Privacy Policy

IMPORTANT Please also read our FAQ page HERE & our Privacy Policy Tools Page HERE

It provides details regarding which portions of the GDPR apply to our website and which do not.

Who we are

Our website address is: https://nonstandardhouse.com.
We are not a business or a commercial entity and we do not sell any of our user data. As such, not every aspect of the GDPR legislation applies to this non commercial, community forum.

Nonstandardhouse.com is primarily an internet forum. The site was created by a single private individual to assist owners of properties built using Non-Standard Construction methods. The aim is to provide a discussion platform for our users and to facilitate the sharing of information for the benefit of our community and interested parties.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data provided in the comments form. We also collect the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. We collect this data to enable our website to recognise returning users and to allow them access to certain functions that our website offers. If we did not collect this data, our website would not be able to provide our users with certain features or functions, such as the ability to upload and share images, or to access your profile page and post or to view you comment history.

Sometimes, certain information is shared between other plugins or programs that our site uses to provide you with additional functionality.
One such program that is built into the WordPress CMS platform for example, is Gravatar.
In this case, an anonymised string is created from your email address (also called a hash) and this may may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are an existing, registered WordPress or Gravatar user. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.

Comments
After approval of your comment, your profile picture, if you choose to provide one, is visible to the public along with the entire context of your comment(s), including any images that you wish to upload and share on this public forum.

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 location data from images containing EXIF GPS data from this or any other website. You should therefore refrain from uploading images that contain EXIF GPS data for your own security. You should also be the sole legal copyright owner of any images that you upload.

Contact forms

We do not use a contact form on this website. Users with questions or queries are invited to e-mail us directly at ad***@no**************.com

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website through the use of cookies. Cookies are designed to offer you the convenience of not having to repeatedly fill in your details again when you leave each and every comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and 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, forum post or comment, 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 behave 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

Who we share your data with.

We do not sell your data to anyone! Certain programmes that we use on this website to increase functionality do from time to time access your user data and some do create cookies containing small amounts of your personal data in order to identify you as a returning user to our website.
Some advertising programmes that we use (Google) also use your data in order to display certain advertisements that they claim, better suits your needs. An example of this would be Google Adsense for advertising or Google analytics that provide user statistics relating to the number of visitors we receive. Google Analytics also provides us with information about our visitors so that we can monitor our performance, such as seeing which sites pages are visited and viewed most by our audience or even where in the world the visitor to our site is from.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that choose to register on our website.  We also store the personal information that they or you choose to provide in the user profile page. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except WordPress does not allow users to change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information. We cannot view your private passwords, as these are encrypted by our websites platform.
The information that you choose to share in your profile is provided voluntarily. We do not insist you to provide a physical address, telephone numbers, or any other identifying data. None of this information is mandatory, however we do require you to provide a Username and e-mail address, primarily so that we can identify you as a member of our website community and to rule you out as being an automated machine spam robot.

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 identifying data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Erasure of your personal data would mean that any identifying information about you would be removed. The GDPR law states that we may retain and display the contents of your post or posts but that we must remove identifying data, such as your username or e-mail address if you request us to do so. We may also retain and continue to display any photographs that you have uploaded to our website, providing they do not contain data that may identify you personally.

Under GDPR legislation, you do have the right of erasure, otherwise known as the right to be forgotten.
If you wish to exercise the right to be forgotten, we will remove your account from our website and allocate an alternate and anonymous username to the content that you have posted in the past. We are not required to delete your posts, or anything you have posted, including photographs or web links. We are legally allowed to retain and display what you have posted but we must and will remove any data that may identify you personally.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments and member comments are checked against an automated spam detection service that we use called Askimet. This is a security feature that we use to prevent malicious parties from accessing our website.
Askimet is also used to protect all users against malicious users or spam bots. This tool is essential for our website to run safely.

Additional information

How we protect your data

We use high quality security software programs to protect your personal data. Your data is also stored within our websites database which is hosted by a company called Siteground.
Siteground also uses software to further enhance the protection of your data and to prevent it being accessed by hackers or viruses which attempt to steal such data.

You can view Siteground’s GDPR Policy HERE

What data breach procedures we have in place

Should we ever incur a data breach, we will inform you of the incident according to the rules, conditions and regulations set out in the GDPR legislation. We take your and our data protection very seriously indeed.

What third parties we receive data from

We do not receive data from any third parties apart from Google Analytics as mentioned above.