We respect the privacy of all of our visitors. We will not sell, rent, or lease your information to anyone for any purposes. Period.
Your email address and other contact information will only be used to contact you in accordance with your specific requests, and you can change your preferences at any time. If, by mistake, we send you an email or notification that you believe you did not request, you may change your preferences through the “unsubscribe” link provided in all of our emails, or you can contact us directly ( matthew@thewetpen.com ) and your information will be removed from our database immediately.
Affiliate Links
Like most web publishers, this site is supported by “affiliate links”. This means that if a visitor clicks a link on The Wet Pen and follows it to an eCommerce site and makes a purchase, we will probably receive a commission or percentage of that sale.
However, I will never provide positive reviews in exchange for any type of compensation. All of my reviews are as honest and unbiased as possible, regardless of whether a product was given to me for free or whether I paid for it myself.
Our affiliates do not provide us with any personally identifiable information about who makes purchases through links on this site; all data we receive are anonymous.
For additional details, please read our “Full Disclosure” page regarding affiliate links.
Who we are
I’m Matthew Gore, a photographer and writer living in the Seattle area. My website address is: https://www.thewetpen.com.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Shipping and Payment Information
If you create a customer account, we’ll keep your information in our database until you close your account or request your information to be removed. We will never share this information with anyone, ever, except to be used as you have requested, such as to ship an order.
We do not store any payment information on our servers. If you have linked a payment method to your account at the Wet Pen, then that information is stored on the servers of the third-party provider that you have linked (PayPal, Apple Pay, etc).
Comments & Reviews
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.
Contact forms
If you use the contact form to send me a note, the database will store a copy of your message along with the information that you entered. This information will not be used for anything except to respond to you if you request a response.
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.
Analytics
Who we share your data with
Nobody. We do not share your information with anybody, under any circumstances, unless it is necessary for completion of a product order (eg, the USPS will see your address if your order is shipped through the post office).
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 we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.