The Legalese

Definitions:

• “I” or “The Website” refers to Off the Escalator Enterprises LLC
• “You” or “the user” refers to the user of the website
• GDPR means General Data Protection Act.

Processing of your personal data

Under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) we do gather some digital personal information about you, and control and process that information. We also partner with select service providers that process some of your personal information (such as for payment and shipping for books purchased directly via this website.)

Lawful basis: Consent


The reason we use this basis: You gave us consent to use your data when you bought or negotiated to buy a book from my website. Or when you checked a box to give permission to join our mailing list, take our survey, or otherwise interact with us.

We process your information in the following ways: To send you a book , allow you to take a survey, and keep you updated with special offers and news about our books or other offerings.

Data retention period: We will continue to process information associated with your purchases or completed surveys indefinitely. We will continue to process information associated with your visits to our website until 26 months after your most recent visit.

Sharing your information: For information that we directly gather or access, we do not share that information with any third parties. For information that our data processing partners gather, please see their respective privacy policies (listed below)

Why we use this legal basis:  I need to pay my taxes correctly. For tax inspections, I must maintain a list of customers with name, address, and purchases (which I get from my payment processor Paypal). I must retain tax-related data for six years.

Your Rights

Under the GDPR, your rights regarding our data from you are as follows:

• the right to be informed
• the right of access
• the right to rectification
• the right to erasure*
• the right to restrict processing
• the right to data portability
• the right to object
• the right not to be subject to automated decision-making including profiling

* Erasure includes only stored data, such as your email address. It does not include information that you voluntarily supplies to us via survey responses, interviews, special requests, or other materials for which we have gathered your explicit consent that we may quote at any time in our publications (including posts to this website) as we see fit, with agreed-upon attribution.

Data Processing Partners:

Links here go to each partner’s privacy policies or other privacy-related links.

Google Analytics (website analytics): We passively gather limited anonymized information about your via Google Analytics. Specifically, we know what country you’re visiting from (unless you’re using tools to mask your location), but we do not have access to your IP address via Google Analytics.

Akismet: spam comment detection software

Amazon: Sales channel for unsigned copies of our print and audiobooks books.

Kindle ebooks: Amazon does have some visibility into how much of each Kindle ebook you reads, what you highlight and annotate in those books, etc. We have only limited aggregate insight into that data, not data on individual ebook readers.

Paypal: Provider of our payment processing when you purchase a book via this website’s shopping cart. Applies to all transactions, credit card and Paypal account.

What personal data we collect, and why we collect it

Website Comments

Each time a visitor leaves a comment on this site, we collect the data shown in the comments form. We also gather the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string, to help us detect spam comments.

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.

If you use the Gravatar service, when you comment here an anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to  Gravatar. (See Gravatar’s privacy policy.) After we approve your comment, your Gravatar profile picture will be displayed to the public, in the context of your comment.

If you have left comments on this website, 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.

Cookies

As is common for WordPress websites, 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.

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.

How we may quote you

The Off the Escalator books, as well as our other products and promotional content, include many direct quotes from a variety of sources.

Forums, Social Media and Private Communication: Occasionally we will see a post or comment in an online discussion, or receive a private communication (such as an email message, that illustrates or illuminates a theme we are covering. We always ask the original author of that post, message or comment for permission to quote it, as well as how they would like their statement to be attributed. We always get that permission in writing before deciding whether/how to use that quote.

Published sources: Occasionally we showcase direct quotes from content or publicaitons available to the general public:  books, websites, research reports, public blog posts, podcasts, etc. Or we may include embedded media available to the general public, such as YouTube videos. We publish this content under the Fair Use provision of the US Copyright Act.

 

Sponsored links, affiliate tracking & commissions

Our website may contain sponsored and affiliate links on some pages. These are served via, Amazon Affiliates, or through our own means.

Clicking on any adverts, sponsored or affiliate links may track your actions by using a cookie that our partner saves to your device.  Your actions are usually recorded as a referral from our website by this cookie.

Email marketing messages & subscription

We may invite people who contact us via email, or other means, or who purchase our books directly, to join our mailing list — but we will not add them without permission.

• Unsubscribe to any email by contacting Julie at [email protected]