Privacy and Personal Data

This site is a personal blog run and administered by me, Daragh O Brien. It is not a commercial activity as it began half a decade ago as a hobby blog to vent my thoughts and perspectives on Information Management and other issues.

My commercial blogging takes place on my company website (www.castlebridge.ie).

As such, this site falls within the “Domestic Use” exemption under the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 (the governing law in Ireland, where this blog is written and hosted). If you post a comment on this site you are consenting to an amount of personal data being processed for the purposes of administering and managing this site and complying with any legal obligations that might arise as a result of this site’s existence or the content of your comment.

However, for the avoidance of any doubt here is a short statement of what personal data is captured, why, and what use it will be put to:

 

  • Email address required for comments.

Provision of email addresses on comments  is a mandatory requirement. An email address is required to enable me to identify a commenter and contact them if I believe that a comment is inaccurate, offensive, or potentially libelous. This is a personal blog but, as the publisher of it, I have a legal liability for the content that is published.

If I am notified about content in comments that is in breach of copyright, defamatory etc. your email address will be used to contact you about that complaint and may be disclosed to a 3rd party where to do so is required as part of any actions I need to take to exercise my personal legal rights or as required by any order of a Court. These are valid exemptions for processing and disclosure under the Data Protection Acts.

Your email address is not displayed or made public through normal operation of this site. Certain functions of WordPress may allow you to receive email notification of further comments on a post or further posts in a particular category. This type of functionality is Opt-in in nature.

  • Name:

Anyone making a comment on this website is required to provide a name, either a real name or an alias, which will be displayed alongside the text of the comment (once it has been approved for publication).

  • Website URL

Commenters may also optionally provide a website URL which will be used to create a hyperlink from their published name to that website. The URL may be to a personal or corporate web presence. By providing the link you consent to its publication (because it is an OPTIONAL field).

  • IP Address:

The IP address you post a comment from or access the site from is logged by both WordPress and Google Analytics. IP Addresses are not classed as personally identifying data in Ireland at this time. In the context of Google Analytics, your IP Address is used for statistical purposes to identify sources of traffic to this site geographically.

With regard to IP addresses associated with comments, they provide additional identifying information should inappropriate content be posted to the site via a Comment and may be used to identify and verify the source and origin of any content which is posted which is inappropriate.

  • Cookies

To enable the smooth and effective operation of the site, from time to time the wordpress platform may write a small file to your computer called a cookie. Other plugins used to provide functionality on the site may also write cookies. We use Cookie Control from CiviComputing as our cookie preference manager on the site and apply an explicit consent model, but some cookies may still be written that are essential to the operation of the site (e.g. a cookie from CookieControl that records your general cookie preference). We also use the DoNotTrack plugin to try to any sneaky cookies that slip through the net.

You should feel free to block cookies from this site via your Web Browser as there is no function of this site (such as a login or visitor registration function) which would require cookies to operate (although you may have to rekey data if you are commenting which might otherwise pre-populate if your browser has a cookie to reference).

A full list of cookies written by the site can be found in our Cookies Catalogue.

Things we don’t do:

  • Registration : You can visit this site 100% anonymously as regards providing me with usable personal data.  The blog doesn’t require registration. Yes, it’s a pain in the but when you
  • Mailing List: No mailing list is run off the back of this site (it’s not a commercial blog). Some say I’m nuts not to, but so be it.
  • Selling your data: That’s a no no to. I don’t do that either.
  • Sharing data: I don’t share data about visitors to this site either. Anyone who wants to see who has commented can visit the site.

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below and I’ll get back to you.

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