Privacy Policy

Last updated: 11 August 2026

This policy explains what personal information annettemwalker.com collects, why, how long it is kept, and the choices you have. It is written to be read, not to be impenetrable — if anything here is unclear, please ask.

Who we are

This website is annettemwalker.com, a personal website published by Annette M Walker. For anything relating to this policy or your personal information, contact annette@annettemwalker.com.

What we collect, and when

Comments

When you leave a comment, we collect the name and email address you enter, your comment text, and — automatically — your IP address and browser user-agent string. The IP address and user agent help with spam detection. A name and email address are required to comment.

If you have a Gravatar account, an anonymised (hashed) version of your email address is sent to the Gravatar service so your profile picture can be displayed alongside your comment. Gravatar is operated by Automattic Inc. in the United States, and its privacy policy is at automattic.com/privacy.

The contact form

If you use the contact form, the name, email address and message you provide are sent to us by email so we can reply. The form software also keeps limited internal logs for troubleshooting. We use this information to respond to you and for no other purpose.

The newsletter

If you sign up for the newsletter, your name and email address are stored by Mailchimp (Intuit Inc., United States), which we use to send it. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link at the foot of every email, and we will not send you anything you did not ask for. Mailchimp’s privacy notice is at intuit.com/privacy/statement.

Images you upload

If you upload an image to this site, avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS), because other visitors can download those images and extract that data.

Server logs

Like almost every website, our web server automatically records each request in an access log: your IP address, the page requested, the time, and your browser user-agent string. These logs are used for security and troubleshooting. They are rotated daily and kept for 14 days, then deleted.

What we do not do

We want to be specific about this, because most privacy policies are not:

No analytics. This site runs no Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, or any other analytics or measurement tool.
No advertising. We display no ads and use no advertising or retargeting networks.
No tracking cookies. Simply reading this site sets no cookies at all — see the Cookie Policy.
No selling or sharing. We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing.

Who processes your information

We use a small number of service providers, who process information on our behalf:

DigitalOcean — hosting for this website and its server logs.
Mailchimp (Intuit Inc.) — newsletter subscribers and delivery.
Namecheap Private Email — delivery of email sent by this site, and our mailbox.
Automattic (Gravatar) — comment profile pictures, if you have a Gravatar account.

Some of these providers are based in the United States, so your information may be transferred and stored outside your own country. We rely on the providers’ own safeguards for such transfers, including standard contractual clauses where applicable.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or to protect our legal rights.

How long we keep it

Comments and their metadata are kept indefinitely so follow-up replies make sense. You can ask us to delete yours at any time.
Contact form messages are kept in our mailbox for as long as needed to deal with your enquiry and for a reasonable period afterwards.
Newsletter subscriptions are kept until you unsubscribe.
Server logs are kept for 14 days.
For users who register on this site, we store the profile information they provide. Users can see, edit or delete their personal information at any time (except that they cannot change their username).

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

ask what personal information we hold about you, and receive a copy of it
have inaccurate information corrected
ask us to delete your information
ask us to restrict or object to how we use it
receive your information in a portable format
withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent — for example by unsubscribing from the newsletter

To exercise any of these, email annette@annettemwalker.com. We will respond within the period required by the law that applies to you (one month under UK and EU rules). If you are in the UK or the EU and are unhappy with our response, you can complain to your national data protection authority.

If you leave a comment, you can request an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, or ask us to erase it. This does not include data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal or security purposes.

Children

This website is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us with information, please contact us and we will delete it.

Security

This site is served over an encrypted HTTPS connection, kept up to date, and protected by server-level security measures. No website can promise perfect security, but we take reasonable steps to protect the information we hold.