Privacy Policy

This privacy policy applies to the PolGeoNow Control Maps website – that is, the website located at https://controlmaps.polgeonow.com (hereafter “this site” or “our site”). Although it does reflect the overall ethic and mission of Political Geography Now as a company (hereafter “PolGeoNow” or “us”), it may not apply fully other websites, such as its sister site at www.polgeonow.com, or to other locations such as our various social media channels, which are subject to the terms of use and privacy policies of the platforms on which they are located.

Cookies

“Cookies” are a type of file placed on your device to help websites remember who you are. At PolGeoNow we seek to use cookies sparingly, and unlike many other websites, this site does not use any cookies that are intended to track your behavior for marketing or advertising purposes.

As part of the WordPress software that this site runs on, if you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine whether 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. Login cookies last for two days. 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.

What data we collect from you and why we collect it

Email Communications

If you choose to identify yourself (or otherwise provide us with personal information) by contacting us using the email addresses published on this site, we may collect and retain any personally identifying information, such as your name, email address, and phone number, and any other information included in your message.

We will use this information to try to fulfill your request and may use it provide you with additional information at a later time, or for the purposes of our own internal business analysis. We will not disclose any such information to third parties, except as specified in this privacy policy or in the form of anonymized statistics.

Subscriber Details

If you purchase or are granted an account to log into this site as a member, we may collect and store your first name and last name (as provided to us – you are not required to give us your real name), as well as your email address and a password. You can change this information at any time by visiting the Edit Account Details page on this site.

Your email address will be used only as a login name and to contact you in direct relation to your account and subscription, unless in the future you actively opt into other communications (none of which are offered at this time).

Any password you create for your account is private to you – not even we can see what it is. It is stored on this site’s servers using one-way encryption that would make it appear unintelligible even if we looked it up directly or if a hacker was able to break into the site. The only way it can be compromised is if a hacker or malicious computer program successfully guesses it, so if you’re concerned about the privacy of your password or the other (very limited) information stored in your website account, it’s your responsibility to choose a strong password.

As with most membership sites, it’s possible for our system administrator to see when each user has logged in, including a list of who is currently logged in, as well as which IP addresses* they log in from. However, we do not typically review or analyze this data unless necessary to address a specific security or customer service issue. It is probably technologically possible for us to also track which members visit which pages on the site and when, but we do not have any easy way of doing this, nor will we seek to do so.

At this time, PolGeoNow Control Maps does not collect credit card information or any other payment details, which are handled separately by our contracted payment portals such as PayPal.

Analytics

PolGeoNow Control Maps does not currently use any third-party service to track the use of our website for analysis purposes. We do use a simple service that runs on our own server to log the number of visits to our pages and what links people followed to arrive at our site, but this does not collect any personally-identifiable information or share it with any third party, and is configured not to place any cookies on your device.

Our Host’s Servers

Just like almost every website on the internet, when you visit our site, you should assume that your computer automatically sends certain information to the servers that host our website, such as:

  • the name of the company that’s providing your internet access;
  • which web browser app and operating system you are using;
  • the date and time you access our site;
  • the web address (URL) of any site where you clicked on a link to get to our site; and
  • the current IP address of the device you’re using*

However, none of this information directly reveals anything about your personal identity (see the note on IP addresses at the end of this page for an explanation a the case in which it may come close to doing so).

The servers that host our website are operated by VeeroTech Systems, LLC, whose use of the above-described data is governed by their privacy policy. We may be able to access data collected by VeeroTech through these methods, but we will not attempt to do so unless necessary for maintenance or troubleshooting, or if we are required to do so by law.

Embedded Content

Although we seek to avoid it, some articles on this site may include “embedded” images or other content, meaning that the content is loaded directly from another website’s servers instead of our own. Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

It is possible for these websites to collect data about your device, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content, especially if you have an account with that website and are currently logged into it.

At this time we are under the impression that the only embedded content on PolGeoNow Control Maps consists of a small number of graphics that are still hosted by Google’s servers in articles transferred here from our old portal, which uses Google’s Blogger service. Loading these graphics does not appear to result in any cookies being placed on the user’s device, though other types of data collection or tracking may still be possible. We plan to eliminate this and all other embedded content from PolGeoNow Control Maps in the future.

Other Third Parties

Besides those listed above, this site does not allow or help any other third parties to collect information from you or place cookies on your device. For example, we do not allow Facebook to track your visits to this site (though if you follow a link from this site to another site that does allow Facebook tracking, Facebook might still be able to detect that you arrived there from our site – this is related to the way the internet works, and is outside of our control).

Who we share your data with

This site does not sell your data or share your data with third parties for their own marketing. We never give anyone else your information for the purpose of contacting you without your explicit permission.

We may entrust third parties including (but not limited to) email services, backup services, and Google Drive (Privacy Policy) with confidentially storing, managing, processing, or analyzing data that we collect. The activities of these third parties are governed by their own respective privacy policies.

If you request information, services, or assistance, we may ask permission to disclose your information to additional third parties who may be able to help fulfill your request. We will share said information only if you grant us permission, and will only share the specific information indicated.

We may also share information with law enforcement if we are legally obligated to do so.

How long we retain your data

If you purchase or are granted a member login to this website, the data you provide to us in the process will be retained for at least as long as you remain a member. If your subscription expires or is canceled, we may retain your user account in our system for a period of time in case you return to renew the subscription. We will seek to delete such accounts permanently from the system after approximately one year, though some details may be retained for longer in our data analysis tools unless you request otherwise.

Records of user login and logout dates and their respective IP addresses* are normally deleted after a short time, with the system only retaining records of the last 100 logins across the entire site.

Personal information provided to us by other means, such as in emails you send to us, may be retained indefinitely for our records unless you request that it be erased. Anonymous data on the numbers, type, and origin of visits to the PolGeoNow Control Maps website may be retained by us indefinitely.

What rights you have over your data

You may contact us to request that we erase any personally-identifiable data about you that is held within the control of this site. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes, nor does it include data held outside of our direct control by third parties.

How to contact us

You may contact us with any inquires about your data or privacy using the email addresses on our contact page.

*An IP address, short for “internet protocol address”, is a number assigned to your device when you connect to the internet. Depending on the way your internet service works, your IP address could be different every time you connect, or could stay the same for long periods of time. In addition to recognizing the same returning user, an IP address can also be used to extrapolate limited information about your physical location – usually only the name of the closest city, but possibly down to the city-block level in some cases. The company that you get internet access through (your “internet service provider”, or ISP) may keep internal records linking an IP address to the user’s precise location and member account, but websites such as PolGeoNow Control Maps cannot access this information, and companies normally do not share such information with anyone unless obligated to by law enforcement (and sometimes not even then). However, since IP addresses provide opportunities for potentially deducing the identities of web users, they are sometimes considered a form of “personally-identifiable information”.

Note: Some of the text of this privacy policy has been borrowed from public domain privacy policy text on other sites. PolGeoNow takes full responsibility for implementing any policies described in such text, but does not claim authorship of it. Likewise, you are free to copy any parts of this privacy policy into your own site’s privacy policy as long as you remove any references to PolGeoNow and this site, and take full responsibility for the text’s accuracy in relation to your site.