Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: https://strategyofthings.io.

We respect and protect your privacy. In this section, we will describe what information we collect, use, and save on our website. In general, our site is designed to share information, such that you can visit us and learn about us without the need to log in, identify yourself or reveal any personal information. If you decide to engage us, that is when we start to collect the minimum basic information needed for engagement, as described below.

 

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When you leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, your name, email address, website (if you supply), and the IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. Beyond spam detection, we don't do anything with your name, email address or website - that is, that information is not shared with our email marketing database.

If you post comments to our blog, your comment is visible to all site visitors. Your name, or the name you provide, will be visible. If you provide a website, that website will be accessible by a hyperlink associated with your name. Your email address is not visible to visitors.

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 (if you have a Gravatar profile).

 

Media

At this point in time, we do not allow our visitors to upload images to our website through our Comments form (when leaving comments to our blog posts) or Contact Us form.

However from time to time, we get requests to cross-post blog content on our website, as well as invite others to do so. For guest posts, there may be images that are supplied.

If you upload images to the website for guest posts, 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

When you contact us through our Contact form, we collect your name, email address, the subject and your comment. That information is forwarded directly to our email inbox where we reply to your inquiry. Depending on the nature of the inquiry, that information is either deleted if it is spam or irrelevant, or if relevant, we will respond to your inquiry.

We encourage you to contact us if:

  • you have a question or comment regarding the content on our website
  • you wish to engage or interact with us for business, partnership or consulting matters
  • you wish to learn more about our services

When we respond, a copy of our response, and your original inquiry and contact information, is saved to our Sent box. Your original inquiry may be stored in our email inbox to continue the conversation chain. Your contact information is never transferred to our email marketing system as that is a separate form that is linked to a subscription and opt in process.

 

Subscribe forms

We provide our visitors with a way to subscribe to our newsletter. This is done through the Subscribe form on our blog posts. We collect your email address, first and last name. Only the email address is mandatory.

This information is sent directly to our email marketing list, hosted at MailChimp. When you get the email newsletters, you have an option to unsubscribe from the list at any time. There is a link at the bottom of the email newsletter for doing so.

 

Social Media

On our website, we provide links to our social media sites on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. We invite our visitors to follow us, or stay in touch. If you visit our social media sites and "follow" us on those pages, "like" our posts, or leave comments, we may be able to see your information (subject to the privacy controls and settings you enable on your accounts). You may remove that information or unfollow us at any time. We do not do anything with your information nor do we integrate your information into our internal systems.

 

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 are a guest blogger, we will issue you an account. When 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.

 

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.) or links to external websites. 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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

 

Analytics

From time to time, we will analyze our website traffic to determine which web pages are most popular, and where and how long people stay on our website. All information is anonymized and there is never any personal information that is visible to us during this analysis.

Our objectives in analyzing this information is to determine what information is of most value to our visitors, and how we can continue better value and experience in the future. We also look at what regions of the world our visitors come from. This will help us determine if we need to "localize" our content, as well as determine if the content we have create is of value to our visitors.

 

Who we share your data with

As a matter of general practice, we do not share your information with any external parties, nor any of our partners, except in compliance with legal or regulatory requirements within the jurisdictions we operate in. In those cases, we will do so only if proper legal documents requiring us to do so are provided. We will not sell, rent or lease your personal data to others.

When you contact us through our contact form, it will initiate a conversation with us through email. Depending on the nature of your inquiry, we may refer you to a third party that we may or may not have a relationship with. If we have a relationship with the third party, and you wish for us to facilitate an introduction, we will do so. However, we will not proactively refer you to any third parties without your active consent.

 

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. If we believe your comment is spam or irrelevant, all information, including your email address, name, website and IP address, it will be deleted upon review.

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.

If you subscribe to our newsletter, your email information will be kept until you choose to unsubscribe, and at which point, your information is flagged for removal from our email database.

If you contact us through the Contact form or email us directly, your information is routed to our regular email system (not email marketing) where we  may initiate a direct conversation with you. This information and your contact information may be kept indefinitely for business interaction purposes. If the original inquiry was spam or irrelevant, it gets deleted immediately.

If you contact us through our social media sites, your information is subject to the retention policies of those sites. You may delete your comments on those sites at any time. If those comments are abusive or irrelevant, we may delete them at our discretion. If the comments are relevant, we will not remove them, but allow you the option to do so at any time.

 

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site (as a guest blogger), 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. All comments are kept on our hosting service provider systems.

If you subscribed to our newsletter through the Subscribe form, your information is sent over to our email marketing system.

If you contact us through our Contact form, your information will be sent to our regular email inbox.

 

To reach us

For any questions about this policy, you may contact us as follows:

marketing @ strategyofthings (dot) io

You can also send letter correspondence to us at

26250 Industrial Blvd, Suite 102
Hayward, CA 94545