Term Conditions

Privacy Policy

Who We Are

This website address is: https://joexyoung.com.

The Website owner is Joe Young. No other parties are involved or ultimately responsible for this website.

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.

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 any area of 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 post another comment.

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, links, fonts, 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

As the nature of this website is one of intentionally sharing your work on a global platform, it is taken as a standard expectation that certain information will need to be made available to third parties. The shared information in question would be useful or indeed essential in relation to advertising your goods and services to the general public, with such details as your name/alias, location (physical and/or online), and what you are offering i.e. titles of books and/or trading names of services.

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 user 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. The data you provide is minimal and only necessary for your interactions with the site's facilities and other members.

Where we send your data

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

We do not send your data to third-parties except where it is required to provide services of benefit to you, such as the inclusion of your books on external sites such as Pinterest.com.

Advertising and Affiliate Programs

In an effort to create a viable website of use to the community it is necessary for me to monetize certain aspects of the site with advertising and affiliate links. I will only advertise things which I believe are of benefit to the writing community, and the same will apply to affiliate links. For those unfamiliar with affiliate linking it's simply that a word in certain lines of text may be a different colour or change colour when hovered over. That will be a 'live link' which, when clicked upon, will open another page, usually showing the product, for example if you move your cursor over the word below...

Scrivener

It will take you to the Scrivener page on this website where you can find out about the product and purchase it.

When you purchase something as a direct result of following a link on this website I will earn a small amount of money from that transaction, but only if I am part of the company's affiliate program.

As an example of affiliate earnings, if following a link from this site results in a purchase of a paperback book from Amazon, I would receive (at time of writing this) 4.5% of the value of the sale.

This payment would not affect you as a buyer/seller as the payment is given to me from Amazon.

GDPR requirement. (General Data Protection Regulation.)

What the GDPR has to do with you.

It's an issue surrounding personal information and compliance. I live in Germany, where there is the Europe-wide GDPR ruling regarding privacy. ALL websites which are visible to and serving anyone living in Europe are obliged to comply with GDPR standards and carry an acknowledgement/notification of compliance with GDPR.

There are examples of huge fines being given for breaches such as Amazon being fined 746 Million-Euro and WhatsApp being fined 225 Million-Euro, both for failure to adequately protect data as their business model relies heavily on their ability to trade your data.

GDPR doesn't just affect corporate giants.

In January 2022 a German court fined a website owner €100 for being in breach of GDPR rules. The breaches are very simple ones, in which users were not being made aware that their IP addresses could potentially be backtracked and the information used by certain businesses with a direct connection to the website.

What constitutes a direct connection is not always obvious. Whilst it would be safe to say that anyone clicking on an Amazon advert and making a purchase is opening the door to allow full visibility of their IP address, it is also the case that there are certain other things which work in the same way without visitors to a website being aware of them.

One such direct connection is via fonts, with the aforementioned German court ruling coming about regarding a website using Google fonts. When a website uses Google fonts, the usual practice is to have those fonts on the website, which when the website is loaded via the browser is directly connected to Google servers where that font is stored. This gives Google the ability to extract IP information from that site, its creator, and its users. This is not to say that it will definitely do that, just that it is possible. Google is primarily information based, and your data is considered a valuable asset for such things as marketing, so it is just something to keep in mind that your presence here provides at least some likelihood that Google may access your information.

There are ways around the GDPR font related issues, with perhaps the best and most popular way being to host the fonts locally. In the creation of this website I have chosen to just allow Google to access the usual IP information. The reason behind that decision is simply that there are going to be a great many external links to products such as books et cetera, which will carry the same potential for personal information to be exposed and gathered. Protecting against Google gathering IP information via the fonts channel is then rendered useless, as clicking on a link to buy someone’s book from their own website could quite easily land you on a page which is not GDPR compliant.

We live in an information heavy environment, and anyone reading this probably allows the harvesting of their IP information many times a day without even realising it’s happening, with no detrimental effect. This warning is merely a precaution presenting you with the facts regarding my necessary compliance with GDPR rulings.

Please consider this a warning that although I will do everything possible to protect this site, its members and all I.P. there are no guarantees.

If you decide that being a member of this site represents too much of a risk you are free to leave, following which I will delete your account details. 

Should you choose to stay, then thank you for your understanding and acceptance of these issues.

Joe Young.