress and its internet service provider, eHost, uses some cookies when you browse the website. These are used to help it run smoothly and to collect statistics. None of the information gathered by cookies identifies you as an individual – it is all entirely anonymous.