Privacy Statement
How did you get here?
This website’s URL is https://lorrainepestell.com.
You may also have arrived via https://alifesingular.com or https://alifesingular.com.au.
Who manages this website?
I am Lorraine Pestell, author of the “A Life Singular” series of contemporary fiction novels. As a 35-year veteran of the IT industry, I manage my own website, e-mail and mailing list. I abide by the Ethical Author code of conduct.
What personal data i collect and why I collect it
Contact forms
Submitting the Contact Form on the Home or Contact Us page sends me an e-mail with the information you provided, i.e. name, e-mail address, your phone number (optional) and your message.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site, I collect the data shown in the comments form, along with their IP address and browser’s “user agent string” to help with spam detection.
An anonymised 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.
Media
If you wish to upload images to this website, please avoid using images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Other visitors to this website are able to download and extract location data from images, which may then be used for malicious purposes.
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 last for one year.
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.
Analytics
With Whom Do I share your data?
How long I retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For visitors who register on the website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All registered users can see, edit or delete their personal information at any time (with the exception of changing their username). As the website administrator, I can also see and edit this information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site or have left comments, you may request an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You may also request that we erase any personally identifiable information we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service to guard against cyberattack and to filter out inappropriate content.