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BENEFITS

Protecting Your Privacy

Privacy policies are a tour de force online these days, with a team of legalists writing them for big time companies that always manage to wiggle in some “exceptions” for future use, in case the company is bought or sold.

I hate spam. Don’t you?

That’s the basis of our privacy policy around here. I don’t like spam. I get reams of it. It’s my personal goal to ensure that you don’t get any more because of this website.

With that said, there’s things you should know about how the CoffeeGeek website is run, and the underlying technology that runs it. Our website is built on a very customized version of WordPress, and uses Elementor Pro as the main CMS / Design element. In addition, we will be using a program package called “Buddy Boss” to re-introduce all our community features.

WordPress is extremely popular, and because it is, there are literally tens of thousands of “bad actors” out there actively trying to hack and undermine WordPress hosted websites. To combat this, CoffeeGeek has a variety of security measures in place, from the most basic (CDN protection) to much more advanced programs.

This document will underline exactly how this technology affects you, or more importantly, your information. This document in some ways is a supplement to the CoffeeGeek User Terms and Conditions, and our Copyright Statement, both of which may be referred to in this document.

Members vs. Visitors

CoffeeGeek has two types of site users – those who are registered with the site (“Members”), and those who aren’t. CoffeeGeek is optimized for use by its Members, but Visitors can also get a great experience from the site.

As a site Visitor, your visits to the website are logged in our active site logging tool (the Site Log). This tool provides us with pertinent information – not about you, but about the numbers you represent – it counts the pages you visit, it counts the times someone from your IP (it could be you, it could be someone else on your ISP) visit the site, it counts the amount of kilobytes you’re responsible for downloading from the site. It also looks to see what link you clicked to arrive at this site. (known as ‘referrer’). One thing it doesn’t do is personally identify you for our records – you are more or less “anonymous”.

Our Content Management Software (CMS) also tracks what reviews you’ve read, and what site comments you’ve read. Again, this is completely anonymous: think of a “take a number” sign that is changing. That’s all your visit to our site does – ticks another click on that number counter.

What is known as a “session cookie” is placed on your computer for the duration of your visit. It’s primary use is to optimize your time on the website – make pages load faster, optimize caching time, know which page was your previous page, so we can send you back there faster. It also sets your site status as a “visitor”, which means there’s certain pages you cannot access, including review creation pages, discussion board comment creation pages, and the like. The cookie is disabled once you leave the website and close down your browser. The next time you visit us and not logged in a s member, you’re completely anonymous again, and we put a new session cookie on your computer.

Many sites use “cookies” to target specific ads your way, registered or not. We don’t do that. I won’t say we won’t do that in the future, but if I can avoid that practice in any way, I will. While I don’t find it particularly nasty, I do find it a bit creepy to know ads are following me around.

CoffeeGeek Members

If you have signed up as a CoffeeGeek Member, we track the information listed above for Visitors, and additional information about you. We store information about you in our secure database. There are many reasons why, and (almost) none of them have to do for profit reasons:

  1. Database Data Collection: Members’ information, including private and public email addresses, username, password, name, city, coffee expertise level, and other associated information entered into the CMS system by you, either voluntary or required information, is stored in our “site user” database. This database is highly secure. In over 20 years of running this website, it has never been “hacked” or otherwise stolen.
  2. Database Usage: Our site user database is used within the CoffeeGeek website in many ways: to fill out your profile page should anyone click on your name in a review or a discussion board comment; to prefill in certain fields when you write a product review; to identify you when you post a comment; to track what reviews and articles you’ve voted on (so you cannot vote twice); to know when you have written a review for a product so you cannot write a different review (exceptions are products that have categories, such as “espresso cups”); and other ways. One way our database is never used is outside the CoffeeGeek website, or with anyone not directly working for CoffeeGeek: we do not share any of that information on an individual basis with anyone outside our little realm. Only 3 or 4 people have access to that full database, and only one of them knows how to actually read the darned thing.
  3. Cookies: In addition to the way we use cookies for Visitors, we use your session cookie and permanent cookies based on what you have selected in your preferences. If you have selected “log me on automatically”, we store a permanent cookie on your computer so the next time you access the website, you’re logged on. We do not use cookies to get any kind of personal or private information from you, and your username and password are not stored on the cookie.
  4. Private email addresses: You may have wondered why we ask for two email addresses. The public one is the one others see if they visit your Member Profile page, or when you write a review or post a comment. This is an optional email address and you can make it real (name@name.com), spamproofed, (name@removethis.name.com), or fake if you choose (name@noemailsorry). If you want other site visitors or members to communicate with you, we would appreciate a working public email address. Your private one, that one never gets displayed anywhere on the website at all. It’s private. It is so private, it’s very hard for us to see it. We require one for site activation (so that all accounts can be active), and for the sole purpose of having a solid way of contacting you should you win one of our many planned contest giveaways, or if we have to contact you regarding your participation on the website should questions arise (if, for instance, there is site participation that is contrary to our site’s Terms and Conditions). We do not harvest, repackage, disseminate, reuse, or sell your private email address to anyone, and we work our hardest to keep it away from those who would abuse it. I hate spam, remember?
  5. Usernames vs. Real Names: CoffeeGeek asks you for a username and a real name. We ask for the username so you can have an easy-to-use name when logging in, and also for your discussion board participation – people prefer “nicknames” where they can get them, and we recognize that. We also ask for a real name (first and last) because we feel it lends credibility and a certain objectiveness to having your full name displayed on the product reviews you write. It was a conscientious decision to do this, and while some may have a problem with this, I hope most don’t, and I hope you see the reasons behind it. I’d much rather read a review by Mark Prince than by “Joe543”
  6. Advertiser Provided Information: We provide advertisers with a wealth of information. The good news is, none of it identifies who you are, and none of it is personal and confidential information about any specific person. We tell advertisers, upon request, the following information: how many total members the site has; how many views we have for a) site, b) sections, c) reviews, and d) individual reviews; how many visitor sessions we have in a day, a week, a month, or a year; how many times their specific ads have been a) viewed, and b) clicked; and from time to time, we let them know other site traffic numbers and information on a general basis. This is why we have site logs, and have our CMS system track ad views and clicks on the self-managed advertising systems in place (more on this below).

Site Advertisers

At this writing (note, this could be subject to change), CoffeeGeek runs two types of ad programs. One is entirely self-managed by us, and is 100% coffee focused. These are our “site sponsors”. We manage and display their banner ads, box ads, and other ad placements. The other is Google’s Adsense Program, which as of 2024, we are slowly phasing out, mainly for security and privacy concerns. Google (or Facebook / Meta) do not care about your privacy, and they have been getting progressively worse about it in the past few years. We hope to make CoffeeGeek entirely self-managed advertising in a few years.

Self managed advertising is great in many ways. It provides advertisers with a very low cost way of getting the message out about their products and offerings to you, a “targeted market” (we’re all coffee and espresso lovers, or likers at least, aren’t we? That’s a target). It also lets advertisers control their own ads, so if they want to run a special one week, they can. If they want to run a special URL for a GeekLink!, they can.

One way self-managed advertising is great for you, the site visitor or member, is that there is no nefarious things going on behind the scenes. No “single pixel identifier gifs” from third party sites that haunt you as you travel around the internet. No cookies placed on your computer by advertisers. No pop up ads (ever, if I have anything to say about it). No advertisers collecting any information about you, be it anonymous IP addresses, or worse things, like your email address for their next spam outing. Self managed ads are no frills in many ways, but the high targeting we provide to our advertisers more than makes up for any shortfalls that more traditional (and uber-spying) advertisements can provide. In other words, surf our site with the confidence that you are not being added to some giant ad database that discovers you like Folgers over “the second leading brand”.

With all this said, I hope that you will patronize our site sponsors, and recognize that it is their money, their hard work that creates that money, that makes this site a continuing possibility. Without you as a customer, they have no income. Without any income, they cannot advertise with us. And without advertisement revenue from them, we either have to opt for much more intrusive (and annoying) advertising, or shut the site down completely. I don’t want that. I hope you don’t either. Become patrons of the CoffeeGeek advertisers. They continue to make this site possible.

Contractors and Third Parties

M.Prince Photography Ltd., the sole owner of CoffeeGeek.com, utilizes the services of several third parties to run and maintain this website. They are all independent business owners who offer specialized services, such as SEO optimization, WordPress expertise, photography work, writing skills, or design services. They aree bound by our company’s privacy and confidentiality agreements, agreements we make all sub contractors sign. These agreements enforce your privacy, as outlined in this document.

M.Prince Photography Ltd., is the hosting provider for the CoffeeGeek website. That company “owns” the server that the website is fed from, through the use of a co-location VPS web server service. As such, no third party is currently involved in the management, hosting, or delivery of the CoffeeGeek website, and no third party has access to your confidential information. Should this change in the future, rest assured that any third party we contract out to must abide by and be bound to this website’s stated privacy policies before we would enter into any kind of business arrangement with them.

Government Relations and Lawsuits

In some cases, the governments and legal entities (court of law, police subpoena, etc) can compel the disclosure of information about you, and of course CoffeeGeek will need to comply. However, irrespective of those situations, CoffeeGeek can unilaterally turn over information about you to the government if it believes such disclosure to be appropriate, in which case you authorize it to do so. You also consent to CoffeeGeek disclosing information about you to actual or potential parties to a lawsuit that CoffeeGeek is or may become involved in (a) if it is required to do so, (b) if it reasonably believes that such disclosures will potentially mitigate its liability, or (c) to enforce its rights.

Our lawyer made me put that clause in.

Limits on CoffeeGeek’s Abilities

A site and service as complicated as CoffeeGeek.com is never perfect (boy, do I wish), and thus CoffeeGeek may inadvertently make uses or disclosures of your information in ways not contemplated by, or in direct contravention of, this Statement. For example, if the CMS software has a temporary problem, or is infected by an as of yet unknown virus or trojan, your personal information could be displayed on the site even though you’ve configured your preferences otherwise. No software is hackproof; if it exists on the Internet, the best we can do is make it “hack resistant”.

In addition, although highly unlikely, it is possible for Internet transmissions containing your personal information to be intercepted by others. It is impossible for CoffeeGeek to ensure the privacy and security of all transmissions made to and from the site while in transit.

I ask you to please keep in mind that there is no such thing as perfect security on the Internet.

If you have any questions about this privacy statement, please use our contact form, and we’ll do our best to answer them.

Mark Prince

Lead CoffeeGeek, January, 2002.

Revised July 2003, August 2007, January 2012, September 2017, April 2021, and March, 2024.

Further Privacy Notes

Boilerplate Privacy

WordPress has its own privacy information which covers the basics of any WordPress based website. These terms all apply to CoffeeGeek.

Who we are

CoffeeGeek is owned by M.Prince Photography Ltd., a company registered in the province of British Columbia, Canada.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on our website 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. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

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.

Cookies

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.

If you visit our login page, 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.

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.

Who we share your data with

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email. Otherwise, we share your personal data with no third party.

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), 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 site, or have left comments, 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.

Where your data is sent

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.