Who we are
I’m Katymarie Frost. I’m an author with an emphasis on Young Adult Fiction, particularly fantasy. This is my author site to inform people about me and my books. I don’t sell anything through this website. At the moment, all my sales are through Amazon. Eventually, that might branch out to other bookselling sites, but I don’t sell anything directly. If you would like to contact me, the best way to do so would be to email me at katymarie@katymariefrost.com. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Our website address is (even though I’m pretty sure you know if you are looking at this) https://www.katymariefrost.com. Check it out. It’s pretty cool.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
If you visit this website, it doesn’t collect any more personal data than your average blog site. We offer the chance to give your name and email address to stay on our email list, but it is far from required. You can still access everything on the site without doing that. If you do give us your name and email address, we basically take it as permission to use that information to send you an occasional email. That’s all we do with it. If you choose to leave a comment, it will also ask you for some further information. (See below) However, sometimes computers and sites and stuff collect these things called cookies. We don’t really have much control over this, so it’s possible they are collected here because they pretty much are everywhere. More on this below as well.
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.
So, in summary, you have to give us your name and email to leave a comment. Your email doesn’t show up for everyone to see. It’s used to keep spam comments at bay. It also lets the site know if you have a Gravatar account. If you do, it will show the picture you have on your account. If you don’t, you just will have your name show. That’s it. We don’t use any of this stuff to send marketing emails. You won’t be stuck on our list for forever or anything.
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.
This really shouldn’t be much of an issue, since I’m pretty much the only one who does that, but just in case you somehow manage to do so, be aware of this.
Cookies (Not the kind I wish)
My source
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.
Pretty sure the only thing applicable to you would be the first paragraph, but it’s great to cover your bases.
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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
We use Jetpack for our analytics. It tracks which things are clicked on, how many times they are clicked on, when they are clicked on, and which source the click came from if it was a link leading to the page from somewhere other than this website. It does not say who clicked what.
On the other hand (I don’t know if this needs to be here, but better safe than sorry) if you sign up for the email list, I can see who opens the email (name and email address) and clicks things from links in the emails. That’s about it. The only thing I use that for is to gauge the effectiveness of my emails and make them better for you. Super not scary.
Who we share your data with
We do use MailChimp for our email list. Your name and email list are sent to them when you sign up. They use it to help me organize and send out emails efficiently. They don’t use it for anything I don’t tell them to send you. You can read all about it here if you are worried. https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy. If you skip to number 3, that is what you will be most wanting to know.
Also, visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
How long we retain your data
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.
For users that register on our website (if any, and there aren’t right now), 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
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. We use Bluehost to host the website, and there’s a possibility your data may end up there. Their privacy policy is here, for what it’s worth.
Our contact information
If you need to contact us with any privacy concerns, the best way would be to email katymarie@katymariefrost.com. We will address them as expeditiously as possible.
How we protect your data
We really try to keep a secure website and work with others who keep their stuff secure. We also don’t ask for extremely sensitive data.
What data breach procedures we have in place
If we discover there have been any data breaches, there will be a great many icky phone calls (something I loath with my entire being, but I’d do it for you) to hosting or whoever I needed to work with. We would do our best to figure out what happened and what we can do to prevent it from happening again.
And I think (fingers crossed) that we’ve covered all the things applicable to this site, and a few others which are not. If you’ve actually made it this far, congratulations. You are one of the few because 99.9%* won’t. Not many people love reading boring privacy policies. If you’ve been skimming, here’s the summary for you. We really do take privacy seriously. We’ll do our best to keep you safe. There are probably cookies involved (not the kind you’re wishing, but if you really want that kind I have some good recipes I would be happy to share.) The only thing we use the name and email address for are to send emails or, in the case of comments, check for spam, find your picture if you have a Gravatar account, and have a name with the comment. Those are the most important points. If you want more details, feel free to read the rest, or contact us if that still doesn’t answer your questions. Good luck, and enjoy the website.
*Number entirely made up by me. Not based on actual data.