Who we are
Gary Polson of Polson Enterprises in Stillwater Oklahoma operates PropellerSafety.com in conjunction with his wife Lora. See “About Us” tab in top menu above for additional information. We are respect your privacy and strive to minimize collection of higher level private information (personal name, address, phone, email, credit card) as you visit and interact with our site. However the modern Internet enhances your experience by exchanging lower level personal information (cookies, IP address, web site analytics data, etc). Below we explain how we handle both your higher level privacy information and your lower level privacy information.
Updates
We reserve the right to update this Privacy Policy at any time. Any changes will be posted to this page.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
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.
We run external Polls and Surveys from time to time. Those providers may capture personal information and a record of your vote. We limit ourselves to reputable well known firms.
If you try to break into our site, our security system may capture your login details and ban you from this site.
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
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.
When you visit our site or YouTube videos on our site, Google may set cookies on your computer or read cookies on your computer.
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.). 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
We note that no individuals are directly identifiable in our analytics data. Internet Service Providers, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and in some instances Corporate Affiliations are discernible from the data.
Those wishing to not have their data captured by our analytics programs can (1) avoid our site, (2) use a Virtual Private Network (VPN), or (3) visit our site from a public computer.
Like many firms, we capture raw log files of visits to our site. We use multiple programs to analyze our logs including Google Analytics and StatCounter.
We monitor traffic to our site for the same reasons others monitor their sites:
- To make sure our visitors are finding what they are looking for
- To gather information that allows us to improve the design of our site
- To understand how many people are visiting our site, and what they are looking for
- To measure impact of certain events on our site (such as us releasing a new post or people looking for information on a propeller accident
- To understand the long time draw potential of certain posts on our site.
- To understand the mix of browsers and platforms (such as mobile) being used by our visitors so we can make sure those platforms and browsers can actually visit our site.
- To better understand where our viewers come from, including if we need to add a language conversion tool.
As a provider of information related to boat propeller safety, we also monitor visitors / traffic to our site for additional purposes:
- To be able to recognize traffic spikes indicative of a breaking news propeller accident, then we respond by gathering and publishing information on that accident
- Identify legal firms visiting our site to better understand their questions, interests, knowledge of our site and the topics we cover.
- We use analytics data (web logs) to study the dispersion of information and/or corporate knowledge about things related to boat propeller safety among the marine industry and those who serve the marine industry, specific companies to which that knowledge was dispersed, and when and how it was dispersed.
If you contact us by email we will not publicly post the content of your email message without previously receiving your approval.
Who we share your data with
By visiting our site, your visit is recorded by our Internet Service Provider, Google Analytics, and StatCounter.
If you found us via a search engine, that search engine may also retain information of your visit.
Employees of our firm have access to analytics data that is not specific by personal name.
External sales (such as Amazon Affiliate Sales) or ads (such as Google Adsense) on this site may directly collect personal data if you interact with those elements of our site.
As mentioned above, we use web site analytics data (web logs of our visitors) to study the dispersion of information and/or corporate knowledge about things related to boat propeller safety among the marine industry and those who serve the marine industry. Rarely, small portions of analytics data or summaries of that data may be posted online or publicly shared in other environments. Individual users are not identified by personal name or by full IP addresses. Historically any public sharing of analytics data or summaries of analytics data has been limited to records of visits of major manufacturers of marine drives to specific pages of our site. We do so in a manner consistent with Google Analytics Section 7 Terms of Service. Visitors are never identified by personal name or by full IP addresses.
Google Analytics Section 7 Terms of Service to which we abide:
You will not and will not assist or permit any third party to, pass information to Google that Google could use or recognize as personally identifiable information. You will have and abide by an appropriate Privacy Policy and will comply with all applicable laws, policies, and regulations relating to the collection of information from Visitors. You must post a Privacy Policy and that Privacy Policy must provide notice of Your use of cookies that are used to collect data. You must disclose the use of Google Analytics, and how it collects and processes data. This can be done by displaying a prominent link to the site “How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps”, (or any other URL Google may provide from time to time). You will use commercially reasonable efforts to ensure that a Visitor is provided with clear and comprehensive information about, and consents to, the storing and accessing of cookies or other information on the Visitor’s device where such activity occurs in connection with the Service and where providing such information and obtaining such consent is required by law.
As mentioned earlier, those that sign a comment they post on our site with their actual name may have their name placed online by their comment.
Beyond those we share information with listed above, we do not share information of a specific individual by personal name.
How long we retain your data
We maintain raw log file analytics data a maximum of two months.
We maintain Google Analytics data indefinitely.
We maintain StatCounter data till our allowable volume is filled, currently about 3 years.
We locally capture and maintain certain analytics data of specific interest and retain it indefinitely.
We maintain analytics data for lengthy periods to assist in our study of information dispersion and/or corporate knowledge as described above.
We retain emails indefinitely.
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.
Business Structure Changes
We reserve the right to disclose and transfer all information related to our Sites, including personal data: (1) to a subsequent owner, co-owner or operator; or (2) in connection with a merger, consolidation, or restructuring.
What rights you have over your data
If you have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you related to that comment, 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. It also does not include the comment itself once any personal identifying information has been removed from it. It also does not include web site analytics data that is not identifiable by personal name.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Our contact information
We can be reached at the “Contact Us” link in the top menu.
Additional information
Thank you for viewing our Privacy Statement.
How we protect your data
We collect a minimum of personal data. We do not locally store the bulk of that data. It is stored by our Internet Provider and by well known web site analytics firms. We do not collect personal addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, etc.
Our local machine uses a firewall. We use secure methods to interface with external data sources.
We run antivirus software and keep it up to date. Our primary local machine is not used to visit “risky” sites, games, etc.
What data breach procedures we have in place
The only data we are collecting is from those submitting public comments and analytics data. We have no means of identifying where most of the public comments came from.
We monitor our system for breaches. If we become aware of a breach, we will respond quickly to stop the problem and to prevent it from happening again.
We have no plans to report a data breach should one occur due to the low level of any data that might be breached. We gather no credit card information, no address information, and no contact information (beyond those leaving public comments) from those visiting PropellerSafety.com.
What third parties we receive data from
None beyond those mentioned above.
What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data
We block our own entries from analytics programs before we view the data (as do most web sites that actively use analytics) AND we often automatically filter out visitors to one popular page on our site before viewing the rest of the data.
We use external tools to automatically “reverse lookup” IP addresses and convert them to names (like Company Names, Internet Server Provider Names, etc).
Certain visitors exhibiting bad behavior here or elsewhere may be automatically blocked from our site.
See “Who we share your data with” section above for additional profiling information.
Industry regulatory disclosure requirements
This page is among our efforts to comply with GDPR.
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