Privacy Policy

PERSONAL INFORMATION WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU AND HOW WE USE IT

Information you provide to us

We collect personal information about you when you voluntarily submit information directly to us when you access, use or receive public services like this website. This can include information you provide to us when you submit an enquiry through our website, correspond with us by phone, email or otherwise, subscribe to newsletters or other forms of marketing communications. If you choose not to provide personal information, we may not be able to provide some or all of the services to you or respond to your other requests.

We automatically collect personal information about you indirectly about how you access and use our website and other interactive features (the “Online Services”) and information about the device you use to access the Online Services. For example, we may collect:

  • information about how you view the Online Services (e.g., the pages you view, the links you click)
  • information about your browser and usage patterns (e.g., your IP address, browser type and language)
  • information about the device you use to access the Online Services (e.g., device identifier, device type, model and manufacturer)

We use this information to: present our Online Service to you on your device; determine news, alerts and other products and services that may be of interest to you for marketing purposes; and monitor and improve our Online Services and business, and to help us develop new products and services.

Log Files

Just as when you visit and interact with most websites and services delivered via the Internet, when you visit our Websites, including the Cloudflare Community Forum, we gather certain information and store it in log files. This information may include but is not limited to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, system configuration information, URLs of referring pages, and locale and language preferences.

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

Our websites use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website or access any of our other websites and also allows us to improve our websites.
Cookies are pieces of code that allow for personalisation of our website experience by saving your information such as user ID and other preferences. A cookie is a small data file that we transfer to your device’s hard disk (such as your computer or smartphone) for record-keeping purposes.
We use the following types of cookies:

  1. Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website.
  2. Analytical/performance cookies. They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily. We may use third-party analytics tools such as Google Analytics, to help us measure traffic and usage trends for the Online Services and to understand more about the demographics of our users. You can learn more about Google’s practices at http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners, and view its currently available opt-out options at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
  3. Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region).

The cookies we use are designed to help you get the most from the website but if you do not wish to receive cookies, most browsers allow you to change your cookie settings. Please note that if you choose to refuse cookies you may not be able to use the full functionality of our website. These settings will typically be found in the “options” or “preferences” menu of your browser. In order to understand these settings you should use the “Help” option in your browser for more details.

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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

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.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Our site may be served through Cloudflare. Cloudflare helps our site load faster by storing copies of our content in data centres around the world, and defends our site from attacks by logging requests to detect and block suspicious traffic. For more information on how Cloudflare handles the data it collects, see Cloudflare’s privacy policy. Cloudflare is fully GDPR and Privacy Shield compliant according to www.cloudflare.com/gdpr/ and www.cloudflare.com/privacyshield/

Your rights

If you are resident in the European Economic Area, under European law you have the following rights in respect of your personal information that we hold:
(a) Right of access. You have the right to obtain:
(i) confirmation of whether, and where, we are processing your personal information;
(ii) information about the categories of personal information we are processing, the purposes for which we process your personal information and information as to how we determine applicable retention periods;
(iii) information about the categories of recipients with whom we may share your personal information; and
(iv) a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
(b) Right of portability. You have the right, in certain circumstances, to receive a copy of the personal information you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format that supports re-use, or to request the transfer of your personal data to another person.
(c) Right to rectification. You have the right to obtain rectification of any inaccurate or incomplete personal information we hold about you without undue delay.
(d) Right to erasure. You have the right, in some circumstances, to require us to erase your personal information without undue delay if the continued processing of that personal information is not justified. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
(e) Right to restriction. You have the right, in some circumstances, to require us to limit the purposes for which we process your personal information if the continued processing of the personal information in this way is not justified, such as where the accuracy of the personal information is contested by you.
(f) Right to object. You have a right to object to any processing based on our legitimate interests where there are grounds relating to your particular situation. There may be compelling reasons for continuing to process your personal information, and we will assess and inform you if that is the case. You can object to marketing activities for any reason.

If you wish to exercise one of these rights, please contact us.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint to your local data protection authority. Further information about how to contact your local data protection authority is available at http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/bodies/authorities/index_en.htm.

Residents in other jurisdictions may also have similar rights to the above. Please contact us if you would like to exercise one of these rights, and we will comply with any request to the extent required under applicable law.

LINKS TO THIRD PARTY SITES

The Public Services may, from time to time, contain links to and from third party websites, including those of other users and news publications. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that we do not accept any responsibility or liability for their policies. Please check the individual policies before you submit any information to those websites.

OUR POLICY TOWARDS CHILDREN

Our Public Services are not directed at persons under 18 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you become aware that your child has provided us with personal information, without your consent, then please contact us using the details below so that we can take steps to remove such information and terminate any account your child has created with us.

CHANGES TO THIS POLICY

We may update this privacy policy from time to time and so you should review this page periodically. Changes to this privacy policy are effective when they are posted on this page.